The news: Religious fundamentalists, regardless of their stripes, seem to have a core aversion to the same things: science and education.
According to a new report by the Associated Press, the Islamic State's (IS) ground strategy has not been to win over hearts and minds, but to indoctrinate people with its branch of radical Islam, starting with children. In the city of Mosul, Iraq, the terrorist organization has put together a new curriculum — allegedly issued by leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself — that bans subjects such as evolution and literature, instead focusing on religious fundamentalism.
The new curriculum "stresses that any reference to the republics of Iraq or Syria must be replaced with 'Islamic State.' Pictures that violate its ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam will be ripped out of books. Anthems and lyrics that encourage love of country are now viewed as a show of 'polytheism and blasphemy,' and are strictly banned," the AP reported.
Scared and defiant parents in Mosul have taken to keeping their children home in order to fight IS's so-called efforts "to eliminate ignorance, to spread religious sciences and to fight the decayed curriculum" — but unfortunately, their struggle to keep religion and education separate is hardly unique.
Sound familiar? To an extent, it should. While it's obviously hyperbolic to compare IS with Christian fundamentalists, a serious aversion to science is common among both groups.
Take evolution, for instance: While Charles Darwin's widely accepted theory may be banned in the classrooms of Mosul, it's also getting pushed out of many classrooms in America. With lax state education rules and the fundraising power of religious groups, there are now thousands of schools across America that teach creationism and other "alternatives" to evolution, and your taxpayer dollars might be going towards this effort without you even knowing it. According to Slate, Texas, Louisiana and Tennessee "permit public school teachers to teach 'alternatives' to evolution," while in states such as Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Arizona and Washington, D.C., taxpayer money has been used to fund scholarships and voucher programs at private schools that teach creationism.
While IS's violent tactics are certainly not equivalent to American religious conservatives' efforts to introduce non-science-based education, it is important to address the one point of commonality here: using children's education to further a religious agenda. In both cases, we see religious fundamentalism superseding the goal of providing children with factual, scientifically supported education. And that's an unsettling similarity.http://mic.com/articles/98962/the-islamic-state-and-christian-fundamentalists-have-something-big-in-common
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