Jeesus K. Reist… I’ve long said that Christian schools are simply pushing an organized system of ignorance, but this fourth grade textbook published by Bob Jones University, and highlighted in a ScienceBlogs post by PZ Myers, a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, really takes the cake in the dumb department.
As Myers points out, “[W]e can use [electricity] to build hair dryers and Large Hadron Colliders; to make the argument that we are mystified by it is lying to the kids.” I’ll go one further, to subject children to this sort of “education” is anti-intellectual child-abuse:
That second paragraph is a horror of gobbledygook. Apparently, they think electricity is something like oil, a substance lying in large deposits that must be harvested and poured into your hairdryer to make it work. A current, as mentioned above, is produced by the movement of charged particles, nothing more or less. The sun produces moving charged particles, so it is a source of electricity, and the movement of the earth generates an electromagnetic field, but I can also do the zombie shuffle across the carpet to build up an excess of charged particles and touch the cat to allow them to flow, creating electricity myself, like unto a God. I do not have to create particles to make electricity, I just have to make them move.
Also, if that little girl did not use electricity, she would be dead. All of the cells in your body create charge imbalances by pumping charged ions across their membranes, and using the flow of ions back across those membranes to create chemical energy — they are machines that convert chemical energy into electricity that is used to power little dynamos that create stored chemical energy. We also use the gated movements of charged ions to generate electrical currents in our nerves and muscles, which is how we think and move.
Isn’t it nice how clearly religion is shown to be a science-stopper? Just take common questions, declare them a mystery and that no one has an answer, and presto, religion becomes an authority. An authority stuck at a dead end.
Christian parents who willingly sign their kids up to be taught this sort of malarkey deserve what they will eventually get when their children are either A) too poorly educated to compete in a workforce where for most entrants electricity is not a fucking mystery or B) want nothing to do with Christianity after they realize that it’s something on the level of believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny…
Read a sample chapter here. How do they explain the moon?