A. Basic Personal Preparations
1. Be sure you are personally trusting in Jesus Christ as
your Lord and Savior.
2. Know what you believe and why you believe it. Study the
Bible and pray daily, asking God's help to give you understanding and guidance.
3. Commit your life and all of your daily comings and
goings to Christ for Him to use for His glory.
4. Be as good a student as you can with the Lord's help.
This increases your credibility.
5. Pray for opportunities to promote God's truth whenever
error is being taught.
B. Tactics To Use In The Classroom
1. Develop a sharp eye for dogmatic statements, i.e.,
statements of "fact" that cannot be demonstrated to be factual.
2. Learn how to ask intelligent, probing questions that
expose dogma for what it is.
3. Demand empirical evidence for all statements of faith.
4. Learn some of the weaknesses and failures of
evolutionary theories.
5. Introduce these failures and weaknesses into classroom
discussion. Do this either by asking questions or by reporting pertinent facts. Be sure
you can back up what you report.
6. If you are challenged, either be prepared with
documentation, or turn the challenge around to put the burden of proof on the
evolutionists.
7. If the critical information is not made available in
the classroom (as proposed in Appendix 2), if dogmatism, protectionism and exclusivism
seem to control what goes on in the classroom:
a. Respectfully ask the teacher why a science course
should be taught this way. Do dogmatism, protectionism and exclusivism make for good
science?
b. Ask for critical information to be made available in
the classroom.
c. Ask that qualified resource personnel be invited to
speak to the class on the scientific evidence for the alternative creation perspective.
8. If science or evolutionary theories are in any way set
up to contradict or disparage your biblical Christian faith, respectfully point out to the
teacher that:
a. Science instruction is not supposed to be used as a
weapon against God or against anybody's religious faith.
b. This misuse of science is highly offensive to you as a
Christian believer.
c. The Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution guarantees your protection from any such offense by any government
agency or agent.
9. Always be respectful and calm, humble but confident, in
your classroom interactions with teachers and students.
10. Pray for your teachers and fellow students, that God
may be gracious to them and give them light.
11. Pray that God may be glorified in all that you and
other Christian students do concerning this difficult and controversial issue.
12. Pray that God may be pleased to change the public
schools for the good, if it is His will.
C. Christian Community Action
As the Lord leads, join with other Christian students to organize a joint community
action with pastors, parents and Christian students to petition the school board to
introduce the changes recommended in Appendix 2.
D. Our Strategy And Goals For America
Our goal is not to bring a study of the Bible or the reading of the Genesis record of
creation into the science classroom. Rather, if evolution or any other theory of origins
is to be taught in a science class or textbook, it should be dealt with in a scientific
manner. This means that dogmatism, protectionism and exclusivism should be excluded. Our
goal is not to give Christians or the Christian world view a place of special advantage or
monopoly control in the public schools, since this would be considered unconstitutional.
Rather, if other belief systems are given a place, the biblical Christian alternatives
should be placed in properly balanced competition with them.
We do not want to attack anybody else's religious faith in the science classroom, but
we want an end to the use of science and science instruction falsely as a weapon against
God and our Christian faith. Our goal is not that everybody in science and science
education should be forced to think like a Christian. Rather, we want the system opened up
again so that Christians can be free to think like Christians and function openly as
Christians in science, education, scholarship, and other life callings without
discrimination or prejudice because of their faith.
We want all citizens to be judged in society on the basis of their performance, not on
the basis of whether or not they are willing to give in to what the majority believes or
disbelieves. Under these conditions Christians, as well as those of other beliefs, will be
better able to demonstrate the validity and value of their faith by the quality of their
lives and accomplishments. Christians can give glory to God who has made it all possible.
E. The Constitutional Rights of Christian Students
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion [i.e., a government sponsored church or religious
belief system], or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." We have emphasized the
Free Exercise Clause. This clause means, among other things, that the government may not
offend any citizen by telling him that his religious belief is false and that he should
believe in some other belief mandated by the government. Thus, when the State's schools
teach a student who believes in creation by God, that evolution is a fact, even though it
cannot be proved to be a fact, the State is telling the student that his or her religious
belief is a falsehood. The State is illegally offending the believing student by violating
that student's Free Exercise rights under the First Amendment.
When the State protects evolutionary interpretations and theories from intelligent
criticism, the State is making a religious (or irreligious) dogma of evolution and again
is violating the Free Exercise rights of the student who believes in creation.
When the State exclusively teaches materialistic theories and speculations concerning
origins, without allowing for competition with alternative interpretations of the observed
data, the State is teaching that a materialistic view of the universe is the only
scientifically and intellectually respectable one. This constitutes a distortion of
science that falsely makes science a weapon against religious faith. This violates the
constitutional rights of Christian students.
Let's get the religious (or irreligious) indoctrination out of public school science
and other subject areas by stopping the present policy of teaching evolutionary ideas
dogmatically as fact and protecting them from criticism and competition. Let's stop the
public schools from promoting atheism by teaching as science the belief that everything in
the universe is the product of accident and that there is no Creator who created anything.
Let's stop the public schools from promoting immorality by indoctrinating students in the
belief that they are chance cousins of apes and therefore are no more subject to God's
Moral Law than are the apes.
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