Why Teaching Biology may be Harder than it Needs to be!

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is an online comic strip that I think I don't look at nearly often enough.  To the right is an old one that was recently passed to me.  It was too good not to pass on.  Have you run into someone so entrenched in their position, nothing in the way of logic or evidence can possibly dissuade them?  I know I have! It does illustrate that it can be hard to get some points across, particularly when the person you are talking with has been indoctrinated in their view that evidence gets summarily dismissed.  I do enjoy, as odd as it might sound, driving believers to the point where they have to invoke their deity to keep their belief set in play.  Check out panel 4: "Put here by Satan to fool non-believers". Funny, I have heard two versions of that.  On the one hand it was placed by Satan to fool folks, however more often I have heard the evidence was placed by God to test people's faith.  The end result is the same, the believer denies the evidence.  But sometimes I want to put two of them in the same room and let them duke it out to determine who 'planted' the evidence.  It always amazes me the lengths people will go to to maintain their delusions! It's not just theists, but people who believe in other supernatural foolishness, homeopathy, climate-change deniers, and -- of course -- the whole anti-vaccination movement.  Evidence is only meaningful if it can be twisted to support their entrenched position! Hopefully there isn't an actual 'Creation History Foundation', but you never know.  How often have we spoken about the Discovery Institute re-writing history? Think about how their pseudo-historian Michael Flannery, for example, has been telling us how Darwin is responsible for racism and Hitler -- regardless of the fact . . . and I do mean fact . . . because Hitler claimed to have been given a divine inspiration! While many Christians hear that and get upset, claiming that Hitler wasn’t a Christian that he just used the Bible as an excuse to justify and rationalize his actions. I agree! But then why does the DI insist that Darwin’s work caused the Nazi atrocities? Sounds a little self-serving and more than a little dishonest. Here is a something from Main Kampf just to prove my point: " . . . [Jews] very existence is an incarnate denial of the beauty of God's image in His creation." (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt) History re-writes abound, things like the whole 'The US was established as a Christian Nation' to the DI re-baptizing people who are safely dead as 'Intelligent Design' supporters.  I commented on that a few years back in "Social Studies next on the firing line?" and Laurie Lebo had an article in 2011: "Fundamentalist-led Texas History Standards get 'D' from Conservative Think Tank."  There she reports that: "Texas’ new standards are evangelical-led revisionist history" So while there may not (yet) be a 'Creation History Foundation', one may come to pass.  I will be pretty confident that it will have as much to do with history as the DI has to do with science and it will probably be based in Texas . . . sorry Texas! I hope that you enjoy SMBC as much as I do, and as much as I plan to do on a more regular basis.  I do have a link to a short list of comics I do read daily.  That list includes XKCD, Dilbert, and Jesus and Mo.  I will be adding SMBC to that list. Note to SMBC:  I did copy your comic image for inclusion here in case the image link doesn't work in the future.  I've had that problem on a couple of other sites.  If you object, please let me know and I will change it to a link.