I was on myspace playing Heroes earlier today. I started to log out when I saw this little video slide across the screen as part of a promotion for the new Myspace App: Bumperstickers. I only caught the words “The students stared in amazement”. I thought to myself, this has got to be something either really gross or utterly fantastic. So I clicked on it.
5 minutes later, I sat there staring at the screen and realizing that those were 5 minutes I would never get back, and I could have been watching porn or something. Anything else would have been great. It was a little story, with pop rock playing in the background. No pictures or video, just the paragraphs fading in and out for 5 freaking minutes.
Here’s the story, paraphrased of course. This teacher is a devout atheist. He spends each semester determined to prove that God doesn’t exist. (Which tells right from the beginning this was made up, because he would have been fired a long time ago on account of protesting Bible-thumpers.) At the end of each semester he holds up a piece of chalk and tells the class, “If there really is a God, he can stop this chalk from hitting the floor and breaking.” Then drops it. It shatters on the ground. Chalk is brittle shit, you know. He then looks at his flock of sheep and says, “Surely if there were a God he could have stopped that from happening, so there can’t be a God.” He then commands anyone who still believes in Jesus to stand up. No one ever does.
Okay, flash forward a few semesters. There’s this devout Christian who gets up every morning and puts on his Air Jesus kicks and his “Real Men Love God” shirt and heads to class. Only this semester he has the religious ogre’s class. He has heard of the teacher and prays every morning to have the strength and courage to stand up at the end of the semester. Okay, flash forward again. Teach is holding up the chalk. He repeats, “Anyone who believes still, stand up!”
The faithful one stands up, and the teacher yells at him.
“YOU FOOL! If there was a God, he could stop this chalk from hitting the… bla… bla… bla..”
He drops the chalk, but it catches on his sleeve and lands in the pleat of his pants and then rolls down his shoe and stops on the ground with no breakage. The teacher looks at the kid in shock, awe, horror, and whatever expression the original writer grossly exaggerated, and runs out of the room. The students stare in wonder at a piece of chalk that didn’t break, and the kid in the back comes up and preaches about God for half an hour. Then they all go home and enjoy a nice cup of Lamb’s Blood tea and curl up with their Bibles.
Okay, I’m not religious. I believe there are higher powers, but not in the form of a single entity that somehow watches over 6 billion people every second of their entire lifetimes. I don’t believe that religion should be taught in schools. That’s what Sunday school is for. The school system was founded to teach science, art, language skills, ect… Not whether a crazy man talked to a bush that was on fire and believed it was the voice of an entity.
But I don’t believe in preaching Atheism either. And there is a reason behind that. Same as before. Anything that involves religion or the lack of religion should be kept out of our school systems. It doesn’t belong there. Schools are for education, not the reversal of education. You look closely at the Bible Belt. Schools in those districts have the lowest test scores in the country. Not because they are dumb, but because the religious yokels refuse to let certain things be taught in the schools that they consider “unChristian-like”.
So when I get on Myspace to chat with my friends or play a game, and I see some story about a piece of chalk that doesn’t break turning a class into devout followers… Shit, I see so many faults in that story. One, no teacher is going to be allowed to devote his time to such a cause. He would be fired. Two, there is no way to prove God does or doesn’t exist. Dropping a piece of chalk will not do it. Three, the chalk didn’t break because it didn’t hit the ground from its original height. He fumbled it and it landed on his pants first then rolled off his shoe and hit the floor at an angle, reducing speed and impact at which it hit. This is basic dynamics people, now you see why you have such low test scores? And Four, the teacher looks in horror at the kid and runs out of the classroom. The teacher would have known the reason it didn’t break, and would have done it again with the proper technique. Not run out of the room like a schoolgirl.
Oh, and then the kid comes to the front of the class and preaches for half an hour? Okay, after seeing a piece of chalk roll down a pant leg like a turd and hit the floor making the teacher look like a douche, those kids would have been laughing. And the chances of them sitting there for half an hour after the class ended? Nada, especially not to hear some kid talk about an invisible man who watches you from the clouds.
Do me a favor folks. Before you start flamming this post like I predict you will do, try educating yourselves on the proper way to prove an all powerful being might exist. If the chalk were to stop in mid-air, that would be miraculous. If it were to just vanish, that would be miraculous. The only thing this post made me consider was that maybe we need to reinforce that idiot Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act”, because it’s very obvious that a few did get left behind. Welcome to the internet, tribulated ones. We have dry erase boards here.
