RobertE

Already did, but I don't my local paper, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to toss him. He's one of the few rabidly right wing/fundamentalist columnists they print. I prefer they keep running his columns. Refuting the stupid things he writes helps get rational thought out there into the community.

gravitybow

I believe they see us as unfair and undemocratic, afraid of public scrutiny, propping up a crumbling theory, anti-intellectual, anti-free speech, and censoring the free flow of ideas that ordinarily thrive in academia. As we all know, the proper way to conduct science is to see what the Bible says on the topic, and if that doesn't work, take a vote.

DarkBronzePlant

Can anyone tell me what is up with the Augusta Chronicle? It seems like every other idiotic letter-to-the-editor that gets referenced here is from that newspaper.

TerryTryon

I wrote a letter to the local paper, and man! did I get roasted. For weeks after, there was a letter in each edition of mostly ad hominem attacks. So I cut back on my letter writing until there was coincidentally two independent sex scandals related to high school sports and professional sports. I remarked about the hysteria the paper generated about one while not covering the other at all. The newspaper asked me if they could print the letter three months later when it was completely irrelevant to any current news stories, letting me appear to be spinning stories out of the blue. Some newspapers don't play fair. I now write to the alternate press newspaper that doesn't creatively edit my letters or exite the mob against me. <img src="graemlins/boohoo.gif" border="0" alt="[Boo Hoo]" />

Since Arizona is an ACT state, the small number of SAT's given here must be skewed towards high achievement students headed to out of state schools. Otherwise, we would be 50, along with our high school dropout, teen pregnancy, suicide, and conviction to arrest rates.

[ August 30, 2002: Message edited by: TerryTryon ]</p>

wade-w

During the recent flap over teaching creationism in the Cobb County schools, the number of pro-creationism letters printed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution overwhelmingly outnumbered the pro-evolution letters. While I don't recall any that were quite as bad as this one, many came close. The "Its ONLY a theory" nonsense was particularly rampant.

There are several threads in these forums about the Cobb County school board looking at teaching Creationism in biology classes. For those of you who are not familiar with Ga geography (and why should you be?) Cobb County is not some poor rural county. It is well within the metro Atlanta area, and and is one of the most affluent counties in the state. Believe it or not, their school system is generally considered to be one of the better educational systems in the state.

"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity"
-- R. A. Heinlein

"Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has..."
-- Martin Luther

RufusAtticus

Cobb County is also where Bob Barr and Newt Gingrich are from. If that tells you anything.

Georgia ranks 50th in SAT scores because we treat the test differently than other states. We encourage even our bad students to take it. With all the post-HS educational opportunities that are available now in the state, it is good to see them try. In other words, GA's scores are indicitive of our average student performance and not our average college-bound student performance.

I would like to see a some statistics on how average SAT score correlates with percentage of students taking the SAT.

Edit:

Look's like it has been done: <a href="http://www.bsu.edu/news/article/0,1299,3500--,00.html" target="_blank">State SAT rankings are worse than meaningless, say Ball State experts</a>

"They found the larger the percentage of students taking the SAT in a state, the lower the average SAT.

In the 10 states with the highest SAT scores, an average of 8 percent of their high school students took the SAT, while 69 percent of students took the test in the 10 lowest scoring states.

Also, the lowest 10 states had twice as many high school juniors taking the test and 14 times as many SAT takers overall."

[ August 30, 2002: Message edited by: RufusAtticus ]</p>

Dank

<strong>"If man came from an ape, why are there still apes today?"</strong>
Hey! Give us a little time, would ya'? A couple hundred more generations and we should have other apes eliminated, OK?

jdawg2

hehe, when I was born, my parents and grandparents where still alive, as were 2 older brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles, etc. I guess creationists think they're supposed to magically disappear as soon as a descendent is born, *shrug*

TerryTryon

My last post on this thread was a bit disorganized and cryptic, so let me connect the dots.

Arizona, while never a slave state, shares many characteristics with them. Both the newspapers and state government panders shamelessly to biblical inerrantists, even though they are a minority of the population. All the hot buttons are regularly pushed: creationism, sexual mores, (especially gayness) attacks on the institution of public schools, abortion, more severe punishment for crime, (especially capital punishment), etc.

The media do their best to exaggerate the popularity of these views, and to marginalize and ridicule dissension from such. The legislature uses this false popularity to pass laws favoring the bible thumpers.

The result is the same as in nearly all slave states. Public funding of medical, educational, and welfare programs dwindles, while the state is overwhelmed with the cost of poorly run, over-crowded prisons, producing ever more prison induced psychosis to plague society.

Arizona, like Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, Texas, or almost any other slave state, languishes at the end of the list in suicide, divorce, high school dropouts, malnutrition, crime, and any number of other quality of life indicators.

The correlation between media and legislative support of creationism and society's ability to support decent living conditions for all of its citizens is striking.

[ August 31, 2002: Message edited by: TerryTryon ]</p>

wade-w

As a commentary on Georgia newspapers, consider this: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a regular Saturday section called "Faith and Values".