The thing with what you seem to be saying (that the science camp is trying to drive religion out of schools despite their supposed adherence to "live and let live") is that public schools are a state institution, and separation of church and state is also incredibly important. You're perfectly free to set up religious schools (which exist), and also to home school your children (also common for the religious). What's explicitly not OK is trying to foist your specific religion in an institution paid for by public money. That's the entire distinction. Past that, "live and let live" is indeed the order of the day.
But then, I suppose you may view science as another religion, and I guess that's probably going to be a sticking point. I view it as mostly orthogonal except for the creationist stuff that has mountains of evidence against it, and requires rather convoluted reasoning about God putting the evidence there as a test of faith (my understanding of the reasoning, anyway)
I don't really think that either of us is going to convince the other on any subject of import; we just don't share enough priors - for example, I doubt you are very susceptible to conviction on the point of modern progressivism as an inherently corrupt Christian heresy, and while I did once share the same faith you expound here, it would take a book to explain how and why I ceased to do so. That book actually has been written - and in a pleasantly engaging and discursive style, yet - but it would be astonishingly presumptuous of me to require such a hefty prerequisite for mere conversation, and I will not do so.
I will, though, note that it's curious how you talk about public schools as though they were paid for with federal money - this being the usual meaning with which the phrase "public money", in this connection, is used. By the Department of Education's own accounting [1], the proportion of primary and secondary public school funding which originates in the federal purse is approximately eight percent.
Yet the federal regulatory apparatus insists on an approximately one hundred percent share of control over how all of these public schools, even the vast majority for which it does not pay, must operate. This is a remarkable disparity! In any other context, its mere existence, to say nothing of the desirability of its being suffered to continue, would require considerable justification. Perhaps I am a fool to wonder what makes this context so unique.
I didn't mention Federal money, I'm keenly aware that it's primarily funded at the local level, mostly via property taxes. I'm not sure how the funding source is relevant, though, it's still public funding one way or the other. Separation of church and state is a core American value, not only at the Federal level.
It is the privilege - in the denotative sense, the private law - of power to identify one's own faith so perfectly with the right ordering of things that you need not recognize that the distinction you cherish, between church and state, does not at present exist, and has not existed in living memory.
I should not like to see my own church take charge of the nation. I don't like that yours has done so, either, at least not now that I've become an apostate of it. Before that happened, I would've been fine with the idea, but, like you, failed to recognize the fact of it - not that that's any excuse.
The thing with what you seem to be saying (that the science camp is trying to drive religion out of schools despite their supposed adherence to "live and let live") is that public schools are a state institution, and separation of church and state is also incredibly important. You're perfectly free to set up religious schools (which exist), and also to home school your children (also common for the religious). What's explicitly not OK is trying to foist your specific religion in an institution paid for by public money. That's the entire distinction. Past that, "live and let live" is indeed the order of the day.
But then, I suppose you may view science as another religion, and I guess that's probably going to be a sticking point. I view it as mostly orthogonal except for the creationist stuff that has mountains of evidence against it, and requires rather convoluted reasoning about God putting the evidence there as a test of faith (my understanding of the reasoning, anyway)