Originally posted by telerion
1) You speak as if you do like the Crusades. But please, explain your point more fullly. As yet it seems spurious to me, but I acknowledge that I am not a historian and that in my ignorance I may not appreciate the fundamental role that the Crusades played in the creation of the US's Bill of Rights.

I'll also acknowledge that today some hardline Islami ...[text shortened]... s sadistic extermination program played an integral role in the creation of the Israeli state.

1. I have mixed feelings about the Crusades. On the one hand, there is no denying the barbarity of some of the Crusaders' actions (e.g. the sacking of Constantinople and the massacres in Jerusalem). On the other hand, the Crusades did check the expansion of the Seljuk Turks (it didn't stop it entirely), giving Europe the breathing space it needed to develop. This would be critical a few centuries later when the Ottoman Turks began their conquest (and, as it was, they were only stopped from taking Vienna by a freak rainstorm). Without the Crusades, a protracted battle between the Turks and the Christians on European soil would've been devastating for European trade and economy - critical for the development of the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment.

It's interesting you should mention the US' Bill of Rights. The entire BoR is based on the premise of men having natural rights, which the (largely Deist and Christian) authors of the Constitution grounded in the conception of man as created by God. While I haven't studied the impact of (for instance) Thomistic anthropology on the theory of natural rights, I do know that his Five Proofs were the philosophical basis for the entire Deistic movement.

But that's a bit of a digression. What's the fundamental role the Crusades played in the creation of the US's Bill of Rights? In short - no Crusades, no developed Europe; no developed Europe, no Enlightenment; no Enlightenment, no BoR. There are more detailed intermediate steps - but that's the gist of it. Comprende?

3. Nice try.

If Hitler had defended the Jews, or the Israelites had used Hitler's philosophy as the basis of their new state, your analogy would have been less faulty.

Do you think science would flourish in an environment where objective truth is considered not to exist? Where reason is not considered to have the power to attain objective truth, even if it exists? This was precisely what St. Aquinas and Bonaventure argued against. The idea that reality is ordered and will not present different results to different observers is so basic to scientific enquiry we don't even bother articulating it anymore. Yet it's so easy to forget that people didn't always take this position as a given.

Originally posted by Halitose
Why the evangelicals in particular?

Because then my children won't be subjected to them.

Originally posted by bbarr
Because then my children won't be subjected to them.

Does that include Jehovah's Witlesses? 😀

Originally posted by bbarr
Because then my children won't be subjected to them.

Why? if I may ask, it would seem like to me that you would want your kids to see both sides of the picture, and make their own decision.

Originally posted by flyUnity
Not to mention that I think Homeschooling is better, then todays public schools

Any schooling provided by those who recognize the above as a passable sentence ...

It contains errors in capitalization, punctuation, spelling, grammar, and syntax in thirteen words.

Originally posted by flyUnity
Why? if I may ask, it would seem like to me that you would want your kids to see both sides of the picture, and make their own decision.

I want to innoculate them early against the viral spread of knee-jerk obedience and self-hatred. They can make up their own mind once they're educated.

Originally posted by flyUnity
... it would seem like to me that you would want your kids to see both sides ...

Life is a picture, and there are exactly two sides.

Originally posted by bbarr
I want to innoculate them early against the viral spread of knee-jerk obedience and self-hatred. They can make up their own mind once they're educated.

Well I think you have a unfair picture of them, kindve like the Americans have a unfair picture of the French and vise-versa. Once you get to know the other side, they are not really all that bad.

Originally posted by flyUnity
Well I think you have a unfair picture of them, kindve like the Americans have a unfair picture of the French and vise-versa. Once you get to know the other side, they are not really all that bad.

I was an evangelical twenty years ago. I agree with bbarr. However, he needs to face the reality that growing numbers of his public school teachers are evangelicals, including some of the science teachers.

My son already has had two biology/life science teachers who couldn't give a competent explanation of the theory of evolution, and he's only in ninth grade.

Originally posted by Wulebgr
I was an evangelical twenty years ago. I agree with bbarr. However, he needs to face the reality that growing numbers of his public school teachers are evangelicals, including some of the science teachers.

My son already has had two biology/life science teachers who couldn't give a competent explanation of the theory of evolution, and he's only in ninth grade.

Your kid wasn't in the district for NCHS was he? Remember I know one of the science teachers there.

Originally posted by telerion
Your kid wasn't in the district for NCHS was he? Remember I know one of the science teachers there.

He goes to NCHS, but did not have the teacher that you know. I'd almost rather that he had. KW is an honest and respectable man, no matter how misled he may be in certain matters. He also would refuse to put up with some of the nonsense that my son is accustomed to dishing out.

Originally posted by Wulebgr
I was an evangelical twenty years ago. I agree with bbarr. However, he needs to face the reality that growing numbers of his public school teachers are evangelicals, including some of the science teachers.

My son already has had two biology/life science teachers who couldn't give a competent explanation of the theory of evolution, and he's only in ninth grade.

Your son is being taught by a teacher who is in the ninth grade? Boy, they start them teachers early there in NC. Or, was that just an example of a passable sentence?

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
Your son is being taught by a teacher who is in the ninth grade? Boy, they start them teachers early there in NC. Or, was that just an example of a passable sentence?

Um, that sentence was perfectly constructed. It wasn't even ambiguous, given that "he's" is singular, and thus couldn't be taken to refer to the teachers mentioned in the sentence.

Originally posted by bbarr
Um, that sentence was perfectly constructed. It wasn't even ambiguous, given that "he's" is singular, and thus couldn't be taken to refer to the teachers mentioned in the sentence.

True. Just feeling a mite cantankerous.

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
True. Just feeling a mite cantankerous.

Fair enough. This whole discussion has gotten a tad snarky.