Steven Weinberg Quotes

Let them be reassured, it has never been one of our intentions to ban religion in society, but solely to protect the national education system from any conspicuous display of religious affiliation.

The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.

Partisan politics has no place in the classroom.

As a matter of principle, science teachers are professionally bound to limit their teaching to science and should resist pressure [from religious fundamentalists] to do otherwise.

The state may not require that teaching and learning must be tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect or dogma

I'm all for teaching creation and allowing prayers in schools, as soon as scholars begin teaching Darwinism and geometry in church.

I don't have an issue with what you do in the church but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me I got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school. That's when we're going to fight... There's no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher 'that might not necessarily be true.' That's never happened. There are no scientists picketing out front of churches. There's been this coexistence forever, so to have religious communities knocking down the science door, there's something wrong there.

We can trust our doctors to be professional, to minister equally to their patients without regard to their political or religious beliefs. But we can no longer trust our professors to do the same.

Public education grants secular worldviews an exclusive monopoly in the classroom.

A university is not a political party, and an education is not an indoctrination.

I choose to worship not believing in God and government should not thrust a religious idea down my throat.

But instead of standing up for reason, our government is handing education over to the world of faith.

In America our public schools are intended to be religiously neutral. Our teachers and schools are neither to endorse nor to inhibit religion. I believe this is a very good thing.

I say further that our system of education should be unsectarian.

Education should be totally secular. I am not telling people not to believe in God, but it should be a personal matter which should be done at home.

In Holland, they have come to precisely the same conclusion. There they have adopted a system of secular education, because they have found it impracticable to unite the religious bodies in any system of combined religious instruction.

In a pluralistic society, public schools are places for persons of all faiths and none. Schools may neither promote nor denigrate any religion.

The [public] school’s approach to religion is academic, not devotional. • The school strives for student awareness of religions, but does not press for student acceptance of any religion. • The school sponsors study about religion, not the practice of religion. • The school may expose students to a diversity of religious views, but may not impose any particular view. • The school educates about all religions; it does not promote or denigrate religion. • The school informs students about various beliefs; it does not seek to conform students to any particular belief.

But I firmly believe that evolution be taught in the schools has the best witness of what modern science has taught us. To read the Bible literalistically about such issues disinvites us from using the best of recent scholarships

I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive of religious belief, and I'm all for that! One of the things that in fact has driven me in my life, is the feeling that this is one of the great social functions of science--to free people from superstition. But I don't think that that attitude of mine should control the high school curriculum. My own personal motivation is irrelevant, just as the motivations of religious people should not affect high school curricula: Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to destroy religion--science should be taught simply ignoring religion.

Keeping education in the United States free of sectarian influence has long been one of the primary struggles of believers in freedom of religion.

No sectarian tenets shall ever be taught in any school supported in whole or in part by the State, nations, or by the proceeds of any tax levied upon any community.

Resolve that neither the state nor nation, nor both combined, shall support institutions of learning other than those sufficient to afford every child growing up in the land of opportunity of a good common school education, unmixed with sectarian, pagan, or atheistical dogmas.

To call public education godless betrays invincible ignorance, infinite prejudice, and complete misunderstanding of what religion is all about.

A University with sectarian professorships becomes, of course, a sectarian monopoly: with professorships of rival sects, it would be an arena of Theological Gladiators. Without any such professorships, it may incur, for a time at least, the imputation of irreligious tendencies, if not designs. The last difficulty was thought more manageable than either of the others….there seems to be no alternative but between a public University without a theological professorship, and sectarian seminaries without a University