Posted on 06/02/2005 8:09:10 AM PDT by EarthStomper
In a recent meeting of the Board of Education in the city of Artichoke, Alabama, it was decided to ban the reading of Homer's Illiad and Odyssey in the classroom. The grounds given for the exclusion of these towering masterpieces of ancient literature is that reading them in a public school violated the first amendment's guarantee of the separation of church and state. Wallace Nobrainer, the attorney for the Artichoke school system, explained that "the Homeric texts are obviously designed to promote the polytheistic view of the Greeks," and hence they should be looked upon in the same light as the reading of the Book of Psalms in a public school. "We don't want taxpayer dollars being spent in order to proselyte children into praying to Zeus and Apollo," remarked Debra Klewless, the chairperson of the Board of Education. "If we forbid the teaching of one religion, we must be consistent and forbid the teaching of all religions."
Okay -- you got me. There is no Artichoke, Alabama -- at least, I don't think there is. And no one (so far) has demanded that Homer be taken out of the classroom. It is okay for our children to read stories about Hera and Athena, Aphrodite and Poseidon, all of whom were once the objects of superstitious veneration among the Greeks; but it is not okay to read about Adam and Eve, or Joseph and his brothers. In short, kids can enjoy the myths and stories that have come down to us from The Illiad, but they cannot be permitted to enjoy the myths and stories that have come down to us from The Book of Genesis.
The only possible reason for this dissimilarity of treatment is that the pagan religion is as dead as Mr. Dickens' proverbial doornail, while the religions that are associated with the Bible are still practiced by millions of people in America and the world over. True, the Greek pantheon might once have been a potent force in shaping the daily life of human beings, but today it has all the vitality of a wax museum, full of mannequin divinities, frozen in their timeless splendor, but long since unable to inspire warmth of affection or devotion.
The last gasp of the old pagan religion occurred when the Roman emperor known as Julian the Apostate attempted to reverse his predecessors' embrace of the Christian faith and to roll back the clock to the long vanished era in which men and women still worshipped at shrines dedicated to Apollo and Diana, and still heeded the artfully ambiguous oracles of Delphi. The apostate failed, and the once vibrant gods of Greece degenerated until they became mere rhetorical flourishes that permitted learned poets, like Milton, to ornament his verse with their euphonious names.
On the other hand, the myths and stories of the Bible continue to provoke not merely warmth, but a great deal of heat -- consider the role that the continuing belief in the fable of Adam and Eve has on the debate over the teaching in public schools of Darwin's theory of evolution. People still take the Bible stories seriously -- they live by them, and guide their lives by them.
So that is the explanation for the different treatment received by Homer and by the Bible. Homer's gods are dead, but the god of the Bible still breathes. We can trust our children not to be carried away by Dionysus; but the same cannot be said about Jesus of Nazareth.
Yet there is still hope. Man's future may well turn out to fulfill the British biologist Richard Dawkins' most cherished dream: we may all stop believing in religious superstitions completely, and cease to take seriously all this nonsense about supernatural beings. Christianity may die out, along with Islam and Judaism, whereupon the peoples of the world would unite around the banner of detached scientific objectivity and enlightened rationality.
If we were all atheists, then the Bible would become as harmless to read as the poems of Homer. And if all of our children became atheists, too, then there would no longer be a reason to keep them from reading the Bible from time to time, even in public school, just as today they are allowed to read Homer.
Indeed, the day may come when the current attempt to suppress the reading of the Bible in public school is looked upon as being no less hysterical than the efforts of the good town of Artichoke to repress the reading of Homer in their public schools. Why have conniption fits over the retelling of stories that have charmed listeners for several thousand years? Why not ban the Arabian nights as well, along with all the fairy tales that men and women have handed down to their children?
There is something unspeakably philistine about those who wish to forbid the reading of the Bible in public school. And if you don't know what the word philistine means, just thank the ACLU.
(Hint: The Philistines were the baby-sacrificing enemies of the ancient Hebrews, but in the nineteenth century the word philistine came to represent a crass and materialistic insensitivity to the aesthetic, imaginative, and spiritual side of human existence.)
Lee Harris is the author of Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History.
I realize that - it is just a sore subject with me, because some insist that it occurs in EVERY public school.
i realize that, but unfortunately, it is a very real problem in many public schools. not your's, and for that you are lucky.
No doubt there is a problem in some, and that should be dealt with in thoe localities. But broad brushing all public schools because of a few bad apples is wrong.
rural areas are going to be ok, but large urban centers are typically much more PC and will then have more stuff like this going on. It is equally wrong to minimize a very real problem.
I am not tryig to minimize a serious problem. My issue is that this is being used as the standard for which the anti-public school contingent uses to describe ALL public schools. You know the type I am talking about.
ROFL! That one line is almost enough to redeem the author's sneering condescension towards people of faith.
Glad to see that this article was a parody, but it raises an important point. Public schools should teach classical mythology because it was an important part of shaping the Western world we now inhabit. Likewise, schools should teach kids the Bible as literature, because it too has been enormously influential on shaping our modern world.
But because of PC-ness and multiculturalism, many educators are of the mind that Western civ is unimportant or downright evil. Thus many students come out of high school with a very poor knowledge of the history of their culture. They are especially ignorant of the role of Christianity in Western history, which is just inexcusable. Public schools wouldn't dream of teaching kids about the human body in biology class and not mentioning the skeletal system. But they do the exact same thing in history and literature classes when they try to give a picture of the last 2000 years in the West w/o mentioning Christianity.
Case in point: last summer mr sassbox and I were working part-time at a warehouse. We did very mindless tasks like light assembly and packaging orders for the mail, so we were able to chat while we worked all day. We were talking about religion and mr sassbox said something about Martin Luther. A co-worker overheard us and said "are you talking about Martin Luther King?" I said no, we meant the "original Martin Luther." He said in amazement, "there were two Martin Luthers??" I said yes, that the other Martin Luther started the Reformation. He had no idea what the Reformation was. I tried to explain it as the period when Protestants broke away from the Catholic Church. This didn't help much; he seemed to have no understanding of what the terms "Protestant" and "Catholic" meant and the important distinction between them. Just unbelievable....
This fellow was not from a disadvantaged background. His family was well-off and encouraged education (his older sister was a lawyer). He had been in public schools his whole life and was about to be a senior at a public university, with a major in the humanities. Yet in all this time, he had never learned about the Reformation. Now one can certainly debate about whether the Reformation was a good thing, a horrible thing, or just two superstitions squabbling amongst themselves. But one cannot deny that it, along with other events in the history of Christianity, has had an enormous impact on shaping the world we live in today. For better or worse, the modern world would not be the same if not for Martin Luther. So one has to at least know about the Reformation if they want to understand history and today's world. It is just shameful that a lifetime of public education could leave this young man still so ignorant.
For anyone wanting to know what all the hoopla is about, Robert Fagles' translation of the Iliad (and Odyssey) is a truly wonderful read, and for a devastating critique of Greek and Roman polytheism you need look no further than Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, or St. Augustine's City of God (which draws heavily on Cicero, but others as well).
One thing I noticed was that a lot of courthouses have statues of Justice, Justice was a roman diety.
Please! Tell us this is all a joke.
To make such an arguement in court not only fails the Red Faced Test, it requires a mental stretch that even Plastic Man couldn't manage.
Does anyone know if Alabama courts ever order drug tests on lawyers filing such suits?
Take a deep breath, then read the first sentence in the second paragraph.
Ain't no such thang.
Surely this guy knows that objectivity and rationality are sometimes even more hated than monotheism in American universities; many despisers even link the concepts together. He's a "freethinker" right out of the nineteenth century.
Ouch I fell for that, hook, line, and sinker. And me without my trusty disgorger.
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