Student and teacher
Talk in Class Turns to God, Setting Off Public Debate on Rights
Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United States Constitution this fall, he was accused of violating it.
Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.
“If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,” Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. “He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell.”
The student, Matthew LaClair, said that he felt uncomfortable with Mr. Paszkiewicz’s statements in the first week, and taped eight classes starting Sept. 13 out of fear that officials would not believe the teacher had made the comments.
In a Sept. 25 letter to the principal, Matthew wrote: “I care about the future generation and I do not want Mr. Paszkiewicz to continue preaching to and poisoning students.”
I listened to the recordings from the NY Times.
I think as a Methodist brought up in the UK I find all this very, very disturbing. We were taught to think for ourselves and to question views in order to come to our OWN understanding of the world.
Basically, David Paszkiewicz is swapping one set of beliefs for another. He tries (unsuccessfully I might add) to put down science in some of the most rediculous ways possible (did YOU see evolution take place) in order to supplant his own and not so rock solid views of the world as seen by faith.
What he is suggests is that the scientific view of the world is morally wrong and that religious faith is the only really truth.
He’s wrong. Morality and faith are not one and the same. One must only look so far as the born again Christian George W. Bush for evidence of this. It is perfectly possible for a person to be both moral and not religious.
He quotes Moses in Genesis and says ‘It’s all true because it says so in Exodus.”. The details of which are meant to refer to the period when Pharaoh enslaved the Jews in order to make the pyramids.
This NEVER HAPPENED. Slaves did NOT build the pyramids. But I suppose that wouldn’t count because it was written by people at the time and not several hundreds and indeed thousands of years later by scholars in Rome.
Also in the “On Salvation” recording; is that someone covering a laugh when he says “He was a holy God.”?
I have a Biology teacher that preaches that faith in God is necessary for good health, that evolution is a myth, that condoms don’t work, that middle school students go to the bathroom to have sex with each other all the time, that internet pornography is making everybody a pervert, and that kids have sex at age eight these days. This in a Biology class. First of all I think she is a paranoid nutcase who gets all of her information from FOX news. Second I think she should keep her RELIGION to herself. I will get my RELIGION from the source that I choose thank you very much!