Yoshie, this is where it gets a little tricky. There are some good union men and women who hold creationist beliefs; although their understanding of the world around them maybe fairly limited. I don't know if you have ever seen the John Seals movie Matewan and although I don't buy his characterization of Frank Keany for various reasons, the movie does portray the pro-union religious fervor of the other characters pretty well.
Tom
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> W. Kiernan:
> >Concerning Carrol's question: when I was eight, in 1962, my parents
> >moved in the middle of the school year from Cleveland, Ohio, where I
> >never heard a word about the Bible in school, to Sarasota, Florida.
>
> I suggest as a hypothesis that the presence of a stronger tradition of
> organized labor and left-wing politics is inversely related to the presence
> of a fervor for creationism. Perhaps creationism is a price we pay for the
> sins of the failure to organize the South and racism.
>
> >These last few years Kansas fundamentalists have been forbidden to teach
> >religion classes openly in their public schools; should they do so
> >anyway, they risk being sued by the ACLU, Barry Lynn's "Americans United
> >for Separation of Church and State," and similar groups. But with this
> >new anti-evolution regulation, they can now sneak their religion classes
> >in the back door of the biology department.
>
> Not just biology but also geology, chemistry, and physics must become
> distorted through the introduction of creationism.
>
> We may advocate the teaching of comparative religion (of which Christianity
> should be only a part) in public schools, which should also include a study
> of the history of philosophy, as well as the history of racist and sexist
> misuse of science. Should be quite interesting, though I am not sure how
> many public school teachers are up to such a demanding task.
> Alternatively, a course in the study of Biblical scholarship and its
> vicissitude may be taught as part of English or history. I didn't come to
> the USA until I entered grad school, so I don't know if the above is
> already part of public school education somewhere.
>
> However, I don't think that such a way of including religion in public
> education would appease fundamentalists, who do not think of their Book as
> just a piece of literature or historical document.
>
> Yoshie