Maggie's Farm

Re: Allah in our text books
We are not Arabic speaking Christians and we don't use the word "Allah" when we mean "God". What would be the reason to change it now? Also given our recent history with people who yell "Alla Akbar!", it seems a little insensitive at least to make this change. Certainly the politically correct school administrators and text book writers would see that. But maybe they have their reasons.

As for objectivity in science, that is a goal and ideal. I'm not sure what you mean by "an imperfect methodology". The politicization of science erodes public confidence in scientific knowledge, leads people to call theories as "settled science", and denounce people who have reached different conclusions in personal terms rather than try to refute their claims with evidence. The reason it took so long to come to grips with the fact that the Earth moves is the same reason we have the current debate over AGW. Instead of the scientific method of testing and challenging theories with experimentation, they (and we) have political debate. They are very different things and can have very different purposes.

I was replying to your post. I didn't read the link Bird Dog was responding to. It seems pretty clear that "God" was being replaced by "Allah" from the quote you included in your post:

Bird Dog: Parents, have you read your child's textbook lately? "As a Christian, I find the interchanging of “Allah” and “God’s” name offensive."

That implies to me that either previous versions of the text referred to God or that new texts that are not culture specific (such as for Islamic kids) are using the name "Allah" where "God" would have been used previously. To my mind, that is incorrect as it is not part of the prevailing US culture to use the term "Allah" and given the recent history I referred is grossly insensitive to the point where it sounds indoctrinational.

You are mistaken about AGW. There is a lot of politics that goes into that starting with making the location of temperature stations secret after several were found near A/C exhaust, and other places where higher than normal temps would be registered, not allowing AGW articles to be peer reviewed by skeptical scientists, shouting down scientists who disagree as "deniers" who should be considered in the same vein as "Holocaust Deniers" or paid by oil and gas interests. None of that has any relation to any scientific model. It is many of the AGW promoters who are acting like the early Christian Church which denounced those who disagreed with it.

The Lord's Prayer in Cherokee reminded me of a conversation I had several years ago with a Black Foot Indian. He was an ordained Christian minister and a Black Foot minister (I don't know that he told me the name of their religion). He told me the similarities between the two religions were very profound (including the virgin birth of God on Earth) even though the Black Foot religion predated white men in the Western Hemisphere.