the difference that I see is that most groups that gather to discuss politics know something about the issue. most churches are told that they must vote according to the precepts of their faith. generally including abortion, stem cell research, gay marraige, etc.
heres a story about a church that went door to door to force people to adjust their votes or to leave the church
Not by Conservative Christians with the goal of promoting a Christian Agenda it doesn’t.
below is a quote from the document linked at bottom. this is an example of how churches can change voting.
"On most issues that come before voters or legislators, the task is selecting the most effective strategy among several morally good options. A Catholic can take one side or the other and not act contrary to the faith. Most matters do not have a “Catholic position.”
But some issues concern “non-negotiable” moral principles that do not admit of exception or compromise. One’s position either accords with those principles or does not. No one endorsing the wrong side of these issues can be said to act in accord with the Church’s moral norms.
This voter’s guide identifies five issues involving “non-negotiable” moral values in current politics and helps you narrow down the list of acceptable candidates, whether they are running for national, state, or local offices."
http://www.priestsforlife.org/elections/voterguide.htm
and for the record, im not against any religion, just the people who choose to use them to get votes for their pet projects
History like the Earth being 6000 years old, and Jesus riding dinosaurs? Or how about the founding fathers being fundies who tried to make Christianity the state religion until this damn godless libruls corrupted it?
Their position is not remotely reasonable, and the article does a disservice by trying to present it that way.
I wish California would adopt Texas’ method of buying textbooks at the state level.
Good lord, why?
Actually, CA does “state adoption” up to Grade 8, just not for high school.
But why do you think state adoption is a good thing? California is nearly as much of a pain in the ass to write textbooks for as Texas, just with different hot-button topics. For instance, because by state law textbooks cannot promote unhealthy eating, textbook publishers must avoid all mention of things like birthday cake and pizza parties – even in grammar exercises. Their state standards include ridiculously vague things like, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Students will appreciate poetry in languages other than English.”
The review process for state textbook adoptions is a clusterfuck of epic proportions. Among other issues, if you are a reviewer, you are expected to evaluate tens of thousands of pages of textbooks in a few months – for literature books, it’s 800 to 1200 pages per book, per grade, per publisher, just for the main book – and then you’ve got all the ancillaries, including workbooks, special editions for struggling students, online supplements, and so on. Reviewers are often teachers with regular classloads. I’m sure you see the problem there.
The California assembly, worried about students’ heavy backpacks, passed a bill a few years ago stating that no state-adopted textbook could contain more than 200 pages. They did not, however, propose any changes to state law requiring giving instructional coverage for every single word of every single state standard in every single textbook. Fortunately this bill was not approved by their senate, but we were all pretty worried for a few months.
McLeroy is an idiot. His idiocy, however, is a wholly separate question from the actual changes in the Texas curriculum. For the most part they seem pretty innocuous. But this one isn’t:
The idea that Moses or Christianity was a considerable influence on America’s founding documents is absurd. The Declaration of Independence refers merely to “Nature’s God,” a typical deistic reference, not to Moses or Christianity. The Constitution lacks even deistic references to God, and the Bill of Rights prohibits an established religion and guarantees free exercise of religion, with no special place for Christianity, explicitly violating the Mosaic commandment to have no other gods before the God of Abraham.
The Mayflower Compact is certainly Christian, but it’s no more an American founding document than the first Virginia charter is a Confederate founding document. It’s a resolution of a group of English subjects who start by explicitly avowing their loyalty to the King of England; the very concept of “America” as a distinct entity is completely absent from it. And of course it gave rise to a colony with a rigidly authoritarian government church, exactly the thing that the Founders forbade in the Bill of Rights and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.
To see Moses’ hand in all this is to simply misunderstand what Moses did; the Ten Commandments that he delivered are a moral code for regulating individual Jews’ lives, not concerned with setting up a government. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are not concerned with making law for individuals (treason is the only crime defined in either of them); they define the responsibilities and limitations of the state. They’re completely different kinds of documents.
I’m OK with the list of significant Americans. The conservative resurgence in the 1980s is simply a fact, and the factors they list doubtless contributed to it, although they’re neglecting the importance of the aging Baby Boomers. I agree that religion has played an extremely important role throughout American history, and that we do a lousy job of teaching about it. But this Moses-informed-our-founding documents bit is wrong, wrong, wrong.
You missed the part where they’re trying to rehabilitate Senator McCarthy, then.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/the_rehabilitation_of_joseph_mccarthy_texas_textbo.php
Yeah, Tailgunner Joe as an American Hero.
Then they’re certainly failing, at least with me, because I was reading some of the stuff quoted in the article and thinking “dear God, if those are your True Believers and the Keys to Heaven are theirs as they believe… may I get a ticket to Hell now, please? I’d like a cauldron close to Kepler’s if it’s possible, thanks.”
Merely one sample, from Peter Marshall: “The Founding Fathers’ biblical worldview taught them that human beings were by nature self-centered, so they believed that the supernatural influence of the Spirit of God was needed to free us from ourselves so that we can care for our neighbors”
Soooo… the FFs believed that human beings were created by God as self-centered, therefore needing God’s supernatural intervention. Right. Gotcha. I mean, unless in the mouth of a Creationist, “by nature” means that the Designer was somebody other than God. So God made us unable to make good decisions unless he grabs us by the scruff of the neck. Not much of an optimist, this Marshall guy.
When McLeroy says McCarthy was “vindicated,” I assume he means that there were in fact numerous Communist spies in the State Department and the nuclear program, including some, like Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss, who were held up as innocent by many liberals at the time. Which is true, but McCarthy was absolutely useless to exposing them, and instead made groundless and irresponsible accusations against innocent people.
Whatever McLeroy means, it’s his personal opinion; let’s see what actually goes into the curriculum.
To counter the propaganda coming out of Texas. The other things you cited as problems in California’s curriculum pales in comparison to Texas’ marginalizing of civil rights leaders, trying to sneak Creationism into the textbooks, and telling kids what is frankly lies.
Ah. If it worked that way, I might agree with you, but it doesn’t work that way. Instead, you get national editions that simply avoid, as much as possible, all subjects that might upset anyone in Texas OR in California; a subtractive process rather than a balancing process. If Texas standards end up requiring positive mentions of, for instance, Joe McCarthy in 20th century history texts, you can bet they’ll get that in a special Texas edition with that added in to the National edition, maybe in a special supplement or a section in the back of the big book, and we won’t see it in National editions. You’ll actually see less coverage of anything remotely connected with 1950’s Red hysteria in the National editions as a result. It’s much easier to supplement to please both TX and CA if there’s nothing in the National editions to contradict, if that makes sense.
What I see now is a one-sided push to an agenda I don’t agree with. Leave that alone for fear of something worse is to let that side fester and grow. I would rather book publishers fear both CA and TX instead of TX alone. If it takes removing even more things from textbooks to not offend liberal CA sensibilities, then at least the damage is equal to both sides.
One day when Christians realize that pushing their brand of propaganda on kids is wrong, maybe we’ll have more factual textbooks. But anything where intelligent design is not ridiculed is unfit to teach kids.
Religious historians. Thats who will will push for all viewpoints. How could we question their evenhandedness?
Since you only skimmed the linked article you may have missed this troublesome bit:
The injection of partisan politics into education went so far that at one point another Republican board member burst out in seemingly embarrassed exasperation, “Guys, you’re rewriting history now!” Nevertheless, most of McLeroy’s proposed amendments passed by a show of hands.
:rolleyes:
As a Christian I so very much wish this could be dismissed as anti-Christianity jabs, but it can’t be. When my brother was in 5th grade, we moved back to MA to take care of my great-grandmother, and my mom didn’t want to enroll him in a new school mid-term, so she home schooled him. The home school company (Christian something or other Home Schooling) that the school board grudgingly decided was okay for home schooling was apparently a fundy Christian one, because the science book firmly declared that dinosaur bones were planted in the ground to test the faithful. See, everyone knows that the earth is only seven thousand years old, so obviously scientists are trying to trick people by declaring the bones to be much older. Then there was a picture of what really happened: Adam, Eve, and some dinosaurs cavorting…srsly.
So, yeah, if Texas is picking books like that, there’s cause for some alarm. Some how, I doubt that there are Jesus Horses in most TX textbooks, though.
Why is that? Serious question. This is a state with some top universities and high-tech industries.
Agree.
The USA is not, and never has been christian state or a religious state. It’s always been a secular and “nondenominational” state. It’s a case of “you go to your church and I’ll go to mine, and if you don’t want to, that’s your choice”. They wanted to avoid the religious baggage of Europe - religion wars, religious persecution, state religion. There was to be not just freedom of religion, but also freedom from religion for those so inclined. The government was “getting out of the God business”.
I found this interesting within the article;
I didn’t know that. When minority persecuted religions such as Baptists partitioned Jefferson to clarify religious freedom we gain a now famous phrase.
Which fundies continue to remind us is not in the constitution.
I think there’s a valid point to say our educational system downplays the role of religion in our history but trying to actually reinterpret history and then teach it as fact to grade school students is completely unethical.
from the article
and later;
I was taught that settlers came here in part to find freedom from religious persecution and to worship freely. The revelation itself was more about politics , rights, and economics than it was about religion. Is that incorrect.
How much detail does a grade school student need.
Then again, I’m all for a high school course about world religions and/or a section in history about religion in America, from an analytical point of view but too many parents would get their undies in a wad over that.