In the interest of wasting as much time and energy as possible pushing their religious beliefs into anything and everything you do, the Christian right has had its case heard that you can t teach sciencey stuff like evolution if you can t teach the reality of creation. Creation can be proven because it s in a book, you see, that was written by God through the vessel of man he created whereas evolution is just a silly collection of data about things we ve learned by going out and looking.Since creation is the only viable explanation but our government won t allow it in schools, the next necessary step to keeping our children as uneducated as possible is to see that nobody teach anything at all. Ignorance is bliss. That was, at least, what the Citizens for Objective Public Education, or COPE, hoped would happen when they argued to a federal district court that teaching evolution and the way man has come to understand his own ancestry is the same as teaching them the religion of atheism. They obviously don t understand the words they use sometimes, but that s OK.According to COPE:[Evolution brings students] into the religious sphere by leading them to ask ultimate religious questions like what is the cause and nature of life and the universe    where do we come from? The purpose of the indoctrination is to establish the religious Worldview, not to deliver to an age appropriate audience an objective and religiously neutral origins science education that seeks to inform. Isn t that precious? A group of ultra-religious zealots who want your children to believe the earth is barely 6000 years old are calling evolution  indoctrination.  How dare you teach things scientists have gone out and dug into the ground to find and prove? In the end it all comes down to the same thing: God had a plan. That plan couldn t possibly be to ignite the big bang and watch a universe develop. No, the plan has to be the story from the book that was stolen from the other book that learned it from another book that heard it passed down at dinner time for 25,000 years, when God was Goddess and men were washing her feet.The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver snickered a bit and responded: COPE does not offer any facts to support the conclusion that the Standards condemn any religion or send a message of endorsement, and any fear of biased instruction is premised on COPE s predictions of school districts  responses to the Standards an attempt by COPE to recast a future injury as a present one. Americans United for Separation of Church and State chimed in, saying that COPE feared that scientific facts would cause  Kansas schoolchildren to be subtly manipulated into rejecting their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. So, these people don t want things like science and fact get in the way of their Sunday morning fairytale, where strict obedience is all that s truly needed in the end. Americans United continued: It s a nonsensical argument, which is why courts have unanimously rejected it. COPE, it seems, isn t interested in promoting facts; it s interested in forcing public schools to conduct far-right religious and political indoctrination. It s a shame that in today s day and age we need to have a society to separate church and state. It s like a cold with a runny nose the country picked up in the 1950s that we just can t shake.Featured image by Education Images/Getty Images