Biologists will want to have you jailed for mentioning Bible or creation in public schools

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Contents 1 Claim 2 Source 3 Responses 4 Fallacies contained in this claim 5 Related claims 6 Acknowledgments

Claim

Biologists will want to have you jailed for mentioning Bible or creation in public schools. (This is not really a claim, but it happens in a Jack Chick comic.)

Source

• Jack Chick, Big Daddy?, Chick Publications

Responses

1. It is not illegal or even unconstitutional to mention the Bible or creationism in a public school. First of all, students, parents, and other non-government employees have free speech and free expercise rights: they can mention anything they want. What is considered unconstitutional is if a teacher acting as a government employee, teaches the Bible and or Creationism as an official part of the science standards and curriculum.
2. Generally, government employees that do something unconstitutional are not thrown in jail: they are ordered to stop and or relieved of their position if they refuse. It is generally the government itself that bears the punitive responsibility and has to pay damages and so forth.
3. This idea that Biology teachers are being forced to teach evolution has been put out by creationists to explain why the majority of Science teachers teach evolution. The real fear for the biologist teachers is that they will get kicked out of their church for teaching science.
4. If a Creationist uses this claim, ask him or her to cite a specific instance where a Creationist was jailed for having mentioned the Bible or Creationism in a public school.
5. Even if evolutionists did want to want you to be jailed for mentioning Bible or creation in public schools, that would have no effect on evolution and modern biology being true. Most intelligent people are interested in believing what is true, not what leads to virtue.
6. On the contrary creationists have had evolutionists persecuted and jailed in the past for teaching evolution in schools in events such as the Scopes Trial. The evolutionist John T. Scopes was persecuted (though not jailed) for violating the Butler Act, which stated "That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."[1]
7. add more responses

Fallacies contained in this claim

• Straw Man (claim that biology teachers do something evil and attack them for that.)
• Appeal to Pity (Young Earth Creationists are "persecuted".)

Related claims

Acknowledgments

• 65.139.59.148
• Swelke