[AXOmom]

DubaiSis,

Thank you for the suggestions. I'm very familiar with Richard Dawkins, but I'll look around for the others.

Actually, I'm not a proponent of teaching creationism in public schools. I agree that there are many religions with creation beliefs, and they can't possibly cover them all in a science class nor should they necessarily. All that I would like to see is science teachers being respectful of these differing beliefs. Evolution is still a theory and a simple acknowledgement of that would be enough for me. If a science teacher says, "We teach evolution because most scientists and our school system believe that this is where current scientific evidence leads and this is the theory they think is most likely, but there are many other beliefs out there about how life came to be on this planet. If you are interested you are free to research those on you own," then I would be a perfectly happy camper, and I think its a compromise most people on both sides of the fence could live with.

What bothers me is when a student who holds to some form of creationism sits in a classroom and is told that evolution is fact (no doubt whatsoever), and their belief is a myth (no doubt whatsoever). That happened to me - often.

My daughter sat in an anthropology class last winter and on the first day the professor said (and I'm quoting pretty much verbatim here), "I teach evolution because I think any belief that says some diety created life is ridiculous. I might as well say some spaghetti man came down and made the world." This is at a university (my alma mater) that, again, prides itself on open mindedness, tolerance, and diversity. Apparently the concept that respect for diversity includes people who hold religous beliefs was news to her. My daughter certainly expected the prof to teach evolution - nothing new with that - she just didn't expect that level of disrespect towards opposing viewpoints publicly from a teacher at a university.

Anyway - end of my vent. As I said, most everyone here seems much more capable of handling those differences in a civil, respectful way.

Thank you again for the reading suggestions. I'll look for them and add them to my reading list.