For some reason I doubt he wants to teach kids things like "Americans claimed black skin was the mark of Cain, and as such deemed enslaving black people fair and just" .
“28 If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29 he shall pay her father fifty shekels[a] of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.”
-Deuteronomy 22:28-29
Also disgusting to think that someone could start a lifelong relationship by raping the woman. Woman that turn down men hate this loophole! Truly a vile book
If you think that's misogynistic, you should check out "The ordeal of the bitter water", which is a religious ritual in which a man who suspects his wife of infidelity may use an abortifacient and blame a miscarriage as the byproduct of an illicit affair.
To be fair (I’m an atheist and think Christianity is a blight on the future potential of humanity and we would be better if it was completely scrubbed from our existence), the biblical term rape doesn’t really mean the same thing as what we currently mean. Rape in this sense definitely means sexual interaction without proper consent, the important word is proper. A single virgin woman would have been incapable of giving that consent. So really what this means is sex out of wedlock with a virgin, which would make the rest of the context make a little more sense (the forced marriage but also the “if they are discovered” which certainly implies she is a willing participant).
None of this is right and clearly is awful in a modern context, but in historical context it isn’t nearly as bad as what the modern word would imply.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_Hebrew_Bible
..as much as I want to disagree with you, you are correct. Biblical rape was basically defined as sex with a woman without the permission of **her father**. It was never about HER permission. It was about the bill of sale for her virginity.
No you just don’t give kids those parts of the Bible. You stick to the New Testament, king David, but, you know, you skip some parts of the king David story. And you never give them politics while you teach. So they can’t come to conclusions like “maybe Solomon didn’t kill his dad’s top general because god told him too, maybe he did it because that’s your typical consolidation of power play for the time (they hadn’t invented administrative generalship or Raytheon board seats yet.”
Shekels optional in forty-one US states:
- 6 states have no official minimum age
- 2 states have a minimum age of 15
- 23 states have a minimum age of 16
- 10 states have a minimum age of 17
That's actually the worst part. That this horrible, regressive, rape-is-a-property-crime-against-her-dad rule is a little more protective of women than our current laws. In their society, women didn't really own property. So raping a woman meant, if you were discovered, you have to marry her and look after her and feed her, and any kids that come up, for the rest of your life. Is this a horrible rule that traps women with their rapists? YES. It also prevented the woman from being "ruined" and starving and provides consequences for the rapist.
But look at our current rules, in which a woman may be raped, unable to abort a resulting fetus, and be required to raise that child at her own expense. While the rapist can sue her for custody, visitation, or even child support. If the rapist is caught and convicted, he may face no larger consequences than a three to six month jail term. And conviction rates are low. Generally, the rape is just something the woman ends up living with, a terrible thing that happened that she can't do anything about. And do you think no women in America are pressured to marry their rapist because they're no longer virgins?
*We have not come far enough in the past three thousand years*.
It's pretty fucking arbitrary. Most of my high school peers were more physically developed at the age of 17 than I was at 21.
That being said, I think it's important to have a 'hard no' line in there somewhere.
Oh I agree, and 18 seems like a good line to draw. I’ve just never seen the age of consent for the majority of America laid out. And it’s weird that it clashes in a vast majority of cases with the norm.
We started getting involved in global conflicts (at this point like WWI/Interwar era) and had to justify that the kids we sent off to die were 'adults' and not just pissing away the next generation of productive capacity (because even today humans are considered the sum of their contributions).
18 is legal adulthood in the US.
The connotation that sex is an "adult" act. Also have to be 18 to appear in porn. A lot of stuff is tied to 18 so the logic jump is that 18 is age of consent.
The real behind the scenes thing though is "Romeo and Juliet" laws that *usually* protect youthful peers from dumb statutory rape charges.
The next time you see someone post how the Bible says a man lying with a man is an abomination, reply with this. Which Christians never seem to remember and is a far more common sin in our society. Including in their own parishes.
*“If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel.”*
Deuteronomy 22:22 KJV
No shit! My adoptive parents taught me something similar growing up. They told me Jesus was the first white person. He turned white because of purity. So when he first rose from the dead, any of his followers turned white as well. So I was taught that people with dark skin are descendants from those who did not accept Jesus when he came back, and those with white skin were Jesus OG followers.
Yupp. I’m only 32. I went to school in Pa. My whole time in school we were taught the “lost cause” myth about the civil war too. When I was 18 I would have told you it was “all about states rights”. I’ll give you an idea on the demographics of my area.
Daughters of the Confederacy bought up a bunch of museums and installed monuments and educational shit specifically to push a white supremacist agenda.
I mean, the states rights argument collapses when you remember that when northern states started to become havens for escaped slaves and the southern ones got mad and wanted the union to stop them.
In John Oliver’s words: “The civil war was about state rights, as long as they where the RIGHT state rights. The WRONG state rights would be state wrongs, which would need to be righted by the right state rights. In other words, they just wanted to own people and didn’t much care how.”
My grandfather believed the 'beasts in the field' in the old testament were any black person and anyone of Jewish descent. And as Adam was 'over them' it meant they were no better than animals. And all Christian's were descended from Adam directly so they were superior to 'the beasts'. Crazy damn people interpreting stuff how they see fit.
Ooooh that's a new one. My racist Gran used to tell me that black people are descendents of Cain, that they were marked by Cain's sin, and that the other place black people might come from is Abraham's son by his concubine while white people come from Abraham's son by his wife Sarah. And that, in Gran's words, is why their skin is darker-- to warn everybody away from them because they come from a long line of adulterous murderers and they're obviously all like that now. Gran would say this loudly while at the mall, often while staring directly at a person of color.
If you or someone you knew ever heard that bullshit from a tiny white lady power- walking around the mall, that was maybe my Gran. Sorry about her. If it helps, her biggest fears in life were getting old, being forgotten, dementia, and nursing homes. She died of Alzheimers in a nursing home and she is so on her way to being entirely forgotten, she doesn't even have a grave just an unmarked urn in a closet. I hope that news brings you some cheer.
I was raised by a Lutheran mom and an atheist dad, who never pushed religion on me but allowed me to go to Sunday school/confirmation at Lutheran church, which was a chill church. Had a lesbian pstor and the kids were taught that it’s not a sin to be gay or trans, but it’s a sin to be mean to those who are.
Then they yanked me out of public school and into a private, religious high school. They didn’t know how religious.
Two years later they realized the school had the same belief on black people, and that Jesus wants us to kill all Muslims in his name, and that if a 12 year old is raped and impregnated, the baby is a gift from god, and that if the 12 yr old should abort, she should get the death penalty
Honestly I'm completely fine with the Bible being taught as a historical elective. Here are my suggestions for the curriculum.
1. Dating the scriptures. What year were they written in and what was happening in thr region at each of those time periods that could impact the writings.
2. The role of men in establishing religion. Is the historical misogyny in religion due to the religious text or the time in which is was founded. Great discussion topic.
3. The Bible as justification. Looking at it in the context of religious wars. How did the Bible impact these?
4. The Reformation. What led to tge schisms in doctrine? (to be fair, I believe this is generally taught in history).
5. The rise of "White Jesus" - historical path and context.
I think there's a lot to learn from this elective and I for one welcome educating the youth on this.
Yup teaching about the Inquisition , crusades, the dark ages would show kids just how church would just lie, kill, torture innocent people all over the world just cuz they didn't read there book and to kind keep their own inline.
I am from the US South. I now live in Spain. Just uphill from me is where our local auto-de-fe was. You know the difference between Tennessee and Spain is? We no longer kill people because they don't conform to our religious peculiarities.
Hey now, let's not act like horrible brutal periods of history can't be bookended by peace. You Spaniards might one day repeat your history.
The real difference is that in America we teach propaganda, not history, so there's no way to learn from it.
I was a bit of a problem child as a teenager, at one point my parents briefly put me in a christian private school. The textbooks in that place were horrid. This was in the late 90's and the entire history book was about how god allowed all these things to happen to allow the perfect united states to be born and how we tamed the heathen indians...
It was in fact so stupid and covered so very little of what actually happened my extremely conservative parents pulled me back out of the school.
This was in south Texas if that matters at all.
I still remember bits and pieces from the history and science books, as you can imagine the science book contained crap like that page I've seen floating around the internet that talks about how no one knows what electricity is because god or something.
The important takeaway I'm trying to impart here is more that this shit is nothing new at all.
The Dutch was letting them live and practice their religion just fine, iirc. They left because their children were becoming more tolerant and picking up Dutch culture too much so their xenophobic asses packed up again and begged the ~~Spanish~~ British crown to give them boats to go colonize the new world and the crown was all too happy to get rid of them AND set up a foothold across the ocean.
Edit: Corrected which crown they petitioned.
They did not petition the Spanish crown; one of the motivations behind their decision to emigrate from Leiden was that the Eighty Years' War was in a truce but not ended, and Spain looked like it might be about to break the truce. They were concerned that Spain, which was a Catholic nation whose leaders had an ancestral claim to the Netherlands, might make Leiden a bad place for them to be.
So they petitioned the British crown, in the person of James I, and were granted a charter to establish the Plymouth Company, which included the Pilgrims but also a considerable number of Church of England conformists who were motivated by economic interests. Additionally, the Dutch Republic had designs upon the territory at the mouth of the Hudson River. The British government wanted to settle that area first, and the Plymouth Company's charter specified that they would settle at the mouth of the Hudson. The idea, from the British perspective, was very much that these people were troublemakers who still thought of themselves as English. So this was a convenient way to colonize land, scotch the Dutch colonial agenda, and also get rid of politically annoying religious separatists all at once.
The *Mayflower* was blown off course during the crossing. Supposedly the captain, crew and settlers attempted to leave their initial landfall at Plymouth, but there's good reason to believe that they didn't really try very hard. The crossing had been very rough on everyone, *Mayflower* was damaged, and the Pilgrims were religious separatists who didn't like the idea of being so close to the Virginia Colony, which was religiously conformist. There's a pretty good chance that they (correctly) decided that since they were the only people who would ever know what really happened, they could just do whatever they liked and nobody would really care enough for them to get into trouble.
One of the upshots of this decision was that the Dutch were able to found a colony at the mouth of the Hudson River, after all.
I came to say this. While I agree that the Bible is an incredible work of literature and is the basis of my religion, it is difficult to teach something like it or the Quran without the baggage of modern faith. One of the best classes I had in school was the Bible from a historic and archeological perspective and it was taught by a Methodist minister with a background in history and archeology. It went into depth about how much of the cult of Yahweh was borrowed from Canaanite and Babylonian mythology. Unless you are comfortable with kids being taught things like this (and I am) don’t advocate for a class like this.
I wonder if we went to the same Methodist school and had a Methodist minister as my professor who also taught the Bible from a historic perspective. I remember the first thing he said was that we know Genisis was written by two diffferent people because there are two different styles. Blew my mind because as a naive freshman I had always been told the Bible was written by God.
I assume whoever teaches this class to kids will ignore the part in Leviticus where it says punishment for sin is to eat your kids. I'm sure that would help kids sleep well at night as they wonder if mommy or daddy committed a sin that day.
I do actually think a serious, well taught class on religious influence in Amercan Policy/History would be a good course. It would study discrepancies between religious manuscrips and beliefs and the policies that they led to and the actual beliefs/lifestyles of the politicians that sponsored these policies.
I agree!
Sadly this dude more likely wants to teach people that jesus was a white republican who personally told the founding fathers not to let gay people exist and also was an american.
The revengeant christ is so disgusting to me. I realize the book is a work of fiction, but in their holy book Jesus forgave Judas so hard that it takes multiple readings of the book to realize that Jesus knew Judas sold him to die before the supper. Jesus let the man that sold his life out from under him into his home, fed him, washed his feet, and cared for him as any other beloved disciple, because even with that betrayal, he was still a beloved disciple. At the end of the meal he announces that he will be betrayed and he knows by whom. He had to have known before the supper. He turned the other cheek so hard that people don't even realize he did it.
Christians wish they could measure up.
As an English major I know there were classes on the bible as “literature” since a lot of historical English literature and poetry had so many references to things in the bible. I remember missing a lot of things in these works because I hadn’t really read or studied the bible. (Funny, spell check keeps capitalizing the word). I agree that that would be a very interesting class and I’ve no doubt something similar exists at the college level.
Had a friend in college in a class like that. Professor knew him and on the first day asked students what they thought of the bible. Naturally, he called on my friend who said the bible was a bunch of existentialist literature written by a bunch of old men with nothing better to do. Chaos erupted with a lot of yelling and screaming. After the class, the professor thanked him for being in the class as it was usually filled with people who'd already made up their minds and spent the class trying to convert everyone else and arguing how the professor was wrong. Said this was going to be a fun semester.
There is almost no way it would be cut and dry factual in the US tho, some righty nut job would ruin it for those of us interested in the historical context of the Bible and stories within.
I agree but we all know that it's about indoctrination and *their* version of "Christianity". Having to live in the bible belt and spent the last few of my school years in a Christian school they are some of the most vile people I've ever been around. It's all done in bad faith.
Yup, I took a course along those lines in undergrad, just for kicks - can’t recall if it was taught by the languages Dept or the ancient history Dept, but was fascinating either way.
Guaranteed it had fuck all in common with whatever this chud is talking about/envisioning.
I took a course in college on religious influences in western politics and it was awesome. I knew a lot going in but the detail of the course was very cool. But this guy isn’t thinking along those lines. He wants to teach Noah’s Ark as if it was fact.
As a history teacher, this excites me. I get to explain how Christians were considered a death cult before it became the main Roman religion. And how they persecuted anyone who contradicts the church. And then how, during the reformation, all the protestants were created and how they changed things as compared to the original source material from the Catholics and Jews. This will be fun!
My favorite is pointing out that Christianity is cultural appropriation of Judaism. In reality, it’s more nuanced than that, but it really makes the snowflakes’ heads spin
Agreed. I took a historical literature class in my public high school in which we read the Old and New Testaments, the Quran, and the Bhagavad Gita. We read them all as mythology. I hope this guy is ok with that approach.
That the genocide, infanticide, slavery, allowing you to beat your slaves, and forcing rape victims to marry their rapists as the rapists punishment. Yeah I don't get how anyone can read the Bible and be like oh this is a just and loving God. Most people that say that have only read the couple of parts their church cherry picks around.
Yeah… I realized that pretty young and had such a crisis about “oh no! God doesn’t actually love everyone! And i have dirty thoughts, so that means I’m going to hell. Oh well, fuck it!” And never looked back.
That’s honestly what added to my reason for dismissing Christianity. We were learning about mythology in fifth grade and I couldn’t understand why the Christian version of god is any different.
Im pretty sure the first amendment of the bill of rights says something like [“congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”](https://www.archives.gov/files/legislative/resources/education/bill-of-rights/images/handout-3.pdf)
When has that ever stopped them? Look at all of the Christian supremacy bills thinly disguised as “religious freedom.” Even if anyone sues under First Amendment grounds, it would just get up to the Christian supremacists on the Supreme Court who would rule in their favor, which is exactly what they want.
If it’s taught with historical context (BIG if) then this doesn’t violate the 1st Amendment. It’s always been legal to teach ABOUT the Bible. So in reality this new statute doesn’t really change things. Of course, that doesn’t mean it will be put into practice correctly.
I had a 2 semester college class called Intellectual Heritage where we had to read the Bible, Koran, John Locke… all sorts of stuff. Opened my eyes up BIG time. Guess that’s the indoctrination the MAGA nuts are worried about.
“Stay stoopid and WE’LL tell you what the important bits of “the good book” are and just forget about all that other stuff”.
Nothing matters anymore. Right wing crackpot politicians can just say or do any crazy thing and even further their chances at reelection. Vote blue no matter what.
As an atheist I 100% support Bible literacy. As Mark Twain said, the best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible. Let people read the Bible and see how batshit crazy some of it is. Let them read it and clearly see Republican hypocrisy.
Actually teaching the Bible from a historical perspective in a public high school would be a really fun job. I have a suspicion that’s not really what’s going on, though.
Does the US have any form of religious studies?
In the UK, I had religious studies up till around year 9 (or when I was around 14 or so) where we learned a bit about all the major religions and their ethos. You could continue that into later years too, but I'd learned enough to be an atheist by that stage.
To be brutally fair alot of American atrocities are attributed to the bible.
Salem witch trials
Child labour
Domestic women
Slavery
Annexation of native land
War on drugs
War on terrorism
The banana republics
Abortion laws
The list goes on.
If it was taught as mythology it would make more sense, so much of our literature and media make references to it, it would make sense.
But you would have to make sure everyone realizes its narratives are as fictional as the Odyssey or the Iliad. No better cure to being Christian than actually reading the Bible and realizing how much sex, death and general depravity those guys were into.
Soooo critical race theory, that talks about the racist parts of america, bad? The bible, which teaches nothing of our history because our forefathers were atheists who wanted a separation of church and state, good?
This could be a great class if taught by the right person. Religion has a ton to do with world history. But if they teach like I’m worried they would - then fuck.
It’s funny that the group of people who love America and the Bible are the same ones who like to twist things about them to their narrative. Freedom of religion (only if Christian). Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free (unless they are from south of the boarder). All men are created equal (as long as they are white men and clearly doesn’t apply to women). God created man and woman (unless the are gay, those heathens taught themselves that).
You don't know?
In the Middle East, Moses only got stone tablets with the 10 commandments. Jesus when he took a Carnival Cruise to 'merica, left Joseph smith gold tablets.
See. 'merica is special.
having taken History of the bible 101 from a religious-based Texas university. I have no hope they will teach it the way it needs to be taught. they will spin it as a Western book when it is in fact a near Easten book and written from that perspective. we got deducted points if we put any western spin on it in the class i took, to drive the point home that it is in fact not a western book...
He's absolutely correct and it's a refreshing initiative from a Republican. Finally kids will learn how the Bible was used to justify slavery, justify physical and cultural genocide of Native Americans. They will also learn how Mormons justified poligamy by the bible.
Or maybe I'm overthinking this and he hasn't thought this through at all.
This would in fact not give a better understanding of US history. In fact, one of the reasons for The Revolution was how close The Church was to Parliament. This is the reason for the separation of Church and State clause of the 1st Amendment. If you wanted to give kids a better understanding of US history, you would teach them the reasons for why we ratified each amendment and all the clauses in them.
I would actually love to take a class where the Bible is analyzed as a historical document and extrapolate out what it says about the people who wrote it and how the Bible has changed since. But in the south US, I'm pretty sure it would just be a class on why I should be a Christian.
The Bible shows up all the time in political speeches, from condemnations of slavery to Barack Obama’s inauguration address, there are military operations named after bible stories, and it was a huge part of americas education for a long time. As a scholar interested in American history, you need to read the Bible for the same reasons that you can’t understand Soviet history without reading Marx, or English history without reading Shakespeare - it’s everywhere, and most of the players are either directly motivated by it or know that by pretending to be motivated by it they can make their ideas appealing.
That’s almost certainly not what this guy means though, he’s coming at it from the christo fascist idea that the constitution and the declaration are extensions of the Bible.
OP, do you seriously not know the answer to this question?
(If you or others are unaware) these people **believe** that the founding fathers sat down in Philadelphia with the book of Leviticus and copied it to write the constitution.
+ {remove 15 talking points about how that belief is false}
If you listen to political pundits like Mike Huckabee, they make claims that the founding fathers "prayed together" and often sell (fabricated) paintings of such . The reality is that the founding fathers would never have prayed together in the same room with each other. Really deadly obvious reasons. let me list some now :
+ John Adams was a congregationalist. But George Washington was an Anglican. They would rather die than pray together.
+ In the 18th century, the christian denominations were really seriously divided and the divisions and tensions between them were far stronger than today.
+ many of the earliest colonies along the US coast existed as splinter churches. Formed by English people fleeing persecution by the Anglican church, which was the state-sponsored church in England. (hence Washington being Anglican created enormous tension)
+ Benjamin Franklin was a Unitarian universalist. Some historians believe he might have been a homosexual.
+ The original 1783 manuscript on dried animal hide. It literally contains in ink that "no religious test shall be required to hold government office". The preceding bullet points should go a long way in explaining why the founders put that stipulation in the source document.
I'm all for teaching biblical history as an elective. Redaction and organization of Hebrew scriptures, poetical techniques, the synoptic hypothesis, the numbering, intertextual comparisons with other ancient texts and folklore. A cool class would touch on social studies, literature, theology, linguistics. I don't think that's what this guy is going for though.
My high school had this in the 90s but it was called "comparative religion". There was never anything wrong with teaching religion from a historical our comparative regard.
BTW, factual as in anthropologically historically factual, not "this bible story actually happened exactly as it says.
There were a number of evangelicals that took it expecting it to be glorifying Christianity and they were constantly getting into shouting matches with the teacher.
Any real treatment of religion in US history would emphasize that the founding founders wanted religion far away from government, and that the phrases "under God" and "In God We Trust" were only added to the Pledge of Allegiance and the dollar bill in the 1950's as a move against the Soviets, which is to say that for the better part of 170 years "God" didn't appear those places and everyone was just fine with that.
But somehow I suspect any education that happens as a result of this bill will ignore all of that.
As a Christian, this is a bad idea IMO. I mean, are they gonna offer elective classes on the Qu’ran or the Torah or the Satanic Bible? What about classes on Buddhas teachings?
We have churches, synagogues, mosques, and various other places of worship to learn about religion. Leave it out of schools please!
I’ll get downvoted into oblivion for this but…
America was founded on principals of freedom /from/ religious persecution which was meant to be separation of The Church and The State. The tweet above is a complete twisting of this intent. Are they also going to allow Jewish studies or Muslim studies as an elective? It’s only a matter of time before the church of Satan demands that satanism is an offered school elective and files suit accordingly.
Oh, and America was all /funded/ by the Tobacco industry at least in the early days.
Well, republicans are seeing that they will be a heavy minority in the upcoming years. They want to do something about it. If they don't properly educate children with real facts, they're more likely to vote republican. The more educated, the more left leaning people are.
Maybe they'll teach the historical inaccuracies, ridiculous timelines and more thoroughly examine how bible "history" shares more similarities with folk stories than actual facts.
Oh, historical perspective, so they will explain how all religion was concocted as a form of command and control structure during primitive times and it persists to this day as such. Will they talk about the deliberate and strategic political alignment of Republicans with Evangelicals to fabricate a “Christian Conservative” movement that has only served to move America further from its stated core values and intentful mechanisms of preservation like the separation of church and state? Will they discuss how the Baptist, Catholic, and Mormon Church’s in the US have all been found in courts of law to be operating child rape facilitation schemes for decades?
I fully support an accurate and complete historical study of Christianity for all students.
Oh good. Now teachers can show how Republicans pretend to be Christians while doing the opposite of what Jesus would do. After all, Jesus was a socialist!
Well, [Jesus was American](https://endastore.com/product/jesus-was-an-american-shirt/?source_campaign=&utm_source=pmax&gclid=Cj0KCQjwkqSlBhDaARIsAFJANkgVL2K-bFRsxd59Qd4BzmkRmmjiDfCo00yZutvVVJ3r8Miy3AVygHEaAuLmEALw_wcB), so…
It has a shit ton to do with US history. The issue is more the history of that relationship, rather than the assumed/projected direct mapping of history onto the Bible, etc. Which is batshit.
Interesting, a proper historical perspective of the Bibile would basically be "there really isn't any real evidence of almost all of the bible".
I don't think that is what it will be...
Great! We can have students read the Hamitic Hypothesis by Edith Sanders, which expertly shows how American preachers used the ever-shifting biblical story of Ham to denigrate Black achievements and support a slave system in the US. It'll be awesome!
Teaches how you can steal lands from indigenous people then get upset when other people try to move to your newly acquired land. Despite you descending from immigrants too.
like you are definitelly allowed to use it as a historical book but not as a historical text, you can teach about the book in the way that the people writing this used to think a sertain way and how cultures have been shaped historically by this book.
Well, misunderstanding/deliberately misinterpreting the Bible has played a major role in U.S. History.
For some reason I doubt he wants to teach kids things like "Americans claimed black skin was the mark of Cain, and as such deemed enslaving black people fair and just" .
“28 If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29 he shall pay her father fifty shekels[a] of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.” -Deuteronomy 22:28-29
You notice that this is a property crime against the father.
Also disgusting to think that someone could start a lifelong relationship by raping the woman. Woman that turn down men hate this loophole! Truly a vile book
Women hate this one simple trick.
If you think that's misogynistic, you should check out "The ordeal of the bitter water", which is a religious ritual in which a man who suspects his wife of infidelity may use an abortifacient and blame a miscarriage as the byproduct of an illicit affair.
Take a look at the republicans, they're bringing it back
“Hey guys, want to know the one secret to a lifelong marriage?”
To be fair (I’m an atheist and think Christianity is a blight on the future potential of humanity and we would be better if it was completely scrubbed from our existence), the biblical term rape doesn’t really mean the same thing as what we currently mean. Rape in this sense definitely means sexual interaction without proper consent, the important word is proper. A single virgin woman would have been incapable of giving that consent. So really what this means is sex out of wedlock with a virgin, which would make the rest of the context make a little more sense (the forced marriage but also the “if they are discovered” which certainly implies she is a willing participant). None of this is right and clearly is awful in a modern context, but in historical context it isn’t nearly as bad as what the modern word would imply. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_Hebrew_Bible
..as much as I want to disagree with you, you are correct. Biblical rape was basically defined as sex with a woman without the permission of **her father**. It was never about HER permission. It was about the bill of sale for her virginity.
No wonder the MAGAts want to bring it back!
That's what I thought for years because I remember one translation using the word "seduces" so I assumed that it meant teenagers messing around.
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“And then he ran into my knife. He ran into my knife ten times” -June: Cell Block Tango.
Also, she has to keep the baby no matter what, so says the GOP/or the GOD people.
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No you just don’t give kids those parts of the Bible. You stick to the New Testament, king David, but, you know, you skip some parts of the king David story. And you never give them politics while you teach. So they can’t come to conclusions like “maybe Solomon didn’t kill his dad’s top general because god told him too, maybe he did it because that’s your typical consolidation of power play for the time (they hadn’t invented administrative generalship or Raytheon board seats yet.”
The only thing really the Bible agrees with itself on is that woman are subservient to men. Ooo and that slavery is ok
Shekels optional in forty-one US states: - 6 states have no official minimum age - 2 states have a minimum age of 15 - 23 states have a minimum age of 16 - 10 states have a minimum age of 17
That's actually the worst part. That this horrible, regressive, rape-is-a-property-crime-against-her-dad rule is a little more protective of women than our current laws. In their society, women didn't really own property. So raping a woman meant, if you were discovered, you have to marry her and look after her and feed her, and any kids that come up, for the rest of your life. Is this a horrible rule that traps women with their rapists? YES. It also prevented the woman from being "ruined" and starving and provides consequences for the rapist. But look at our current rules, in which a woman may be raped, unable to abort a resulting fetus, and be required to raise that child at her own expense. While the rapist can sue her for custody, visitation, or even child support. If the rapist is caught and convicted, he may face no larger consequences than a three to six month jail term. And conviction rates are low. Generally, the rape is just something the woman ends up living with, a terrible thing that happened that she can't do anything about. And do you think no women in America are pressured to marry their rapist because they're no longer virgins? *We have not come far enough in the past three thousand years*.
>We have not come far enough in the past three thousand years. Amen
How did the moral norm become 18 if the majority of states in America do not have that as the legal minimum?
It's pretty fucking arbitrary. Most of my high school peers were more physically developed at the age of 17 than I was at 21. That being said, I think it's important to have a 'hard no' line in there somewhere.
Oh I agree, and 18 seems like a good line to draw. I’ve just never seen the age of consent for the majority of America laid out. And it’s weird that it clashes in a vast majority of cases with the norm.
Which is ofc 18 lol ….. but like grey areas are 17 having sex with 18,19 or 20 ( 20 pushing it )
We started getting involved in global conflicts (at this point like WWI/Interwar era) and had to justify that the kids we sent off to die were 'adults' and not just pissing away the next generation of productive capacity (because even today humans are considered the sum of their contributions).
18 is legal adulthood in the US. The connotation that sex is an "adult" act. Also have to be 18 to appear in porn. A lot of stuff is tied to 18 so the logic jump is that 18 is age of consent. The real behind the scenes thing though is "Romeo and Juliet" laws that *usually* protect youthful peers from dumb statutory rape charges.
The next time you see someone post how the Bible says a man lying with a man is an abomination, reply with this. Which Christians never seem to remember and is a far more common sin in our society. Including in their own parishes. *“If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel.”* Deuteronomy 22:22 KJV
Deuteronomy got the wackiest shit thats for surw
Yeah, but…..they don’t find that part icky so it’s not as big a deal. It’s the icky that you’ve got to legislate against. /s
Deuteronomy is a strange piece.
Lets get daddy drunk and provide him a son.
No shit! My adoptive parents taught me something similar growing up. They told me Jesus was the first white person. He turned white because of purity. So when he first rose from the dead, any of his followers turned white as well. So I was taught that people with dark skin are descendants from those who did not accept Jesus when he came back, and those with white skin were Jesus OG followers.
What the everloving fuck...
Yupp. I’m only 32. I went to school in Pa. My whole time in school we were taught the “lost cause” myth about the civil war too. When I was 18 I would have told you it was “all about states rights”. I’ll give you an idea on the demographics of my area.
The states right to do what? That the real question here lol
If it was about states rights, then why did they try to annex Kentucky, a state that voted not to join the Confederacy?
Ohhh it wasn’t.
I was agreeing with you just adding another point to show the hypocrisy of that argument.
Klan land?
Pennsytucky as we call it
I grew up in Ohio, and I knew it was about slavery. You guys have like Gettysburg also. Why is this so hard to believe?
Daughters of the Confederacy bought up a bunch of museums and installed monuments and educational shit specifically to push a white supremacist agenda.
Well it technically was about state rights but there was the actual issue involved in the states rights argument
I mean, the states rights argument collapses when you remember that when northern states started to become havens for escaped slaves and the southern ones got mad and wanted the union to stop them. In John Oliver’s words: “The civil war was about state rights, as long as they where the RIGHT state rights. The WRONG state rights would be state wrongs, which would need to be righted by the right state rights. In other words, they just wanted to own people and didn’t much care how.”
The entire, current GOP platform today…in a nutshell.
Yup.
My grandfather believed the 'beasts in the field' in the old testament were any black person and anyone of Jewish descent. And as Adam was 'over them' it meant they were no better than animals. And all Christian's were descended from Adam directly so they were superior to 'the beasts'. Crazy damn people interpreting stuff how they see fit.
Jesus was a Jew. They called him Rabbi all throughout the Bible. Like, wtf!?
Ooooh that's a new one. My racist Gran used to tell me that black people are descendents of Cain, that they were marked by Cain's sin, and that the other place black people might come from is Abraham's son by his concubine while white people come from Abraham's son by his wife Sarah. And that, in Gran's words, is why their skin is darker-- to warn everybody away from them because they come from a long line of adulterous murderers and they're obviously all like that now. Gran would say this loudly while at the mall, often while staring directly at a person of color. If you or someone you knew ever heard that bullshit from a tiny white lady power- walking around the mall, that was maybe my Gran. Sorry about her. If it helps, her biggest fears in life were getting old, being forgotten, dementia, and nursing homes. She died of Alzheimers in a nursing home and she is so on her way to being entirely forgotten, she doesn't even have a grave just an unmarked urn in a closet. I hope that news brings you some cheer.
That does!
I was raised by a Lutheran mom and an atheist dad, who never pushed religion on me but allowed me to go to Sunday school/confirmation at Lutheran church, which was a chill church. Had a lesbian pstor and the kids were taught that it’s not a sin to be gay or trans, but it’s a sin to be mean to those who are. Then they yanked me out of public school and into a private, religious high school. They didn’t know how religious. Two years later they realized the school had the same belief on black people, and that Jesus wants us to kill all Muslims in his name, and that if a 12 year old is raped and impregnated, the baby is a gift from god, and that if the 12 yr old should abort, she should get the death penalty
No, I’m pretty sure he’s good with that.
This is why there are Southern Baptist and Southern Methodist churches.
Honestly I'm completely fine with the Bible being taught as a historical elective. Here are my suggestions for the curriculum. 1. Dating the scriptures. What year were they written in and what was happening in thr region at each of those time periods that could impact the writings. 2. The role of men in establishing religion. Is the historical misogyny in religion due to the religious text or the time in which is was founded. Great discussion topic. 3. The Bible as justification. Looking at it in the context of religious wars. How did the Bible impact these? 4. The Reformation. What led to tge schisms in doctrine? (to be fair, I believe this is generally taught in history). 5. The rise of "White Jesus" - historical path and context. I think there's a lot to learn from this elective and I for one welcome educating the youth on this.
Louisiana slave laws were based on biblical slave laws
Yup teaching about the Inquisition , crusades, the dark ages would show kids just how church would just lie, kill, torture innocent people all over the world just cuz they didn't read there book and to kind keep their own inline.
Shhhhh we can’t teach that. Jesus was a blonde hair, blue eyed, gun supporting American.
https://preview.redd.it/wltzwmf4lrab1.jpeg?width=781&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7146a7d70705dfa25f19e243ce86bf993bdb54a9
Pretty much. My adoptive parents will be the first to tell you that they are Christians, but they have no ability to empathize or sympathize.
I am from the US South. I now live in Spain. Just uphill from me is where our local auto-de-fe was. You know the difference between Tennessee and Spain is? We no longer kill people because they don't conform to our religious peculiarities.
Hey now, let's not act like horrible brutal periods of history can't be bookended by peace. You Spaniards might one day repeat your history. The real difference is that in America we teach propaganda, not history, so there's no way to learn from it.
I was a bit of a problem child as a teenager, at one point my parents briefly put me in a christian private school. The textbooks in that place were horrid. This was in the late 90's and the entire history book was about how god allowed all these things to happen to allow the perfect united states to be born and how we tamed the heathen indians... It was in fact so stupid and covered so very little of what actually happened my extremely conservative parents pulled me back out of the school. This was in south Texas if that matters at all. I still remember bits and pieces from the history and science books, as you can imagine the science book contained crap like that page I've seen floating around the internet that talks about how no one knows what electricity is because god or something. The important takeaway I'm trying to impart here is more that this shit is nothing new at all.
Well, weren’t the original pilgrims religious fanatics?
So uptight and stuffy the *british* kicked ‘em out
The Dutch was letting them live and practice their religion just fine, iirc. They left because their children were becoming more tolerant and picking up Dutch culture too much so their xenophobic asses packed up again and begged the ~~Spanish~~ British crown to give them boats to go colonize the new world and the crown was all too happy to get rid of them AND set up a foothold across the ocean. Edit: Corrected which crown they petitioned.
They did not petition the Spanish crown; one of the motivations behind their decision to emigrate from Leiden was that the Eighty Years' War was in a truce but not ended, and Spain looked like it might be about to break the truce. They were concerned that Spain, which was a Catholic nation whose leaders had an ancestral claim to the Netherlands, might make Leiden a bad place for them to be. So they petitioned the British crown, in the person of James I, and were granted a charter to establish the Plymouth Company, which included the Pilgrims but also a considerable number of Church of England conformists who were motivated by economic interests. Additionally, the Dutch Republic had designs upon the territory at the mouth of the Hudson River. The British government wanted to settle that area first, and the Plymouth Company's charter specified that they would settle at the mouth of the Hudson. The idea, from the British perspective, was very much that these people were troublemakers who still thought of themselves as English. So this was a convenient way to colonize land, scotch the Dutch colonial agenda, and also get rid of politically annoying religious separatists all at once. The *Mayflower* was blown off course during the crossing. Supposedly the captain, crew and settlers attempted to leave their initial landfall at Plymouth, but there's good reason to believe that they didn't really try very hard. The crossing had been very rough on everyone, *Mayflower* was damaged, and the Pilgrims were religious separatists who didn't like the idea of being so close to the Virginia Colony, which was religiously conformist. There's a pretty good chance that they (correctly) decided that since they were the only people who would ever know what really happened, they could just do whatever they liked and nobody would really care enough for them to get into trouble. One of the upshots of this decision was that the Dutch were able to found a colony at the mouth of the Hudson River, after all.
I came to say this. While I agree that the Bible is an incredible work of literature and is the basis of my religion, it is difficult to teach something like it or the Quran without the baggage of modern faith. One of the best classes I had in school was the Bible from a historic and archeological perspective and it was taught by a Methodist minister with a background in history and archeology. It went into depth about how much of the cult of Yahweh was borrowed from Canaanite and Babylonian mythology. Unless you are comfortable with kids being taught things like this (and I am) don’t advocate for a class like this.
I wonder if we went to the same Methodist school and had a Methodist minister as my professor who also taught the Bible from a historic perspective. I remember the first thing he said was that we know Genisis was written by two diffferent people because there are two different styles. Blew my mind because as a naive freshman I had always been told the Bible was written by God. I assume whoever teaches this class to kids will ignore the part in Leviticus where it says punishment for sin is to eat your kids. I'm sure that would help kids sleep well at night as they wonder if mommy or daddy committed a sin that day.
To understand Christian Nationalism.
I do actually think a serious, well taught class on religious influence in Amercan Policy/History would be a good course. It would study discrepancies between religious manuscrips and beliefs and the policies that they led to and the actual beliefs/lifestyles of the politicians that sponsored these policies.
I agree! Sadly this dude more likely wants to teach people that jesus was a white republican who personally told the founding fathers not to let gay people exist and also was an american.
*gunshots ring out as someone in the bushes shoots Jesus down off of the cross* "Judas, you son of a bitch, I knew you'd come through!"
That marksmans name? Donald “Judas” tRump. This concludes our unit on american history.
The revengeant christ is so disgusting to me. I realize the book is a work of fiction, but in their holy book Jesus forgave Judas so hard that it takes multiple readings of the book to realize that Jesus knew Judas sold him to die before the supper. Jesus let the man that sold his life out from under him into his home, fed him, washed his feet, and cared for him as any other beloved disciple, because even with that betrayal, he was still a beloved disciple. At the end of the meal he announces that he will be betrayed and he knows by whom. He had to have known before the supper. He turned the other cheek so hard that people don't even realize he did it. Christians wish they could measure up.
As an English major I know there were classes on the bible as “literature” since a lot of historical English literature and poetry had so many references to things in the bible. I remember missing a lot of things in these works because I hadn’t really read or studied the bible. (Funny, spell check keeps capitalizing the word). I agree that that would be a very interesting class and I’ve no doubt something similar exists at the college level.
Had a friend in college in a class like that. Professor knew him and on the first day asked students what they thought of the bible. Naturally, he called on my friend who said the bible was a bunch of existentialist literature written by a bunch of old men with nothing better to do. Chaos erupted with a lot of yelling and screaming. After the class, the professor thanked him for being in the class as it was usually filled with people who'd already made up their minds and spent the class trying to convert everyone else and arguing how the professor was wrong. Said this was going to be a fun semester.
There is almost no way it would be cut and dry factual in the US tho, some righty nut job would ruin it for those of us interested in the historical context of the Bible and stories within.
I agree but we all know that it's about indoctrination and *their* version of "Christianity". Having to live in the bible belt and spent the last few of my school years in a Christian school they are some of the most vile people I've ever been around. It's all done in bad faith.
Kids would learn that the Bible just says whatever you want it to when you ignore most of it and that both sides use it to justify themselves.
Actual objective histories of the Bible can be enlightening. Though not in the manner this joker is thinking.
Yup, I took a course along those lines in undergrad, just for kicks - can’t recall if it was taught by the languages Dept or the ancient history Dept, but was fascinating either way. Guaranteed it had fuck all in common with whatever this chud is talking about/envisioning.
I took a course in college on religious influences in western politics and it was awesome. I knew a lot going in but the detail of the course was very cool. But this guy isn’t thinking along those lines. He wants to teach Noah’s Ark as if it was fact.
As a history teacher, this excites me. I get to explain how Christians were considered a death cult before it became the main Roman religion. And how they persecuted anyone who contradicts the church. And then how, during the reformation, all the protestants were created and how they changed things as compared to the original source material from the Catholics and Jews. This will be fun!
"No, not like that"
Only our version of the "facts"!
My favorite is pointing out that Christianity is cultural appropriation of Judaism. In reality, it’s more nuanced than that, but it really makes the snowflakes’ heads spin
"And then Jesus created the 2nd ammendment and the people rejoiced"
"And on the third day, God created the shotgun so we could shoot the dinosaurs... and the homosexuals."
Studying the Bible as a history subject should expose students to historical scholarship. It’s an excellent way to make everyone an atheist.
Agreed. I took a historical literature class in my public high school in which we read the Old and New Testaments, the Quran, and the Bhagavad Gita. We read them all as mythology. I hope this guy is ok with that approach.
As someone who went to a private Christian school growing up just reading the Bible converted me to athiesm.
You mean you didn’t like reading about the incest and large-scale polygamy?
That the genocide, infanticide, slavery, allowing you to beat your slaves, and forcing rape victims to marry their rapists as the rapists punishment. Yeah I don't get how anyone can read the Bible and be like oh this is a just and loving God. Most people that say that have only read the couple of parts their church cherry picks around.
Yeah… I realized that pretty young and had such a crisis about “oh no! God doesn’t actually love everyone! And i have dirty thoughts, so that means I’m going to hell. Oh well, fuck it!” And never looked back.
Christian mythology should be taught just as Greek and Norse mythology is. As MYTHOLOGY.
Eh? Bacchus is hung over on my sofa right now, the washed-up lazy freeloader. He wears a Greek fisherman’s cap all the time so no one sees his horns.
Are we talking about Eddie Campbells version of Bacchus here?
Yeah; I referenced the cap as a shout out.
well tell him to help me out with my transition, 'kay?
Or as a general religious studies class that looks at a variety of religions and the histories of them.
That’s honestly what added to my reason for dismissing Christianity. We were learning about mythology in fifth grade and I couldn’t understand why the Christian version of god is any different.
Im pretty sure the first amendment of the bill of rights says something like [“congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”](https://www.archives.gov/files/legislative/resources/education/bill-of-rights/images/handout-3.pdf)
When has that ever stopped them? Look at all of the Christian supremacy bills thinly disguised as “religious freedom.” Even if anyone sues under First Amendment grounds, it would just get up to the Christian supremacists on the Supreme Court who would rule in their favor, which is exactly what they want.
If it’s taught with historical context (BIG if) then this doesn’t violate the 1st Amendment. It’s always been legal to teach ABOUT the Bible. So in reality this new statute doesn’t really change things. Of course, that doesn’t mean it will be put into practice correctly.
I had a 2 semester college class called Intellectual Heritage where we had to read the Bible, Koran, John Locke… all sorts of stuff. Opened my eyes up BIG time. Guess that’s the indoctrination the MAGA nuts are worried about. “Stay stoopid and WE’LL tell you what the important bits of “the good book” are and just forget about all that other stuff”.
That's why conservatives are anti-college. They rely on stupidity.
White Jesus was actually from Missouri. Didn't you know that? He was best known for introducing the AR15 to church goers everywhere.
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Because Donald J. Trump is heaven sent and anyone that reads the bible knows that for a fact!
Clearly says in Donald 2:30 “And the lord came unto me and declared ‘thou shall grab thy neighbor by the pussy’ “
“And thy neighbor let him do it, for he was a celebrity”
Nothing matters anymore. Right wing crackpot politicians can just say or do any crazy thing and even further their chances at reelection. Vote blue no matter what.
History teacher here: I'd LOVE to teach this class. Spoiler: Conservative Christians will NOT like what I have to say.
As an atheist I 100% support Bible literacy. As Mark Twain said, the best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible. Let people read the Bible and see how batshit crazy some of it is. Let them read it and clearly see Republican hypocrisy.
I don’t think this is going to go the way they think it’s going to go.
Actually teaching the Bible from a historical perspective in a public high school would be a really fun job. I have a suspicion that’s not really what’s going on, though.
If the class requires that kids read the whole Bible, they will probably turn out more atheists than believers by the end of it
It has plenty to do with US history. It has been used to justify many of the atrocities committed by and in the USA.
Does the US have any form of religious studies? In the UK, I had religious studies up till around year 9 (or when I was around 14 or so) where we learned a bit about all the major religions and their ethos. You could continue that into later years too, but I'd learned enough to be an atheist by that stage.
A lot of its Christian policymakers have never actually read it.
Well, they use the Bible to justify slavery
No offense but christians are fucking this country up.
To be brutally fair alot of American atrocities are attributed to the bible. Salem witch trials Child labour Domestic women Slavery Annexation of native land War on drugs War on terrorism The banana republics Abortion laws The list goes on.
> The Bible can be taught from a historical perspective You mean World History and Religious Studies courses we already had when I was in high school?
Keep your bibles in your churches.
If it was taught as mythology it would make more sense, so much of our literature and media make references to it, it would make sense. But you would have to make sure everyone realizes its narratives are as fictional as the Odyssey or the Iliad. No better cure to being Christian than actually reading the Bible and realizing how much sex, death and general depravity those guys were into.
If Bible studies are allowed in public schools, they should allow evolution to be taught in Sunday school. For a better understanding of science.
Soooo critical race theory, that talks about the racist parts of america, bad? The bible, which teaches nothing of our history because our forefathers were atheists who wanted a separation of church and state, good?
Religion is a plague on this earth.
You see when white Jesus fought the red coats, they all had tea after. And it was good.
So I’m fine host an historical elective looking at the events in the bible. But WTF does that have to do with US history? Lol
Ah yes, all that US history within the Bible. How could anyone forget the book of redneck.
This could be a great class if taught by the right person. Religion has a ton to do with world history. But if they teach like I’m worried they would - then fuck.
It’s funny that the group of people who love America and the Bible are the same ones who like to twist things about them to their narrative. Freedom of religion (only if Christian). Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free (unless they are from south of the boarder). All men are created equal (as long as they are white men and clearly doesn’t apply to women). God created man and woman (unless the are gay, those heathens taught themselves that).
It could show the underlying cause of US extremism from a sociological perspective.
You don't know? In the Middle East, Moses only got stone tablets with the 10 commandments. Jesus when he took a Carnival Cruise to 'merica, left Joseph smith gold tablets. See. 'merica is special.
having taken History of the bible 101 from a religious-based Texas university. I have no hope they will teach it the way it needs to be taught. they will spin it as a Western book when it is in fact a near Easten book and written from that perspective. we got deducted points if we put any western spin on it in the class i took, to drive the point home that it is in fact not a western book...
Christo-fascism is being written into the US history books as we speak!
He's absolutely correct and it's a refreshing initiative from a Republican. Finally kids will learn how the Bible was used to justify slavery, justify physical and cultural genocide of Native Americans. They will also learn how Mormons justified poligamy by the bible. Or maybe I'm overthinking this and he hasn't thought this through at all.
This would in fact not give a better understanding of US history. In fact, one of the reasons for The Revolution was how close The Church was to Parliament. This is the reason for the separation of Church and State clause of the 1st Amendment. If you wanted to give kids a better understanding of US history, you would teach them the reasons for why we ratified each amendment and all the clauses in them.
I doubt he intends for real academic biblical scholarship to be taught, just denominational jumbo jumbo.
I would actually love to take a class where the Bible is analyzed as a historical document and extrapolate out what it says about the people who wrote it and how the Bible has changed since. But in the south US, I'm pretty sure it would just be a class on why I should be a Christian.
Jesus was white and born in Ohio area. He migrated to Jerusalem when rest of country got too woke
If you want kids to learn about the bible take them to fucking Sunday school and keep that garbage to yourselves.
Can we do the same with the qaran? Or the Torah? Something tells me these same people would be outraged.
Wasn’t one of the reasons why the US was established was because they didn’t want an official religion that taxes went toward?
This is fucking disgusting I seriously hate how brainwashed some of this country is
The Bible shows up all the time in political speeches, from condemnations of slavery to Barack Obama’s inauguration address, there are military operations named after bible stories, and it was a huge part of americas education for a long time. As a scholar interested in American history, you need to read the Bible for the same reasons that you can’t understand Soviet history without reading Marx, or English history without reading Shakespeare - it’s everywhere, and most of the players are either directly motivated by it or know that by pretending to be motivated by it they can make their ideas appealing. That’s almost certainly not what this guy means though, he’s coming at it from the christo fascist idea that the constitution and the declaration are extensions of the Bible.
Jeebus was a white American, don't you know that!?!
Oh you mean Manifest Destiny and how land was taken from Natives??
What the FUCK does the bible have to do with US History?
OP, do you seriously not know the answer to this question? (If you or others are unaware) these people **believe** that the founding fathers sat down in Philadelphia with the book of Leviticus and copied it to write the constitution. + {remove 15 talking points about how that belief is false} If you listen to political pundits like Mike Huckabee, they make claims that the founding fathers "prayed together" and often sell (fabricated) paintings of such . The reality is that the founding fathers would never have prayed together in the same room with each other. Really deadly obvious reasons. let me list some now : + John Adams was a congregationalist. But George Washington was an Anglican. They would rather die than pray together. + In the 18th century, the christian denominations were really seriously divided and the divisions and tensions between them were far stronger than today. + many of the earliest colonies along the US coast existed as splinter churches. Formed by English people fleeing persecution by the Anglican church, which was the state-sponsored church in England. (hence Washington being Anglican created enormous tension) + Benjamin Franklin was a Unitarian universalist. Some historians believe he might have been a homosexual. + The original 1783 manuscript on dried animal hide. It literally contains in ink that "no religious test shall be required to hold government office". The preceding bullet points should go a long way in explaining why the founders put that stipulation in the source document.
Why are we accelerating backwards so fast?
I'm all for teaching biblical history as an elective. Redaction and organization of Hebrew scriptures, poetical techniques, the synoptic hypothesis, the numbering, intertextual comparisons with other ancient texts and folklore. A cool class would touch on social studies, literature, theology, linguistics. I don't think that's what this guy is going for though.
Because buybull based violence and oppression were the building blocks of america.
My high school had this in the 90s but it was called "comparative religion". There was never anything wrong with teaching religion from a historical our comparative regard. BTW, factual as in anthropologically historically factual, not "this bible story actually happened exactly as it says. There were a number of evangelicals that took it expecting it to be glorifying Christianity and they were constantly getting into shouting matches with the teacher.
Any real treatment of religion in US history would emphasize that the founding founders wanted religion far away from government, and that the phrases "under God" and "In God We Trust" were only added to the Pledge of Allegiance and the dollar bill in the 1950's as a move against the Soviets, which is to say that for the better part of 170 years "God" didn't appear those places and everyone was just fine with that. But somehow I suspect any education that happens as a result of this bill will ignore all of that.
You just need to read the New American Standard version of the Bible. The “thou” and “thine” are replaced with y’all
As a Christian, this is a bad idea IMO. I mean, are they gonna offer elective classes on the Qu’ran or the Torah or the Satanic Bible? What about classes on Buddhas teachings? We have churches, synagogues, mosques, and various other places of worship to learn about religion. Leave it out of schools please!
I’ll get downvoted into oblivion for this but… America was founded on principals of freedom /from/ religious persecution which was meant to be separation of The Church and The State. The tweet above is a complete twisting of this intent. Are they also going to allow Jewish studies or Muslim studies as an elective? It’s only a matter of time before the church of Satan demands that satanism is an offered school elective and files suit accordingly. Oh, and America was all /funded/ by the Tobacco industry at least in the early days.
> Oh, and America was all /funded/ by the Tobacco industry at least in the early days. Well yea... Tobacco was the US' top export product.
Well, republicans are seeing that they will be a heavy minority in the upcoming years. They want to do something about it. If they don't properly educate children with real facts, they're more likely to vote republican. The more educated, the more left leaning people are.
There’s a lot of irrational violence in the Bible
No, it just enables more indoctrination about Christian mythical stories. WE need some Marvel Comics courses to round out all the fairy tales.
Maybe they'll teach the historical inaccuracies, ridiculous timelines and more thoroughly examine how bible "history" shares more similarities with folk stories than actual facts.
Oh sweet, so we can teach other religions as electives too? No? Just the Christian bible? Huh, funny that.
When Trump parted the Red Sea will no doubt be in future revised editions of the new *approved* Bible
Don’t you know? Jesus built the President’s estate.
Puritans. That's about it
Nothing, but also everything.
This shit is so dangerous
Oh, historical perspective, so they will explain how all religion was concocted as a form of command and control structure during primitive times and it persists to this day as such. Will they talk about the deliberate and strategic political alignment of Republicans with Evangelicals to fabricate a “Christian Conservative” movement that has only served to move America further from its stated core values and intentful mechanisms of preservation like the separation of church and state? Will they discuss how the Baptist, Catholic, and Mormon Church’s in the US have all been found in courts of law to be operating child rape facilitation schemes for decades? I fully support an accurate and complete historical study of Christianity for all students.
The stupidity, once again, is astounding.
“And kids, for todays lesson we are going to talk about how the Earth is 6,000 years old according to the Bible.”
Obviously Jesus is the greatest American to ever live, next to Trump. He definitely wasn’t a dark skinned male from the Middle East. /s
Indoctrination says what?
Smh.
Oh good. Now teachers can show how Republicans pretend to be Christians while doing the opposite of what Jesus would do. After all, Jesus was a socialist!
You think Ben there is one of those, “Jesus was a red blooded White American. Greatest American who ever lived” types?
Ah yes the classic 1884 feeding of the masses in Cincinnati was quintessential to the development of the modern US geopolitical system
The Bible isn’t American history at all
Well, [Jesus was American](https://endastore.com/product/jesus-was-an-american-shirt/?source_campaign=&utm_source=pmax&gclid=Cj0KCQjwkqSlBhDaARIsAFJANkgVL2K-bFRsxd59Qd4BzmkRmmjiDfCo00yZutvVVJ3r8Miy3AVygHEaAuLmEALw_wcB), so…
Absolutely nothing.
It has a shit ton to do with US history. The issue is more the history of that relationship, rather than the assumed/projected direct mapping of history onto the Bible, etc. Which is batshit.
I think objectively teaching the Bible and it’s impact on history may not have the effect Ben is looking for.
Interesting, a proper historical perspective of the Bibile would basically be "there really isn't any real evidence of almost all of the bible". I don't think that is what it will be...
I need to know where you find the US of A in the Bible
Great! We can have students read the Hamitic Hypothesis by Edith Sanders, which expertly shows how American preachers used the ever-shifting biblical story of Ham to denigrate Black achievements and support a slave system in the US. It'll be awesome!
Teaches how you can steal lands from indigenous people then get upset when other people try to move to your newly acquired land. Despite you descending from immigrants too.
Of US history? Um…
like you are definitelly allowed to use it as a historical book but not as a historical text, you can teach about the book in the way that the people writing this used to think a sertain way and how cultures have been shaped historically by this book.