Posted on 08/05/2007 1:39:05 PM PDT by shrinkermd
New legal mandates and the rise of two national curricula are driving a surge in the number of classes — and the debate over how they're taught.
It looks like a scene out of Sunday school — students in a southern Orange County classroom huddle over Bibles as teacher Ryan Cox guides them in analyzing the relationship between God and Satan.
"If God is supposedly omnipotent, if he exists and is all-powerful, why let the serpent in the Garden" of Eden? Cox asks. "Why let him hurt Job? Why let him tempt Jesus?"
But this lesson, at Aliso Niguel High School in Aliso Viejo, is one of the growing number of Bible classes being taught in public schools across the nation.
There is broad agreement across the social, political and religious spectrum, and most important the Supreme Court, that the Bible can be taught in public schools and that knowledge of the Bible is vital to students' understanding of literature and art, including "Moby-Dick," Michelangelo and "The Matrix."
But battles are raging in statehouses, schools and courtrooms over how to teach but not to preach.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Yes. Californians need to be exposed to the Bible and the Ten Commandments.
I guess if you can have a Koran, you can have a Bible..
Even for the heathens, Bibical knowledge is important to understand Bible references in literature. We also need to include it in our history classes. How can moderns who have no Bible knowlege understand a historical time when the church was the center of learning? By keeping the Bible out of schools, the secularists are trying to rewrite history. It is undeniable that Christianity is a part of who we are today - believers and non-believers. This is why homeschools and private schools do a better job teaching history and literature today.
The Bible can be taught as Western literature - any particular version would do - it has inspired many.
California public school teachers would shrivel up and die if they had to discuss the Bible in some positive light.
How is that "western" literature? Weren't the authors all middle-easterners?
I’m not sure how I feel about this. From what is described in the beginning, it sounds almost like a theology class and I am not sure I want my child thought theology by a public school teacher.
Sometimes teachers use thought questions like the above to shake kids’ faith.
The entire beginning of public education, going back to mid-Sixteenth Century Geneva, was to teach children to read the Scriptures. Four hundred fifty years later, we are asking if the original reason for public education is itself allowed in within the very institution designed to facilitate it.
Sure. We’ve eased out all the hard subjects like higher mathematics and science. Dumbed down biology with squishy Intelligent Design that isn’t “creationism”, but it isn’t science either. Let’s bring on the Bible, that should be an easy subject. Anything to facilitate grade inflation.
If you are really concerned about watering down the curriculum, you should be bitter against liberal indoctrination instead of Christianity. Kids today are showered with propaganda for gay rights, global warming, condoms, tolerance, multiculturalism, ect. Christianity has zero to do with the downfall of public education.
Bump for later reading.
“California public school teachers would shrivel up and die if they had to discuss the Bible in some positive light.”
And this is a negative outcome...how?
Until preaching on those subjects and others is stopped, then the Bible should be given equal time in schools. As it is now, the only preaching forbidden is Christianity.
“Dumbed down biology with squishy Intelligent Design”
Unless you insist that the fossil record proves evolution, and further, that evolution prooves there is no God, then you can have no rational beef with Intelligent Design.
If you agree that the fossil record proves evolution, but hold that evolution is silent as to the existance of God, then opposition to Intelligent Design is irrational.
People are inclined to categorize “religion” differently from other human belief systems. In actual fact a strident atheist world view is psychologically similar to a strident Christian world view. Both require faith in an underlying belief system not provable by scientific reasoning. Both are also fervent proselytizers.
Ditto for strident homosexual activism. This is complicated by the inclination of the strident homosexuals to want affirmation that their sexual activities are “normal.” A common form of denial found in seriously troubled people with a host of conditions.
I’d have preferred Emily Dickinson’s education.
What? Intelligent Design is biblical creationism. Oh, sure, they've changed all the words around making a pretense of removing God from ID. But the facts are that the textbooks for ID in the Kansas school board case used the words "creationism" in earlier manuscripts. "ID" is a fraud perpetrated by creationists that they think will allow them to bypass church-state restrictions, and this fact was clearly demonstrated in court evidence.
If you agree that the fossil record proves evolution, but hold that evolution is silent as to the existance of God, then opposition to Intelligent Design is irrational.
What? So the fact that I accept evolution means I can't oppose those that oppose it?
About my beliefs, I personally think that God is powerful enough to have created evolution. To those that get hung up on the idea that life could not have been created by "chance", doesn't God have control over "chance"? I see no conflict between God and evolution. Genesis is only a few hundred words long, several orders of magnitude too brief to have described "how" God did anything, merely saying "who" did it.
By the way, it's not just the "fossil record" that demonstrates evolution. It's backed up by experimentation, studies of existing species, such as "ring" species, and the best confirmation are the discovery of common retro virus insertions in the DNA of human, ape and monkey species that diverges in a pattern than confirms earlier conclusions about the evolution of man.
The Bible has been a source for inspiration in the West for over 2000 years, regardless of where “the authors” lived.
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