Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond — a Republican — is bucking his own party in a new lawsuit aimed at preventing what would be the first publicly funded religious school in America from opening.
On Friday, Drummond filed the suit in Oklahoma Supreme Court, challenging the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board’s 3-2 decision in June to grant a contract to open St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School. According to PBS, Drummond warned that the establishment of St. Isidore, which is sponsored by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, would lead to the floodgates opening for religious groups of all stripes to make bids for public funding for schools of their own.
“Make no mistake, if the Catholic Church were permitted to have a public virtual charter school, a reckoning will follow in which this state will be faced with the unprecedented quandary of processing requests to directly fund all petitioning sectarian groups,” the lawsuit read.
Supernatural / God is an easy explanation for things we don’t understand because it doesn’t actually explain why things happen, it is a scapegoat that avoids answering the question. In the absence of information, it is more comfortable to feel like we have an understanding rather than admit we don’t understand something.
As we grow and learn about the knowledge humans have gathered we understand why things actually happen. For example, humans used to think a sun god pulled the sun across the sky, then we learned about the solar system. As the breadth of scientific knowledge grows, the areas for supernatural/religious claims shrink.