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Tuesday, December 13, 2005
What it's all about
It's not a mystery, what fundamentalists want. They want their world view and their beliefs taught as truth in public schools. Here's the latest outrage, as reported by Agape:
Several voices are raising objections to a bill in the Alabama legislature, HB 58, which would require local school districts choosing to offer a Bible literacy elective in grades 9 through 12 to use a new, untested textbook that many critics view as controversial.
The bill sponsored by Alabama House Majority Leader Ken Guin and House Speaker Seth Hammett would allow schools to offer a course based on the book The Bible and Its Influence, which is published by the Virginia-based Bible Literacy Project (BLP). However, Dr. Dennis Cuddy, who has taught in public schools at the university level and served as a senior associate with the U.S. Department of Education, believes the book contains blatant errors and misleading information.
"For example," Cuddy notes, "one of the passages says most Christians and Jews do not read Genesis as a literal account of God's creation of the world. Then it goes on to ask students to look up some 'other' examples of ancient literature and mythology of the origins of the world. So a student looking at that could get the impression that Genesis is a myth."
It's exceedingly difficult to discuss the Bible, or religion generally, in public schools. You've got fundamentalists on the one side and cranks like me on the other, all eager to criticize your every move. It's probably best to avoid the subject entirely. Leave faith to families.
Here, though, we have a curriculum which appears to attempt to critically analyze the Bible. Schools should be teach the critical thinking and analysis skills which Cuddy objects to: how is Genesis similar and dissimilar to other creation stories? How is Genesis similar and dissimilar to contemporaneous writings? These are exactly the kinds of questions which should be asked in an academic review of a religious text.
Cuddy and his ilk have no interest in the academic study of the Bible. They just want their Bible in our -- meaning everyone's -- schools. They'll put any shade of lipstick on that pig by calling it "Intelligent Design" or "Bible literacy" or "the philosophies of Jesus". But if you ask that the content match the description, they object. There's no science in Intelligent Design and no literacy in their Bible study, but they will go to the ends of their 6,000 year old Earth to pretend otherwise.
