187 Comments

Teaching the bible as historical fact instead of the cultural signigicance is equivalent to teaching Harry Potter as fact instead of its cultural significance.

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Given the fact there is next to no independent corroboration for any of it, I have no idea how anyone could claim it to be historical fact. They can only get there through special pleading and magical thinking.

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The Bible is 100% hearsay. It wouldn't even be admissible in Traffic Court. Christians hate hearing that.

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Yup!

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That is my biggest fear about this. In other words, what happens when the brighter (and those from more secular homes) students realize that they have been taught myths as if they were facts, then does this shake their confidence in everything else they've been taught? Is the Pythagorean theorem just some dude's opinion? Was Isaac Newton even real or just a story? Etc, etc. Very glad to be leaving this awful state next year, but feel terrible for the people - especially kids - left behind.

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I first read the entire bible starting the summer before I turned 9. In part this was because there were few books at home except the big family bible, and in part because of boredom. (I was a kid immobilized by a disability, and I'd read anything, as long as it held still long enough.) That first reading was the late 1940s/early 1950s Douay-Rheims version, the Roman Catholic translation, which I'd bet the farm isn't the preferred one for this Texas curriculum. Here we have the state of Texas (and, what starts in Texas doesn't stay in Texas, as they say) carrying out the "get-em-young", or "4-to-14" religious indoctrination curriculum. On the bright side, to paraphrase Alexander Cockburn, at the end of my mandatory daily religious observances, I was a thoroughgoing atheist, with sufficient knowledge of scripture to combat the faithful. All of the 6 catholic-indoctrinated kids in my family were one flavor or another of nonbeliever by age 11 or 12. One would hope it would work the same for at least some of the kids in Texas.

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Catholicism was my first religion and my first step to nonbelief. The second step was the Protestants.

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Oddly enough, my knowledge of protestantism ("heresy" in the church I attended as a kid) was mostly through reading til I hit college. At 13, I read the King James Version; in college the New Revised Standard--standard text for Religous Studies classes I took. Finally I read a Modern Hebrew translation in a graduate-level seminar at the end of my undergrad years. The Skeptic's Annotated now graces my bookshelf. I've read the Quran both in English and modern Arabic translations, as well as a bunch of other foundational religious texts. So I'm not illiterate in this area. I did the whole thing voluntarily because I want to understand how people think. That doesn't, however, mean I'm tolerant of idiocy pushed as education.

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I tried reading an “easy read” Bible (with pictures!) at that age, too. Minus the disability, but was plenty bored.

Only managed to make it about two-thirds through the book before all the contradictory statements finally broke my brain. I retained exactly none of what I read.

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Agreed. It was boring. (All those begats!) But it was that or the backs of soup cans and cereal boxes. I did read the whole thing. If I'd known what an acid-trip was, that's how I would have described Revelation. I just thought of it as a Big Book of Fantasy Stories. I had discovered "Tales from Shakespeare" and books about the Greek and Roman dieties the year before and much preferred all of those to saint hagiographies. I don't remember easy bibles with pictures in 1961, or at least not in catholic culture. Perhaps they were more common in protestant circles. At the time, catholics were mostly discouraged from reading more of the bible than the carefully curated excerpts we heard in church (repeated on an annual cycle.)

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The idea is get them while they are young. And to the Hell with the constitution.

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Their master plan seems to be backfiring, though. The harder they push their hypocritical christian nonsense, the more they appear to be driving people away, especially among the young.

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IMO it’ll never work. The kids will only be created in MY image 🎤. Kids are always 1 step ahead of parents.

Cheers 🍻

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𝐴 𝑠𝑒𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑑𝑜𝑐𝑢𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑜𝑓𝑓𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑙𝑠 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑙𝑢𝑑𝑒𝑑 𝑎 𝑙𝑒𝑛𝑔𝑡ℎ𝑦 𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐵𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑟 𝑡𝑜 ℎ𝑎𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑟 ℎ𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑛𝑠 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑘𝑖𝑑𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑎𝑤𝑎𝑦 𝑓𝑟𝑜𝑚 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑡: “𝑇𝑜 𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐾𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑚𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑜 𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑠.”

Really? And I thought that to understand King one must understand the history of slavery. And the history of the civil war. And reconstruction. And Jim Crow. And the fact that King was an educated and articulate black man in the South where an illiterate white man was allowed to vote but he had to pass an insane literacy test that was deliberately rigged against him to even register.

Sure, understanding the religious references in King's writing is helpful inf fully grasping his message, but the biblical passages hw referenced weren't typically from the "slave bible". I doubt Texas would even acknowledge the existence of that piece of propaganda, let alone teach the kids about it.

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I have said many times that knowing the bible as a literary source is a good thing. OBSESSING about it, which is what I see with the Texas curriculum, is quite another matter. Obviously, those promoting this travesty don't consider Sunday School to be sufficient to their indoctrination needs, nor have they any respect for those students whose beliefs or lack thereof don't align with theirs.

And sadly, as Trump returns to the presidency, we can expect a lot more of this same crap in our schools.

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💯

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It's too bad there aren't any churches in Texas where Christians could send their kids to learn about the Bible.

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Trump ought to start a federal program to build churches in Texas!

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Know what would amuse tf out of me? If parents took the reins and explained to their kids the inconsistencies, inaccuracies and fables of the bible, so that the kids could challenge this nonsense in school. Imagine a little Hindu kid telling the teacher that this shit is all gibble written by ignorant men 2000 years ago who didn't even know where the sun went at night.

That would seriously crack me up.

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It's a real pain for the teacher. My kid's Muslim teacher had to mediate between my kid's science-based answer and another kid's "Jesus did it" answer. Which led to a whole philosophy of science type discussion in mini, which is not really where most teachers want to spend their class time and not most teacher's area of expertise or responsibility. Based on my kid's description and the post mortem parent-teacher discussions, I can say I am very happy with how he handled it. But I'm sure he didn't want to spend class time doing that.

So that's another hidden cost here. Even if many of the kids are smart enough to figure out the textbook's Christian slant, bringing it up in class probably derails the lesson and gives good teachers one more potential intra-student conflict they have to spend time preventing or mediating. Contentious political and religious examples should not be part of primary and secondary English reading comprehension lessons, unless the contentiousness of them is part of what you're trying to teach.

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To the dunderheads in Texas...

Wanna push the Christian myth on the kids of your state? Then do it in the over 30,000 churches you have. Shit, churches in the Lone Star State are as common BBQ places and high school football fields. They're practically on every street corner like Starbucks.

You also have private schools, Sunday schools and the believers own homes to foist this nonsense on children. Simply put, you don't need public schools. Public schools exist to impart facts on their students. Facts that so many Christian adults seem ill-equipped to handle.

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This story is as old christianity itself: what christians can't accomplish by persuasion [offering an elective course on the bible], they resort to force to accomplish [using any excuse to push their religion on public school kids].

There's a reason religions target children. What you drill into kids while they're young is infinitely harder to overcome as they get older. Most of us were likely raised in one faith tradition or another, and it took many of us YEARS to overcome the deep indoctrination we were force fed as kids. Some still struggle with it even after fully deconverting.

In truth, you don't need to understand anything about the bible stories to get the point of Dr. King's Letter From a Brimmingham Jail. His letter stands on its own merits. He was a good enough writer to make his message plain even if you didn't get all of his examples. How many christians, for example, have ever bothered to look into his references to Socretes?

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If you aren’t familiar with “the 4 - 14 window”, google it up. What passes for data analytics amongst Christians for targeting kids.

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Well, well, well. The Dominionists are at it again. Nice of you to bring out that the story of Esther was ahistorical. Daniel was too. It is loaded with anachronisms which date its writing to between 164 and 167 BCE - not the 600s BCE when Nebuchadnezzar 2 ruled.. David Fitzgerald points out it was likely cobbled together to inspire the Maccabees in their rebellion against the Seleucids. I'll bet that any teacher who brought this point out would be summarily fired.

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Hey, but they put some guys in a furnace and they didn't burn!

Must be true, it's in the bible...

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That is something that has intrigued me for a long time. Nebuchadnezzar had a furnace so big that four people could walk about therein. For what did he use it? Is there any archaeological evidence for similar contemporaneous structures in the Middle East? Is there an HVAC engineer or archaeologist out there who can enlighten me on either point?

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The HVAC engineer is busy getting a blow-job from Satan for installing air-conditioning in Hell.

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Our heater needs fixing. Do you think Satan is available?

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Yeah, but just the “knock on the door” is $666.

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You don't think I can get a discount for being part of the fall of Western civilization?

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I had wondered that too.

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That was a cool 😎 slice of HOT HISTORY 🔥 … I didn’t know any of that … and I can preach Fire 🔥 & Brimstone to make the Rapture disappear these raggedy 4SS holyrollers.

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“ 164 and 167 BCE”

That is a remarkably narrow window of time. What allows such precision?

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Gosh, if only there were places where people could go, and bring their children, to learn about all these stories and characters as though they are true. You know someplace nearby, has convenient hours that don’t interfere in the average workday, has folks who are well versed in the stories, and focuses on that alone. If only there were more of those places than schools and libraries combined.

It sounds like Christianity is failing in the marketplace of ideas without some sort of force. No loss really, it’s a stupid, unbelievable, vapid worldview.

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"has folks who are well versed in the stories"

That might be harder to find.

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Well….they know which verses have the stories.

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I mentioned it elsewhere on the thread, but Texas has over 30,000 churches statewide. Compare and contrast this with hospitals in that state. There are just over 900 of those.

Somebody's priorities are skewed.

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Churches or hospitals for sinners, don't you know? So that's 39,000 hospitals.

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This is pretty terrifying...it's offensive to Hindus, Unitarians, Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews, as well as atheists.

Which, of course, is the intent.

As far as Texas is concerned, there is only one religion, a deformed version of Christianity -- which probably doesn't allow many other editions of it -- and the state will FORCE every Texan to worship this type of Jesus, along with the Republican Party, the Bloated Yam, the National Rifle Association, and the Confederate States of America.

Yee-haw!

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In all seriousness, where is the organization of people to oppose this in a real way?

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Several places. The Freedom From Religion Foundation, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, and the ACLU are in the forefront of the fight against this brand of religious incursion into the secular state.

Trust me when I say, they are aware of this business, and are likely already taking action.

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It seems to me that there should also be a more localized vocal opposition. I know it can’t be just a few of us in Texas who would be disturbed by this.

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There almost certainly is. If Hemant didn't report on it, that doesn't necessarily mean there was none. It may not have been reported locally, or the parties protesting may have chosen to be anonymous. In any case, they supply the basis for standing the organizations I mentioned will need to take action against that curriculum.

Because without local protest, the fight becomes a LOT harder.

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That’s exactly right. I’m fairly new to Texas, but I will seek out local protest work being done.

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He did mention several speakers protesting at the last public meeting. The board votes Friday and there's no expectation any of the 8 in favor have changed their minds.

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Somehow, this just doesn't come as a surprise anymore. The Christian right has been pushing for more indoctrination for years now, and it's clear they aren't going to stop until they get their way.

From everything I have ever seen out of Christianity, the average Christian has a dubious relationship with the actual truth. They believe they have the corner on it, but they ignore, deny, or cover up anything that doesn't fit their narrative the way they think it should. Nowhere is that more painfully clear than their holy book; the reason they keep trying to push said book on minors is specifically to force their view of the world on children, apparently to push said children into eventually becoming complacent, gullible, easily-lead adults. Destroying education just makes that easier.

Texas and Oklahoma are where they're starting, but we can expect to see this elsewhere in the near future. Trump in the White House is just a start, expect the Christian right to push for more at every turn; there is no 'enough' with these people.

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Their penchant for writing Truth instead of truth always cracks me up. The uppercase letter doesn’t make it any more persuasive.

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Remember, America is where your crank cults who thought that 17th century England wasn't Christian enough went.

Oops, this is supposed to be a reply to A Belsey.

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Yep, the Puritans were kicked out by the tolerant Dutch for being rabble-rousing hateful idiots.

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Ironic that they use Christians refusing to bow to kings while doing exactly that with Trump.

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They aren’t bowing to Trump as a king.

They are worshipping him as God.

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Not much difference, is there?

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Gods tend to be bad things for humans.

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True.

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One of the problems associated with trying to teach Christianity in the schools, apart form the fact it's unconstitutional, is there is no clear consensus as to what Christianity actually is. Christianity is the most factionalized religion on the planet. Nothing else even comes close. Pushing the Bible in schools will cause far more problems than it solves, but the religious right labors on with the delusion if they can just slap the word Christian on something all will be right with the world. Christians acting in the name of Christianity have spilled enough blood to float the Navy.

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There’s someone on a local discussion board who always writes “the Christian religions” or “one of the Christian religions”. The various godbotherers don’t seem to know how to handle that. Especially when the Catholic-Protestant schism gets referenced.

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It will be of the Baptist strain, of course.

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Noooooooooooooooooooo! Not them! Not the freaking Batshits!

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The nasty pro-slavery, Southern branch of course.

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Well with ding dong don taking over what's to stop Texas? Absolutely nothing and teaching from trump biles ( Bibles) too? Guiness on the house for everybody except for Republicans and Texas. I should always have my Guiness before I read Friendly Atheist. Dealing with this 💩 drunk? Yup only way to do it. 🍺

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I am out of Guinness. I do have some vodka, will that do?

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Yes please. 🍸

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Make that two 🍸 🍸

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I can't imbibe. I have a drinking problem.

imgur.com/gallery/WNNsxeY

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You sip it not use it for eyedrops! But who knows maybe might work as eyedrops-- just don't use the good stuff.

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I don't have a drinking problem.

I drink.

I get drunk.

I fall down.

No problem.

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"You think these are cufflinks? They're curb feelers."

-- Dean Martin, onstage with Frank and Sammy

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I wish that I liked Guinness. I do like beer, and I do like dark beer. But it's too sweet, sort of flat, and rarely cold. Both times I visited Ireland, I avoided Guinness and went for one of its competitors

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Try Guinness Extra Stout, it has the carbonation of regular beer and isn't as sweet as Guinness Draught.

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That's okay!

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Ironically for you, the beer I preferred in Ireland is Murphy's.

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I didn't know they made Murphy beer. It's now just my name. I'm thinking of legally changing it to hmm...maybe Guiness?

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The joke is they pawn it off on the tourists, the locals don't drink it, unless it is free.

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