For no particular reason I could fathom, I began receiving all kinds of religous loon-mail today, including denunciations of evolution, pictures of fireworks explosions resembling Jesus on the cross, and sundry laments for the fate of my soul, all by people who have somehow failed to apprehend the sophisticated theologies of Karen Armstrong and Terry Eagleton:

Dear Sir, I am very upset with what you said within a recent article on yahoo. Sir, I’m going to tell you something that you need to hear. Sir, You are going to HELL. Because when GOD CREATED the Earth HE made everything perfect and in GOD’s perfect plan humans didn’t need to be evolved from monkeys. So there evolution is wrong. GO Read the bible it tells you the truth, see what GOD said about creation, not what some Man thought were we came from. Because I believe that WORD OF GOD is the truth and nothing else is. Yours truly, a GOD fearing Man

Aha, something in the press! It turns out that writer Dylan Lovan of the Associated Press just published a nice piece on evolution and homeschooling.

You may remember, early in the history of this website, that a woman wrote me about the nearly complete absence of materials to help homeschooled children, like her daughter, learn evolution. Or, rather, there are materials, but they’re all creationist pap, directed to that large segment of homeschooled kids who are being homechurched at the same time.

At Lovan’s request, Virginia Tech professor Duncan Porter and I reviewed two widely-used evolution units sold by religious homeschool outfits, Apologia and Bob Jones University Press (I’ve talked about Apologia before). The materials were worthless, pretty much straight creationist garbage that didn’t even have the decency to pretend it was intelligent design. Whatever these kids are learning from Apologia and Bob Jones, it isn’t biology. Both Porter and I flunked these two modules. Lovan writes about the Bob Jones effort:

The textbook publishers defend their books as well-rounded lessons on evolution and its shortcomings. One of the books doesn’t attempt to mask disdain for Darwin and evolutionary science. “Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling,” says the introduction to “Biology: Third Edition” from Bob Jones University Press. “This book was not written for them.” The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its “History of Life” chapter that a “Christian worldview … is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is.” When the AP asked about that passage, university spokesman Brian Scoles said the sentence made it into the book because of an editing error and will be removed from future editions.

Editing error? More like their real motivations.

Distressed, I told Lovan that these books were “promulgating lies to schoolchildren.” Ergo my inundation with religious wackaloonery. Expect more of it here because, unfortunately, Lovan also published the URL of this website.