Jewish Reactions To Intelligent Design - Secular Jewish Organizations

Secular Jewish Organizations

Secular Jewish organizations have fought against the inclusion of intelligent design in the public school curriculum, generally on the basis that to teach intelligent design in public schools would be a violation of the separation of church and state. According to Jeffrey Sinensky, general counsel for the American Jewish Committee, "Intelligent design is not a scientifically accepted theory, but a religious theory similar to creationism, which has no place in the science classroom of a public school. Any discussion of creationism or intelligent design would be more appropriate in a history or comparative religion class, as opposed to a science curriculum."

According to the Anti-Defamation League, "The U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of Americans to believe the religious theories of creation (as well as other theories) but it does not permit religious theories to be taught in public school science classes. This distinction makes sense, and is ultimately good for religion, because it leaves religious instruction to properly trained clergy and to parents (where religious education properly belongs), it keeps government out of religious controversies, and it ensures that public school classrooms remain hospitable to an ethnically diverse, religiously pluralistic country."

In a survey of doctors conducted under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary, 83 percent of Jewish doctors agreed with the statement that intelligent design is "a religiously inspired pseudo-science" rather than a "legitimate scientific speculation"

Read more about this topic:  Jewish Reactions To Intelligent Design

Famous quotes containing the words secular and/or jewish:

    but as an Eagle
    His cloudless thunderbolted on thir heads.
    So vertue giv’n for lost,
    Deprest, and overthrown, as seem’d,
    Like that self-begott’n bird
    In the Arabian woods embost,
    That no second knows nor third,
    And lay e’re while a Holocaust,
    From out her ashie womb now teem’d
    Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
    When most unactive deem’d,
    And though her body die, her fame survives,
    A secular bird ages of lives.
    John Milton (1608–1674)

    For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.
    Stephanie Coontz (20th century)