Messages from the Box: examples of Christian homeschooling texts

[Screamapillar]

Thanks for this @IreneIssh! These excerpts are really fascinating. I particularly enjoyed:

Quote

The unbeliever's thinking is not sensible. His attitude is, "If there were a God, He would demonstrate Himself to us by performing miracles to prove that He is there." Yet, when this same individual reads in Scripture that God has done just this very thing on many different occasions, he dismisses it by saying, "These things are too fantastic for any thinking person to accept." The unsaved man rejects God and His Word. You can see how he is the loser for his unbelief, for it even affects his ability to think clearly. 

The presentation of this in a "Science" textbook is like a special kind of brainwashing. I think I could read this kind of stuff all day and it would never cease to amaze me!

It reminds me of the "Movementarian" cult episode of The Simpsons, when the teacher asks where thunder and lightning come from and who invented Morse Code and Bart says "The Leader?"

[IreneIssh]

4 minutes ago, Screamapillar said:

Thanks for this @IreneIssh! These excerpts are really fascinating. I particularly enjoyed:

The presentation of this in a "Science" textbook is like a special kind of brainwashing. I think I could read this kind of stuff all day and it would never cease to amaze me!

I'll gladly find more excerpts later if anyone is interested or has any other questions. I'm just glad to finally share this book with other interested people! Most of my friends will only tolerate my fundie-talk for only a few minutes at a time. 

[Black Aliss]

On 1/3/2017 at 2:54 AM, IreneIssh said:

Oh my dog! I'm so excited this page exists! I have a 1970s Bob Jones University print Science textbook and it's one of my favourite possessions. It's absolutely fascinating how they present information about the earth and outer space. I may have to post some pictures tomorrow.

Oh, please, oh, please, oh please. My favorite Wonkette series was Sundays With the Christianists, where they reviewed Christian homeschooling textbooks.

I know I sha'n't sleep a wink tonight waiting for tomorrow!

[Bretta]

I foresee that Bob Jones, IBLP and the like may discover a new niche market... people who buy books just to snark . Perhaps they will start creating nonsense just for people to buy for the thrill of it... and stop actually believing in it. 

[guitar_villain]

20 hours ago, IreneIssh said:

The theory of evolution is a concept built on the possibility of improvement occurring naturally. Men who believe in evolution can come up with a lot of long words and pretty pictures to illustrate their theory. Yet, it is scientifically unsound because it is based on the never-observed process of natural improvement. 

Forgive the geeking out in a snark thread, but I love this claim because there's an utterly beautiful experiment that shows exactly what they claim has never been observed

Back in 1988 a guy by the name of Richard Lenski took 12 flasks, put some agar in a citrate buffer in them and then added a sample of identical E. Coli. bacteria to each one.  The E. Coli happily ate the agar food and reproduced, filling the flasks with more E. Coli.  He then took a sample of each of the 12 flasks and put it into a new flask.  E Coli filled that flask, so he took a sample from each, put it in a new flask..., etc.  This created 12 separate populations of E. Coli, each in identical conditions but separated from each other.

The experiment has been going since 1988, and now has gone more then *60,000* generations of these 12 colonies. He keeps samples from each line every 500 generations, so he can track any changes over time.  All of the 12 populations have undergone significant changes in the 60k generations- they're all larger than wild type, for example

Around generation 31000, he noticed one of the flasks was cloudy.  Looking at it more carefully, he discovered far more bacteria in it than should have been possible given the amount of food he gave them.  When he analyzed the bacteria, he found that it not only could eat agar, but it had mutated to be able to eat the citrate in the buffer solution.  Normal E. Coli can't eat citrate- it would be like us learning to eat drywall.  But thanks to two specific mutations (trackable because he had samples of the entire line- one mutation occurred around generation 20k, the other at 31k) suddenly they could.

So here we have a case where we see a completely new, highly beneficial mutation appear, and we not only can see the result, we know exactly how and when it happened.  So much for "never-observed"

[smittykins]

If money were no object, and there was a way to do so without giving the publishers any of it, I would collect Christian-school textbooks just for the snark value.

[dawbs]

15 minutes ago, smittykins said:

If money were no object, and there was a way to do so without giving the publishers any of it, I would collect Christian-school textbooks just for the snark value.

You can sometimes find them at garage sales and thrift stores
I buy the pearl's book there sometimes, so I can destroy it and make sure some unwitting parent doesn't end up with it

[smittykins]

13 hours ago, Black Aliss said:

Oh, please, oh, please, oh please. My favorite Wonkette series was Sundays With the Christianists, where they reviewed Christian homeschooling textbooks.

I know I sha'n't sleep a wink tonight waiting for tomorrow!

Ooo, a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole!

[Black Aliss]

51 minutes ago, guitar_villain said:

So here we have a case where we see a completely new, highly beneficial mutation appear, and we not only can see the result, we know exactly how and when it happened.  So much for "never-observed"
 

Something very similar happens with cancer cells. Prostate cancer, for example, needs testosterone to survive. So you can administer testosterone-blocking drugs and the cancer cells die off, sometimes to undetectable levels. A few cells always survive, though, and they evolve to not require testosterone, whereupon the cancer comes roaring back and commences partying on in every part of a man's body.

It's a disease I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, fundy or not, but it would be interesting to see how these anti-science types react to having an oncologist explain to them  that beneficial mutations are happening right inside their own bodies.

[pooplexed]

On 1/3/2017 at 10:49 AM, mango_fandango said:

Wow. For a kid who may want to know what electricity is, that answer is fucking useless. 

"No one knows where it comes from" YES THEY BLOODY DO. 

Lightning is electrical, as Benjamin Franklin discovered. Surely fundies have an explanation for that?

 

On 1/3/2017 at 11:09 AM, AmazonGrace said:

Sure, it's a divine smiting system.

And, dammit, Dog decided to spare Benjamin Franklin for a reason----to teach us about electricity!

[EmiGirl]

32 minutes ago, Black Aliss said:

it would be interesting to see how these anti-science types react to having an oncologist explain to them  that beneficial mutations are happening right inside their own bodies.

They say they believe in microevolution  but not macroevolution

[laPapessaGiovanna]

5 minutes ago, EmiGirl said:

They say they believe in microevolution  but not macroevolution

Because what happens on a microscopic scale can't happen on a much bigger scale because of course. 

[IreneIssh]

1 hour ago, smittykins said:

If money were no object, and there was a way to do so without giving the publishers any of it, I would collect Christian-school textbooks just for the snark value.

I'm thinking of getting a Bob Jones Press history textbook next, because I'm really curious about how they present things like the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement (if they do at all)

I have a small collection of weird Christian books right now, though, so I think I'm going to just embrace that. I found a 1960s Sunday school manual and a book from the 40s called The Christian Citizen at Goodwill. I also had a Psalty children's Bible for a bit, but I cut that up and used it for an art project (thus saving children from that terrifying book monster). 

Edit: @dawbs I totally buy awful books to destroy them too. I destroyed an awful sex education one for girls a while ago. My whole family thrifts so I've told them to be on the lookout for the Pearls books just so we can help rid the world of them 

[guitar_villain]

1 hour ago, Black Aliss said:

It's a disease I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, fundy or not, but it would be interesting to see how these anti-science types react to having an oncologist explain to them  that beneficial mutations are happening right inside their own bodies.

Not beneficial to the patient- probably Satan's work.  (Seriously, I suspect that's their answer)

As a side note, I had totally forgotten one of the even neater bits of Lenski's experiment.  While the citrate-eating Cit+ bacteria were the vast majority of cells in the flask there was still a small group of Cit- "normals" that managed to survive along with them.  The Cit- group underwent rapid evolution as well to survive- the Cit+ bacteria excreted fumarate, malate and succinate in the process of digesting the citrate, and the Cit- bacteria started feeding on that due to another beneficial mutation.  

Even with that, Cit- went extinct about 10k generations later, although we don't know why.  Lenski restarted the colony from one of the pre-extinction samples, and in that Cit- continues to do fine.  A bit sobering to realize no matter how well you adapt, you might end up dead from some totally random event.  

[BlackberryGirl]

In the 60's I went to a Catholic school in 4th grade that used all secular materials for everything but religion.. Then in 5th grade in another state EVERYTHING except math was religiously oriented.  The history text was particularly loathsome. We were taught American history basically through the martyrdom of Isaac Jouges and the Spanish Missions of the west.  My family and I were huge history buffs and my father ended up finding a decent history text to use at home.

[purple_summer]

1 hour ago, IreneIssh said:

I also had a Psalty children's Bible for a bit, but I cut that up and used it for an art project (thus saving children from that terrifying book monster). 

I will fully admit that Psalty is slightly terrifying to the adult viewer but I LOVED those tapes as a kid and I'm still slightly bitter they never bought me the children's bible. 

[IreneIssh]

A few more pages I found as I was flipping through it again. Hope y'all can read the text: 

Some of the post chapter review questions:

[Walking Cat Bed]

5 hours ago, dawbs said:

You can sometimes find them at garage sales and thrift stores
I buy the pearl's book there sometimes, so I can destroy it and make sure some unwitting parent doesn't end up with it

I sent the cheap copies of Pearls' and Gothard's and Duggar's books from my first master's thesis to another FJ person, because they're also interested in criticism and deconstruction of religious abuse manuals.

[Glasgowghirl]

5 hours ago, dawbs said:

You can sometimes find them at garage sales and thrift stores
I buy the pearl's book there sometimes, so I can destroy it and make sure some unwitting parent doesn't end up with it

Shame more people are not doing it. Pearl is not popular here but if I ever come across his book in a charity shop or jumble sale I'll do the same. I wish fundies and other people who use his methods could see sense and stop harming innocent children and babies.

[Four is Enough]

My mother once found a nursing textbook for OB from 1906 that had MANY interesting items in it. Specifically, there were "clamp on" stirrups for when the midwife or doctor went to a woman's house to deliver a baby..  just clamp on the stirrups, right there on the kitchen table, and deliver that baby!!

This was the same book that described "the virgin" or "the married woman" and how their examinations were to be undertaken.

 

It was a treasure trove. Unfortunately, it fell to mold in the basement and had to be discarded...

[mango_fandango]

What I've never understood is how Jesus fits into math. Science I could understand- as in, I get what they would say to explain scientific processes (obviously the fact it's all bollocks is a given)... but with math?

Q) You have five loaves of bread and two fish. How do you divide this between 5,000 people?

A) God will provide.

[WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo?]

12 hours ago, IreneIssh said:

snipped

Some of the post chapter review questions:

It's a pretty minor point, but the Big Dipper isn't a constellation. It's part of the constellation Ursa Major. Patterns like the Big Dipper, the Summer Triangle, the Winter Hexagon, and the Teapot that aren't constellations are called asterisms. Like I said, minor point.

[smittykins]

Okay, this technically isn't a textbook, but I found this on "Sundays With The Christianists" and had to share.

Stumpy the Squirrel teaches kids that Welfare is Very Bad:

http://wonkette.com/593886/sundays-with-the-christianists-a-mutilated-squirrel-teaches-your-kids-why-welfare-is-bad

[CyborgKin]

18 hours ago, mango_fandango said:

What I've never understood is how Jesus fits into math. Science I could understand- as in, I get what they would say to explain scientific processes (obviously the fact it's all bollocks is a given)... but with math?

Q) You have five loaves of bread and two fish. How do you divide this between 5,000 people?

A) God will provide.

I just so happen to have a book called "Mathematics: Is God Silent?" by James Nickel.

https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-God-Silent-James-Nickel/dp/187999822X

I'll let the back cover speak for itself:

Spoiler

Hi Dougie!

The book has a lot to say about the history of mathematics, and the importance of the Christian worldview to the philosophy of mathematics.

Bonus: Creationists saying that life is designed to adapt! http://creation.com/designed-to-adapt

[Audrey2]

On 1/7/2017 at 10:13 AM, Black Aliss said:

Something very similar happens with cancer cells. Prostate cancer, for example, needs testosterone to survive. So you can administer testosterone-blocking drugs and the cancer cells die off, sometimes to undetectable levels. A few cells always survive, though, and they evolve to not require testosterone, whereupon the cancer comes roaring back and commences partying on in every part of a man's body.

It's a disease I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, fundy or not, but it would be interesting to see how these anti-science types react to having an oncologist explain to them  that beneficial mutations are happening right inside their own bodies.

If you or someone you love is suffering from prostate cancer or has suffered, I'm sending hugs. I lost my Dad two years ago to that terrible disease.

 

For everyone who is reading this, please encourage the men in your lives to get their man checks and to talk to family members about their medical history. We thought my grandfather had it, but it also turned out that my great grandfather had it too. I don't want others to go through what my family went through.