I think comparative religions courses are great as long as they aren't used as a pulpit.

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who's smarter than you're? i'm!

Like we need another reason for school-aged kids to break into tribes and hate each other for no good reason. You're probably surprised I'm saying this, but it absolutely must be kept out of public school. Not because I want to shield children from Christianity, but because it will only be a source of conflict... sadly driven by the parents. Kids are learning to tribalize from their parents way too early as it is. Shouldn't we be attempting to bridge gaps so that when these kids are older maybe they won't be at each other's throats like we all are? Faith is faith. You find it or you don't. It shouldn't be pushed institutionally but discovered through exploration, or exposure by a friend or neighbor (and even then I'm not going door to fucking door to push it on anyone).

I mean, if kids bully a child to suicide for a condition he can't even control, there are better things we can introduce in schools. How about compassion. This damn story practically made me cry this morning, and wish I'd never bothered reading the news.

I think the bible taught as part of a comparative religion course would be excellent.

I don't think it should be taught as history since it is largely Israel's history and there's already a lack of good world and American history in your own country and that is where the focus should be.

We have churches where people can be taught about the bible.

One of my assistant coaches in in college taught English in high school (early 2000's) before going back for his PhD. He told me he used bible stories in high school quite a bit because the story and lessons were great (Cain and Abel for example is a good story on jealousy).

He said other teachers were afraid to use them because of keeping religion out of the subject, but he just believed the stories were too good to pass up for an English class. I guarantee he wasn't pushing religion.

If I were made dictator tomorrow I would introduce meditation into our schools focusing in part on the empathy/compassion aspects of it.

Unfortunately this will probably never happen on a wide scale because meditation as a phenomenon comes out of religious traditions and even though it can be entirely divorced from those traditions too many people would freak over it.

Yes I'm not sure what they mean by Bible history, do they mean teaching about what we can gleam from the Bible as history vs. the history of the Bible itself as a book. Where did it come from, how did we get it, who wrote what, what is probably true, what probably isn't true, etc.?

Things we don’t like should never be talked about.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

Christianity and the Bible should be covered in history and social studies due to the significant impact it has particularly on western cultures.

The Bible should also be read in English due to its huge influence on western literature. No different than reading Greek mythology or Aesop's Fables. It gets a little weird because the students will have various degrees of understand and belief in the stories, from those that interpret it literally to the atheists in the classroom. Schools and teachers need to be careful, but they shouldn't be any more afraid than when they teach Huck Finn.

I generally consider education to be anti-tribal, not a means to tribalism.

I think you're excessively risk-averse. I studied the Bible and religion in public high school and college, and remember zero drama.

I don't think we can start walling off avenues of education out of fear.

I don't remember ever studying it in HS although we had a very religious Italian woman (who's name was Mercedes Ferrari) who taught English lit and pretty much everything we read had a religious bent to it. Then again I was so clueless about both religion and literature at the time that I almost certainly missed a whole lot of connection. Regardless, don't remember ever talking about or referring to the Bible.

In college I was a history major for a period of time and took a History of Christianity class. I don't remember any real drama. I do remember some of the more hardcore Christians arguing for traditional Christian take on things if it conflicted with what historians had to say about something.

I think when we remember our schooling, it was a different time. I remember brief lessons on comparative religions in Social Studies, and took a handful of Theo classes in college, all the classes were from a learning standpoint, not a belief standpoint. I don't remember issues either.

ThisIsIt asserted that on the radio they mentioned this as a back-door to get religion back in schools, which suggests a belief-based teaching and I don't think you can go there. From a historical - about the Bible - perspective, it's a gray area. I do think they should still teach comparative religion and study religion in a historical context.

And I think the landscape has changed some now. Just look at how adults treat each other now when religion and faith is the topic. And we were the ones that grew up in the low/no-drama era.

I took a class titled "Bible as Literature" in a public high school in a liberal town. It was a very good class and drew no fire from students or parents that I was aware of. That may be/probably was because (1) the teacher was smart, had 30 years' experience, and no religious or anti-religious agenda, (2) the student body was largely drawn from a well-educated and engaged parental base, such that the parents could see value in the class and were aware that it wasn't pushing an agenda as the class progressed, and (3) this was in the early 1990s, when I think this sort of thing was less likely to draw reflexive opposition.

Which is mostly just fine. Don't confuse the outsized outrage effect that a very few shit-stirrers can have these days when given the megaphone of the Internet with mainstream dialog.

You're right, I went to school and college mostly in the 90's. But I still work around kids all the time. I don't see them as engaging in anything like the tribal warfare of news article comment sections. They seem OK. I don't think they need our protection from the real world.

But I don't think we should wall it off. Kids have to learn how to talk about important shit. I think delaying that learning until their 20's doesn't help much.

That said, I agree that any curriculum would have to be scrutinized for backdoor proselytizing.

More Christians should learn about the history of the Bible — and by that I mean how it came to be, how it has been altered in interpretation, the incomplete nature of original source text, etc. Perhaps then they’d be less inclined to marry it up to their “moral” and political agendas.

But as a source of actual history? That’s rather dubious given that it’s a mix of history, myth, poetry, and human longing. Not all of it is reliable history (ie Solomon & King David have no historical record/reference outside of the Bible, so it doesn’t make the Bible a reliable source of history. The ark story is mythology that some have taken as actual events. Etc.)

It is an awesome source of moral fables, literature, an understanding of how people throughout history have grappled with what it means to be human, repetition of human experience & response to interaction with others, and a case study of how societies developed in their religious/moral centers. So long as world history and theology aren’t being taught, it’s rich source material for the classroom.

This. I was recently in the Louvre and was thinking you would be pretty well lost as to the significance of many of the paintings without an understanding of the stories in the Bible and Roman and Greek mythology. Same goes for understanding the history of the Western World.

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

In an ideal world if the kids are already getting the basics of Math, Science and English then religious studies have a benefit.

I would not limit it to Christianity but teach the history of the large world religions (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism) what are the main tenants of each and how they have shaped history. The burden would be on the teacher to present it in a fact driven, non-opinion oriented manner.

See no problem with teaching these things in school.

Exactly people seem to think that the type of controversial confrontation interaction they see on TV is how normal people behave. In my experience it's not. Most people try to reach common ground when interacting with other people face to face.

FWIW, in one of my son's upcoming literature classes in a public school I know they do readings from the Bible.



They could read Joseph Heller's God Knows and learn a lot about the old testament. Learning the history/bible from a book of fiction might make people more upset than reading the Bible though.

Pretty much.

I think something like the book of Job should definitely be part of curriculum. Again, not to preach someone......but it's legitimately one of the most important pieces of literature ever.

The problem I have with the whole bit is when we try to wash American history as some kind of grand Christian victory and beginning and gloss over all the genocide, slavery, and capitalist greed we founded the country on. Instead we try to preach to public school kids in conservative rural areas that we were righteous Christians that founded the country and that the mean old people are trying to take God away from our government.

It's not wrong to try to utilize some values from different religious backgrounds at all. It is wrong to try to monopolize the business and turn it into a new-age Pharisees and old school Jewish law.

Didn't Christians read anything and learn about that ancient trap of law long ago? Perhaps not.

I think ironically unless taught as proselytizing I think exposure to the Bible erodes faith, especially the casual faith of many Christians. Throw any sort of study of the history of the Bible on top and forget about it.

Not saying there aren't those that come through the other side with a "deeper faith" but I just don't see teaching the Bible in school in any way that is going to past a Constitutional test doing what Christians think it will do for their religion.

Very much agree with this. I was raised in church so knew all the stories and heard it read every weekend. We were encouraged to read the entire book and I made it through a decent chunk here and there. Freshman year of college I enrolled in an Old Testament class thinking it would be an easy way to get some general credits out of the way. It was a very eye opening experience. I learned things about the origin and original content of the bible that I had no previous idea about. In all those years in church I had never heard anything about the canonization of the bible and how they picked and chose what parts would stay and what would go. I never knew how much of the bible and stories were borrowed and doctored from other stories, some pagan traditions, etc.

If anything, an exhaustive study of the bible itself did far more to push me away from organized religion than it did to draw me further into religion. In church, the bible is used to push an agenda, thus a single verse can be talked about for 45 minutes to drive home whatever point the speaker is trying to make. No regard for translation or historic reference is needed, you are just to believe that the words on the NIV bible page came direct from God so listen up. A study of the bible shows just how much men were responsible for those words on the page and creates a framework for an agenda that I had no further interest being a part of. I think the study of how that came to be and even how other religions came to be is very important. I have a friend who grew up Mormon and it was only when he began his own extensive research into the origins of the book of mormon that he figured out it was all hogwash. As others have said the influence in our current culture is still extreme so why not study that?

I will say a lot depends on the teacher. I still have a ton of respect for the Professor that taught that Old Testament class. I really wanted to know if he was involved in a religion, what it was, and what his beliefs were. I took 3 classes from him and still had absolutely zero idea whether he was religious or not. Classmates that were religious would try to get him to answer questions based on their beliefs or his beliefs and he always turned it back around to historical context and never gave a whiff of what his personal beliefs were or what anyone else should believe. I found out after I graduated that he was Nazarene, but had zero hint about that in any of his classes. If a teacher can maintain that sort of integrity, then I see no reason to not study the subject, or any other mainstream religion for that matter.

^ This