Personally, I’d favor a class of instruction on ‘Religions of the World’. Let kids learn what everybody believes and why, as well as those who chose not to believe/disbelieve and why. No one favored over another, just an open educational introduction to the other 30 flavors at the ice cream store that you might not have heard about.
Then again, I still cling to the antiquated notion that the purpose of an education is to give one exposure to a variety of concepts, thereby preparing them for adulthood as a well rounded, conversant individual possessing an understanding of how they can and should contribute to society as a whole.
Weren’t most of the disciples also jews? And most of the early converts to the new religion? Seems to me that Bible suggests the Italians rejected God.
Teaching religion is school is a bad idea but let’s not go overboard and equate it with rabies. Bear in mind the women that was originally appalled by the anti-semitic remark was a Chrisitian religious teacher. The majority of Christians are good people. I’m sure that if some bigoted teacher had taught his or her class that Jews are bad, others students besides this one girl would have passed on this new “knowledge” and other teachers and parents would have been as upset as Beverly Ridell was.
I don’t know about that. The Catholic Church founded by Peter was Jesus’ intention so I would go and say that it was Italians. “And on this rock I shall build the chcurch” (or something like that) Jesus was referring to Peter as the “rock”. It was a figurative statement.
It was the Jewish sect the Pharisees that eventually did Jesus in. They might not have physically killed Jesus… but they sh1t talked him to death… basically. Jesus called himself God and they rejected it and called him a liar… according to the NT. The Romans put him to death physically.
I think most of his disciples were gentiles though… it’s been a long time since I’ve done any Bible reading… but even so I don’t remember much information given about the actual eithnic backgrounds of the disciples.
Since I daresay atheists in this country are more likely to be exposed to and educated about the basics of Christianity than Christians in this country are to atheistic philosophies, I’m sure you’ll have no objections to public schools educating students about the teachings of secular humanism, the works of Bertrand Russell, the career of Robert Ingersoll, and so on.
As much as I like the concept of teaching comparative religions in high school, I have to be realistic. I live in the South. I taught in a high school in a district that did not want to grant me time away from school for Ash Wednesday observances because it was “not an established relgious rite.”
The school system was run by Baptists and Church of Christ members. That’s just fine as long as they don’t discriminate against Episcopalians, Catholics and others who attend services on these days. (They didn’t care much for All Saints’ Day either.) This was in a Metropolitan area of a million people.
Given that there is that much prejudice, how much assurance could we have that an unbiased teacher would be assigned to teach comparative religions?
Further, some of the students themselves are very endoctrinated by their parents and churches. It would be difficult to steer clear of verbal brawls when trying to look objectively at other non-Christian and non-Protestant religions or even non-evangelical religions.
We are talking about people who objected to reading The Diary of Anne Frank because it taught religious tolerance.
I would have been happy to tutor comparative religions on the side if someone had been interested. But the students that I taught needed basic skills much more – street law, child care, life skills.
If that is what it takes to stop this stubborn, crushing insistence upon Christian endoctrination by the government, then they are in my prayers.
The Puritans wanted the kiddies to learn to read to ward off the Devil. Even the alphabet was introduced with some religious concepts. The New England Primer, 1690:
As I’m reading the quote, it was more likely “Christians are good people” rather than “Jews are bad people.” So if you tell her Jesus wasn’t a Christian, you’re telling her Jesus wasn’t a good person. In many parts of the country, second graders would never have a reason to know what a Jew is or why anyone would hate them.
That’s another thing that bugs me; “Christian” has lost meaning as a definition of religious faith and has become a meaningless term of approbation. “Gentleman” used to have a specific meaning of a man who owned a given number of acres of land, so that if you referred to to Mr. Jones as a “gentleman,” you knew he owned land and was a person of significance. The former definition was swallowed up by the latter, so that when Mr. Smith is called a gentleman today, we only know the speaker’s opinion of Mr. Smith, but nothing about Mr. Smith himself.
So, too with “Christian” today. People use it to mean “a nice person” instead of “a person who believes in the articles of the Christian faith,” so that calling X a very Christian person only shows that the speaker approves of X, and tells us nothing about X himself.
You can be a devout Christian and also be a thoroughly disagreeable person. Look at James Dobson–the man is a deep-dyed, hatemongering bigot, yet you cannot say that he isn’t a true Christian just because he doesn’t act in a virtuous manner. He is a Christian because of his acceptance of the tenets of his faith, not the tenor of his behavior.
That’s one of the reason it bothers me that that little girl has been brainwashed by adults into believing that Christian=nice, because the corollary is that /Christian=/nice.
A note: No, the disciples were all jewish. Paul, if you remember your religious history, was the one who spread it to the gentiles. Remember the… Cannanite woman? “Even a dog gets to eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.”
Here we go. http://www.velocity.net/~edju/Dogs.htm
No objection here, certainly. But the instruction here should be as complete as it is on the religious side.
You can’t discuss Catholicism without dealing with some pretty terrible stuff, from the Inquisition right through to the priest abuse scandal. Yet dwelling on these things exclusively wouldn’t be a balanced portrayal of the church.
Likewise, Bertrand Russell and Robert Ingersoll are but one face of atheism. Sadly, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Kim Jong-Il are another face, and a discussion of atheism as a philosophy (or lack thereof) must take into account the disgusting acts of those hostile to religion and its believers.
Learning all of these things allow a person to make judgements, and only then can he be considered educated.
When I was in elementary school we often went to the Church next door and read scripture, prayed, and talked about Jesus and the ten commandments. We also watched Christian education videos.
Seemed OK at the time(my family didn’t go to church ever)…although I hated praying. I always peeked instead of keeping my eyes closed.
Ahem, Marx was atheist, but the others were not (and you left out Mao, Albania’s Enver Hoxha, and the current Turkmenistan dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov). They merely disbelieved in the Christian god. The cults of personality those dictators set up substituted themselves as deities in the place of Jehovah (or in the case of Kim Jong-Il, Buddha and traditional mountain spirits from Korean native shamanism). You cannot call hard-core totalitarian regimes with personality cults atheist because they most definitely have a faith and an object of worship–did you know that North Korean farmers pray to Kim Jong-Il for rain?
Unless you propose to abolish the government school system, the government is inherently in the position of deciding what kids, Jewish or otherwise, are “well served” to learn.
I agree that the attempt to identify Communist totalitarianism as some sort of “atheist” movement is reaching and inaccurate. Communism was a religious ideology unto itself which involved far more than a rejection of Christianity. It was not a simplistic imposition of philosophical atheism. Hell, it wasn’t even really Communist.