Comment and Link of the Week
Posted on April 25th, 2008 by blue collar scientistThe comment of the week looked like it was going to be hard to pick. There were a number of contenders, as there has been a lot of commenting here over the last week, particularly on the Expelled posts. But just as I was going through the comments this week to choose the best, one was left that I immediately recognized was the clear winner. It was left on my post John Freshwater Mutilates Students? and comes from a purported former student of Freshwater. I think it bears repeating in its entirety:
Believe it or not, I actually had Mr. Freshwater for 8th grade science, and I just happened to be traveling back to Mt. Vernon for a funeral when I heard this on the news. It didn’t surprise me too much, to tell you the truth. He’s a likeable guy, but he’s always gone too far with religion in the classroom. I’m an atheist, through and through, and I have been since well before I was in his class. I honestly don’t remember any particular incidents that were too far out of the norm for a small town in the Midwest (not that I think that they were right, or even legal, necessarily, but he didn’t come into the class and carve stigmata into his hands or anything.)
The ‘electrostatic device’ was apparently either a tesla coil or van de graaf generator. I’m a physics teacher now, and I don’t know how he managed to burn a cross onto someone, particularly against their will. Those instruments take some time to do any real damage, maybe 15-20 seconds to make a small burn (perhaps a minute for a small cross) with a tesla coil and dozens of long arcs in a carefully planned way to produce a patterned burn with a van de graaf. It would take half an hour or more all told, even if you planned ahead and all participants were willing. Additionally, anything that leaves a burn from either produces a small scar that lasts a while (I really like playing with electrostatic devices and I’ve burned myself from time to time.)
To make myself clear, I don’t support the guy. This type of thing (religion being forced on kids in the classroom) goes on all too often in small town America and those who complain get squashed by the higherups. However, keeping a Bible on your desk is NOT against the law, nor is it particularly onerous behavior, in my opinion. Having religious beliefs is the right of every person in the US, including teachers and students. What is not legal is when the government (via teachers in this case) uses that power to force religion on the public (students here.) If he was doing a daily Bible reading, that’s one thing, but if it was just there as his personal possession and not as a classroom tool, then it’s nobody’s business but his. Separation of church and state does not mean that religion is illegal in any arena that government is involved in, what it does mean is that the government can’t use its power to coerce us. If he DID manage to burn a cross into a kid’s arm intentionally, he should be resting his heels in a jail cell, plain and simple, and like the previous commenter, I’d go berserk if this were my daughter.
The Link of the Week for this week was easy to choose. It comes from Gwangi Valley - Lost Blog of the Gwangi, and it isn’t so much because of the link to my Expelled reviews post, which was pretty straightforward:
In the meantime I want to point you to a glorious blog post at Blue Collar Scientist which covers critics’ reactions to the… do I have to call it a documentary? OK, fine, the ‘documentary’.
Instead, it is because that blog is really good, and I hadn’t seen it before. From their about page:
Do you believe the Loch Ness monster is real, that there may be a hidden valley full of living dinosaurs somewhere, that pads on your feet will draw out ‘toxins’ or that crystals will heal you? Well, if you do, no matter if you’re a Raelian or a thalian or a Baptist… you’re kind of an idiot.
Yes. Yes indeed. But this link is also recognized because of the way the blog author strode into the mass of credulous creationist comments to my post and started swinging a truncheon of righteousness and truth.
So congratulations Jason P., and Ella Rache, for winning the Comment and Link of the Week awards, respectively. This entirely value-free award entitles you to absolutely nothing but our good opinion. (Maybe someday we’ll put together a badge.)
