How did this come about? We don’t see atheists preaching door to door or anything, I think it’s simply down to people calculating the evidence for themselves. Truth will out, eventually.
No, atheism has a much more efficient system for conversion...it's called public education, in which a purely materialistic explanation is offered as the official "scientific" explanation for how living things came to be, and this "scientific" explanation is shoved down peoples' throats from the time they are in fourth grade (maybe earlier) until the time they graduate high school. Most governments more or less force attendance to these institutions, too. So, a rise in atheism is nearly guaranteed.
A 1990 biology text book used by a local high school where I live blathers on and on about how the first cell came to be without a parent cell billions of years ago under circumstances and conditions that apparently do not exist today
1 (an unobserved, really slow, complicated version of spontaneous generation), tucks Louis Pasteur's experiments safely out of students' view deep in the appendices (Louis Pasteur's experiments disproved spontaneous generation and helped biologists to accept the idea that "'all organisms arise only from others of their kind.'")
2, and, in chapter 1, labels creation science as psuedoscience.
3
The book says that fish have scales,
{added by edit} and that reptiles have "dry, scaly skin." {edit over} That's fine. Then, the book says that birds have "scales modified as feathers" and that mammals have "scales modified as hairs."
4 To my knowledge, no place in the book demonstrates that feathers or hairs are indeed modified scales. Why wouldn't the book simply say that birds have feathers or that mammals have hairs?
In my opinion, it's propaganda mixed in with actual science and people's children are forced to listen to it from "authorities" (the school teachers and textbooks) for about 8 or 9 years (or more); 5 days per week, 180 days per year.
Yeah...they don't go door to door...they make all the little kids come to them...or they threaten to take the kids away from the parents (unless they homeschool or send them to a private school -- not viable options for most).
Now that's my opinionated 2 cents.
1Biological Science: A Molecular Approach. 6th Ed., Heath 1990. pp. 67-86
2Ibid., Appendix 16A, pp. 747-748.
3Ibid., pp. 15-16.
4Ibid., pp. 122-125.
This message has been edited by TheLiteralist, 01-02-2005 01:09 AM
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