Posted on 08/24/2010 3:10:42 AM PDT by Scanian
State testmakers played favorites when quizzing high-schoolers on world religions -- giving Islam and Buddhism the kid-gloves treatment while socking it to Christianity, critics say.
Teachers complain that the reading selections from the Regents exam in global history and geography given last week featured glowing passages pertaining to Muslim society but much more critical essay excerpts on the subject of Christianity.
"There should have been a little balance in there," said one Brooklyn teacher who administered the exam but did not want to be identified.
"To me, this was offensive because it's just so inappropriate and the timing of it was piss-poor," he added, referring to the debate over the plan to build a mosque near Ground Zero.
The most troubling passage came from Daniel Roselle's "A World History: A Cultural Approach," observers said.
The passage reads: "Wherever they went, the Moslems [sic] brought with them their love of art, beauty and learning. From about the eighth to the eleventh century, their culture was superior in many ways to that of western Christendom."
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Leftists love Islam. Because they know it’s not really a religion.
Leftists love Islam because it is about control!
Yup. These two sets of control freaks, islamists and leftists, have looked into each other’s eyes and fallen deeply and madly in love.
What they really love and covet is control over children, the future
The leftists don't realize yet that when the wedding night comes, they'll be the ones with their face in the pillow.
The teacher just does not get it. Our Government under Obama and the Democrats is all about destroying Christianity in America. They have been working at it for years its just that now while in power it is becoming more obvious..
You got that right. The leftists are so deeply in denial that they actually believe that things will go well for them when they and their new butt-buddies, the muzzies, dismantle western civilization together.
Boy, are they in for a bending-over-to-pick-up-the-soap-in-the-jailhouse-shower surprise!
Of course the real problem here is that there is no explanation of why the cultural superiority of the Muslim world to Western Christendom was confined to the eighth through the eleventh centuries, or why it happened at all.
To discuss that would mean overturning a lot of prejudices about medieval history, primarily by actually talking about the elephant in the room—the continued existence of the Roman Empire with its capital at Constantinople, and with it discussing Eastern Christendom, which during those centuries had a culture superior to both Western Christendom and Islam.
Western Christendom in that narrow time window *was* a cultural backwater because of the displacement of civilized Roman Christians by newly Christianized Germanic barbarians, who saw literacy as “ignoble”. It was only the efforts of the Church (contrary to the propaganda shared by protestants and freethinking secularists alike) that kept literacy alive in Western Europe at all.
In the East, classical learning never waned. (I give as an example Anna Comnena’s Alexiad, a puff-piece biography of her father, the Roman Emperor at the time of the Crusades, which is full of allusions to classical literature as well as the Holy Scriptures.)
Muslim culture of those centuries absorbed much of Greco-Roman culture and much of Hindu learning, and were it not for the inhumane element endemic to Islam would arguably have been the most advanced culture in the world, very briefly. (The humaneness of Christianity, esp. in the Eastern version, which was *very* reluctant to apply capital punishment more than balances the availability of Hindu learning to the Muslims)
So why did the cultural superiority of Islam end, and the Muslim world turn into the retrograde backwater of barbarism it has been from the 12th century onward? Very simple: Muslims started taking Islam more seriously than the high culture they’d learned from those the conquered: al Ghazali’s occasionalism won out against the rationalism of Averroes and Avicenna—everything that happens happens by the direct will of Allah—and the intellectual basis for science and even effort in commerce was gone.
The Islam we see today is not the cultured Islam of the pragmatic period in the Caliphate of Damascus where St. John of Damascus was Grand Vizier even though he penned a Christian critique of Islam, nor of the very brief period in the middle of the Muslim occupation of Spain which is the basis for the myth of the tolerant cosmopolitan Al-Andalus. It is the obscurantist Islam that destroyed tolerance in Al-Andalus and Islamic science long before the Reconquista let the Spanish return to running their own country.
I think it would be very instructive for American students to know all of this, but only perhaps one in a thousand high school history teachers has the necessary background to teach it right.
I guess this guy Roselle didn't use Will Durant's Our Oriental Heritage. In this 1936 survey of world history Durant writes about the The Moslem Conquest (of India). Art beauty, and learning my a$$.
ML/NJ
We need to take back our culture. A great place to start is the teacher’s colleges. When conservatives take a statehouse they need to clean out their state universities. The tenure process has been politically determined — no conservatives allowed. Take out the left at the state university level and the state schools will be superior to the Ivy Leagues.
It’s just a marriage of convenience. If they ever manage to eliminate conservatism in America, they’ll be at each others’ throats in no time.
Teachers complain that the reading selections from the Regents exam in global history and geography given last week featured glowing passages pertaining to Muslim society but much more critical essay excerpts on the subject of Christianity.
I’m gonna concede the muzzies those four centuries (8-11 inclusive). I’ll even give them 50 atta boys for each century.
But it’s like my daddy used to say. ONE AW SH!+ wipes out 50 atta boys...
Philosophically speaking, if I had a time machine, the temptation to go back and shoot Mohammed dead in his cradle might be too tough to resist.
http://verydemotivational.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/129137642999037160.jpg
To be sure that would make for a different world. But alas, not one that we two would figure into with SUCH PROMINENCE. ;-))
:’)
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