Public School Bible Classes

Blog Against Theocracy. To participate in this, get your guidelines at that link.

I saw this topic over on John Good’s blog, an opportunity to blog against theocracy that’s being held this “holy week”. It’s important to understand what theocracy is. It’s having a State Religion. It’s being forced to observe religious customs by law. It’s being denied basic rights such as employment and shelter because your personal religious beliefs have been declared to be in conflict with the ones required. It's being forced to abide by laws that have no rational reason for existing.

A lot of Christians in this country see no problem with establishing Christianity as a National Religion, meaning that Christian beliefs would be required and non-conformity would have repercussions. (I would like to ask the Protestants reading this if they would mind if their government was officially Catholic. Thought so...) They don’t understand that this is the very thing that they hate about the Taliban and many other organizations and governments around the world. The thing that they hate is the very thing they would like to establish here, and that movement has made plenty of progress since Bush got into power. One of ways this movement had made inroads is in the changing of public school textbooks and curricula.

It's the following kind of stuff that makes me wish we could cut off the Texas panhandle and give it away. Who wants it? Oklahoma? Any takers? Really though, the problem is bigger than one extreme right-wing fundie member of the Christian Taliban (Pampa's Warren Chisum) with legislative power. Chisum has filed a bill to make Texas required to teach elective Bible classes in public schools. [LINK] The classes would cover the Old and New Testaments.

It’s already being done in many places in Texas (25 districts out of 1,000), and being watchdogged by the Texas Freedom Network: See Bible Curriculum, and only a handful of districts have managed to keep the studies within the guidelines of the topic as history, literature or social studies. I don’t disagree with offering classes on the subject of religious texts as long as they are presented in this way, and literature from other religions such as Islam, Eastern religions and Paganism must be required alongside. It would also be helpful for students to know about all the different translations of these books (particularly the Bible), how they got there, why some versions include chapters that others don’t.

Links: First Freedom First - Blog Against Theocracy

Tags: Theocracy - freedom