NPR : Many Southern Baptists Bypassing Public Schools:
"A growing number of Southern Baptists are pulling their children out of public schools in favor of private, religious education. It's a controversial trend, with some Baptists arguing that the church should stay engaged with the public school system."
Fundamentally speaking ignoring knowledge for mythology is a bad idea. Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire pointed to the fact that the fundamentalist nature of the Christian church was a direct cause of the destruction of cultural and intellectual pursuits leading directly to what has been falsely labeled as the Dark Ages. The pre-Socratic Greeks understood the fact that when religion replaces human reason society is nearing collapse. Throughout the history of religion, when faced with a progressive discourse that is understood in some way to contradict a reliance on scriptural Truth, religion tends to be conservative rejecting the new for the old. In most cases this is not a bad stance to take. New ideas are often not appropriate solutions to problems and will, in time, fade away simply because they cannot be sustained. But, contrary to scriptural evidence, is is clear that the earth is not the center of the universe, that the earth is billions of years old, and that life on earth (and perhaps elsewhere in the universe) evolves through the process of natural selection. Each of these ideas were and/or are being denied by fundamentalists of all religious beliefs that rely on the Hebrew bible as authority as the fundamentalist groups choose a more conservative path. That path is dangerous and could, if Gibbon and the pre-Socratic Greeks are right, in the case of evolution and cosmology, lead to the decline of civilization as we know it today.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life: One of the best descriptions of the nature and implications of Darwinian evolution ever written, it is firmly based in biological information and appropriately extrapolated to possible applications to engineering and cultural evolution. Dennett's analyses of the objections to evolutionary theory are unsurpassed. Extremely lucid, wonderfully written, and scientifically and philosophically impeccable. Highest Recommendation!
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design: Richard Dawkins is not a shy man. Edward Larson's research shows that most scientists today are not formally religious, but Dawkins is an in-your-face atheist in the witty British style: I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence. The title of this 1986 work, Dawkins's second book, refers to the Rev. William Paley's 1802 work, Natural Theology, which argued that just as finding a watch would lead you to conclude that a watchmaker must exist, the complexity of living organisms proves that a Creator exists. Not so, says Dawkins: "All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way... it is the blind watchmaker."
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