Help Challenge A Baptist College

[Bimtly]

My youngest sibling is in their second last year of highschool at a Baptist College, a testament to the closest cheap private school rather than the complete lack of belief exhibited by my entire family.

So I have been keeping an interesting eye on it and making sure she would challenge any complete bullshit they would try and pull but it seems a fairly relaxed school that dosn't ever strongly challenge secular ideas or indoctrinate them to bs christian ideas, however...

Once a term for the senior years of the school they have a day dedicated to what they dub 'Beliefs and Values'. This one came with a letter, the highlights are as follows...


"The theme for our final Beliefs and Values seminar this year is 'The Miracle of Life'. The purpose of this seminar is to reflect upon our lives in light of birth and death..."

"...The day will commence with students visiting a cemetery to consider the question 'what is a life lived well?'...How do we measure the value of a life? Can we measure it in terms of length of days?"

"The second half of the day will be an interactive seminar presentation by [long name] from such and such hospital. This presentation will involve students seeing photos and video of babies in various stages of development from conception through to birth...students will be requried to consider what it would be like to carry and deliver a baby and raise a child."

"At the end of the day we hope students will have gained a new perspective on how their lives are miraculous and valuable. Students will be encouraged to see the potential of life regardless of length"



My younger relative would like me to write out some challenging questions for them incase the teachers and presenters try to push some BS religious agenda, and with the wording used in this letter I feel obliged, thus now you guys are also invited to join in.

[Clivedurdle]

Dawkins God Delusion covers this - final chapter I think.

[Aerik]

Here's an interesting topic you could bring up to this obvious anti-abortion rally.

The embryonic sac, passed after childbirth as placenta, is derived from fetal DNA. This means that the embryonic sac and the fetus are genetically identical. Yet obviously a placenta is not a person, else we'd classify every birth as a simultaneous miscarriage. DNA a person does not make. Therefore it is wrong to say twins share a soul simply because they have identical DNA. Since this is obviously an anti-abortion rally, and it's going to lead into 'arguments' of stem-cell research, what say you to arguments that stem-cell research is too close to cloning? Surely what defines a person is not their genetic make-up but the quality of their mind, as this is the distinction we make between a fetus and its placenta. Considering that the placenta is thousands, millions times the mass and cell count of human embryos used for stem-cell research, don't you think that the idea that human embryos constitute people like you and I to be inherently forfeit?

[Alethias]

Presenting a secular perspective in a religious environment is probably more suited to the Secular Lifestyle Forum, so I'm moving this thread there.

Alethias, GRD Moderator

[Never]

I didn't see any reference to the sky guy in there. If you use my definition of miracle - that which occurs despite the odds being agaist it - there's nothing wrong with appreciation of how amazing the process is.

Of course, I'm pretty sure that's not the intention. :angel:

[Anat]

How about pointing out the huge rate of miscarriages at each stage of pregnancy? I wonder why their God has so little respect to his miraculous creations.

[Jobar]

Hard to say if this will be an "anti-abortion rally" or not, from that handout. It might just be a way of trying to show teenagers why they need to think long and hard about having kids.

Re the cemetary visit- feel free to print out this pic-

http://home.earthlink.net/~jobar2/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/alfordstone1.jpg

More pics of this stone at my site here. (http://home.earthlink.net/~jobar2/jobarspics/id3.html)

See if that gets a rise out of someone. :D

[NZSkep]

Hard to say if this will be an "anti-abortion rally" or not, from that handout. It might just be a way of trying to show teenagers why they need to think long and hard about having kids.

Re the cemetary visit- feel free to print out this pic-


See if that gets a rise out of someone. :D

I can't reads that very well, what is it suppoded to be. Why does it have the compass, a masonic symbol, on it?

[Aikanaro]

I've endured one of these before - at the point where they start showing the ultrasound pictures of the fetus jumping up and down and whatnot and they say how it's 'playing' the question to ask is 'did you know that at that point in it's development the embryo has the mental capacity of a <insert something here - depends what stage of development they're showing>?' - or something along those lines anyway. How does 'playing' (could very well be random muscle spasms for all I know...) infer that it is worth keeping alive at the expense of the mother?

http://www.nyas.org/publications/readersWritersExcerpt.asp?excerptID=43
A pretty handy source about the brain development of a fetus.
When told that the fetus is alive and whatnot whatnot you can refer to the medical definition of 'alive' and how according to it they are, in fact, not alive.

Hmm - it might take some synthesis to make these into questions though.

If they pull out religion then you can refer to the Bible - there's a verse in Exodus which values the life of an embyo as less than that of a human - I believe that religioustolerance.org has an article on what the Bible says about abortion.

(this does sound a bit different from the presentation given to us - that was explicitly anti-abortion. This sounds like crypto-anti-abortion...)

[Deacon Doubtmonger]

"At the end of the day we hope students will have gained a new perspective on how their lives are miraculous and valuable. Students will be encouraged to see the potential of life regardless of length"
Time to talk about how life potential gets wasted when frittered away on religious groveling. Take it away, Ebonmuse!

(1) A Flip of the Coin: Pascal's Wager (http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/wager.html)

(2) Rats in a Maze: The Meaninglessness of Life Under Theism (http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/rats.html)

(3) Life of Wonder: The Nihilism of Atheism (http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/lifeofwonder.html)