Scientific falsehoods heard from adults during my childhood

Oh? You mean to tell me that an idiot is going to be honest with the parent I would bet that the child was most likely disagreeing with the teacher, so the teacher, like most adults who love wielding power over children, rather embellished the note.

 

A slightly un-edited version:

 

Hopefully you did your parental duty and Alex did NOT get detention, and the school principal learned that a member of his staff is an idiot.

 

While it is amusing, I understand where the teacher is coming from. Being right should never be an excuse for poor behavior, especially towards an authority figure. The note does acknowledge that Alex was correct.

 

There you are.

 

To be fair, we've only one side of the story and we don't know how Alex was making his case. The teacher's attitude strikes me as a "my way or the highway" one. The last paragraph does say, "Alex would be better off accepting my lesson without resistance" or words to that effect.

What I read from that is that the teacher didn't like being made a fool and is saying that even when he's wrong his students should be quiet.

If I were that parent, I'd be raising hell.

 

Snopes.com has an article about that letter. There is some evidence that it is phony. Frankly, I think it sounds pretty phony as well, as though it was written by a young person trying to imagine how authority figures view themselves.

 

Agreed, the teachers note is only one side of the story. I'd be willing to bet that if the child in question is normally polite to adults, then that's where this started, and then it escalated when the teacher wanted to handle it as a STFU moment, but a mile is a mile and a kilometer is a kilometer.

10 Quatloos says the note was written AFTER the teacher did some fact checking, and the sap tried valiantly to cover tracks. Too late! You got called out by a kid, Dayton!

Well done, Alex. Authority dosen't guarantee accuracy.

Somebody get this kid a job at the Congressional Budget Office!

 

Well, crap! There went the fun in this!

 

Snopes is often a big party pooper, isn't it?

 

I like my version better.

 

Even if the letter is fake, I've had similar experiences. I once got into a classroom argument with a college physics professor -- and a working physicist, no less -- who insisted that a pound was a unit of mass instead of weight/force. (The Imperial unit of mass is actually the slug, which has a weight of 32 pounds in 1 g. It's analogous to the metric unit of mass, the kilogram, having a weight of 9.8 newtons in 1 g; in both cases, the number of weight units in the mass unit is equal to the numerical value of the gravitational acceleration in the equivalent units -- 32 ft/s^2 in Imperial, 9.8 m/s^2 in metric.) What bewildered me was that nobody else in the class backed me up, even though they couldn't all have been unaware of the difference between mass and weight. In retrospect, all I can figure is that they didn't want to defy the professor. Sometimes human beings believe that following an authority figure is more important than being right.

 

well, biggest untruth i was ever told:

"you'll go blind doing that"

 

This is only a problem if you're a strict literalist. Believing that God created the universe(s? ) through the mechanisms observed by science, however, is NOT a problem at all. Obviously science cannot prove God, but that's not its place anyway, any more than the Bible can give you a diagram of an atom.

Now, it's my personal belief that the author of Genesis had a vision--but an ancient person trying to write anything like that down is going to have a VERY hard time, and try to process it in terms that he understands. (Hell, he may not have even been given everything in sequence, just because this wouldn't have made sense. However, Day 1 is unbelievably striking, in my opinion and sure DOES read like a poetic version of the Big Bang and initial cooling of matter. Which is really, really awesome. )

 

^Thank you. Couldn't have said it better myself.

 

There's no single author of Genesis. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are clearly separate texts, since they contradict each other in several particulars. The Bible is essentially an anthology, a compilation of numerous different texts and transcriptions of oral histories, collected from many different sources, no doubt written over the course of centuries.

Essentially the creation account in Genesis is a rewrite of the Babylonian Enuma Elish creation myth, with the polytheistic elements redacted. For instance, instead of six gods each creating a different aspect of the world, it's one God creating a different part of the world each day for six days. Similarly, the Biblical account of Noah and the flood is based on the tale of Utnapishtim in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh.

 

I have told that to rabid Christians and it gets them tied up in knots.

 

True. Hence the impossibility of taking Genesis (or any part of the Bible, the OT especially) literally.

 

Huh? As I write this, Genesis 1 is over the US/Mexico Border, and Genesis 2 is high above the UK.