Posted on 08/01/2005 7:12:16 AM PDT by Crackingham
When the school board in Odessa, the West Texas oil town, voted unanimously in April to add an elective Bible study course to the 2006 high school curriculum, some parents dropped to their knees in prayerful thanks that God would be returned to the classroom, while others assailed it as an effort to instill religious training in the public schools.
Hundreds of miles away, leaders of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools notched another victory. A religious advocacy group based in Greensboro, N.C., the council has been pressing a 12-year campaign to get school boards across the country to accept its Bible curriculum.
The council calls its course a nonsectarian historical and literary survey class within constitutional guidelines requiring the separation of church and state.
But a growing chorus of critics says the course, taught by local teachers trained by the council, conceals a religious agenda. The critics say it ignores evolution in favor of creationism and gives credence to dubious assertions that the Constitution is based on the Scriptures, and that "documented research through NASA" backs the biblical account of the sun standing still.
In the latest salvo, the Texas Freedom Network, an advocacy group for religious freedom, has called a news conference for Monday to release a study that finds the national council's course to be "an error-riddled Bible curriculum that attempts to persuade students and teachers to adopt views that are held primarily within conservative Protestant circles."
The dispute has made the curriculum, which the national council says is used by more than 175,000 students in 312 school districts in 37 states, the latest flashpoint in the continuing culture wars over religious influences in the public domain.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
More freedom from religion.
Yes. We must instead teach a falsehood-riddled cirriculum that attempts to pursuade students and teachers to adopts views that are held primarily within homosexual and lesbian circles.
"that "documented research through NASA" backs the biblical account of the sun standing still. "
Huh? I've never heard this espoused by ANYone, conservative Christian or otherwise.
"Dubious assertions"?
Are these people so ignorant of history that they think the Framers were multiculturalists?
Just what basis for the Constitution do these so called "critics" think was the basis for that document? What is the "basis" of the Constitution if not the religious outlook of the men who wrote it?
Otherwise well-meaning people occasionally post this famous urban legend here.
Program of SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY (SPD)
Accepted at the Heidelberg Sozialdemokratische Partei Congress on September 18, 1925.
CULTURAL AND EDUCATIONAL POLICY
The Social Democratic Party is striving for the abolition of the educational privileges of the propertied classes.
Education, schooling, and research are public matters; their operation is to be secured through public institutions and the expenditure of public funds. The provision of instruction and instructional materials free of charge. Economic support for pupils and students.
The public institutions of education, schooling, culture and research are secular. All legally grounded interference in these institutions by churches and religious or ideological communities is to be opposed. Separation of church and state. Separation of church and schools. Secular technical and occupational schools and institutions of higher education. No expenditure of public monies for ecclesiastical or religious purposes.
The unified structuring of the school system. The creation of the closest possible relations between practical and intellectual labor on all levels.
The common education of both sexes by both sexes.
Standardized training of teachers in colleges and universities. [...]
EWALD VON KLEIST-SCHMENZIN
National Socialism: A Menace
Der Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1932).
"Mere mention of the word religion has caused eruptions of animalistic rage among National Socialists."
Well, if that is what is being taught, it seems okay to me.
But a growing chorus of critics says the course, taught by local teachers trained by the council, conceals a religious agenda. The critics say it ignores evolution in favor of creationism and gives credence to dubious assertions that the Constitution is based on the Scriptures, and that "documented research through NASA" backs the biblical account of the sun standing still.
Well, if that is what is actually being taught, then I'm not okay with it.
I imagine the truth lies somewhere in the middle, as usual.
Just what basis for the Constitution do these so called "critics" think was the basis for that document? What is the "basis" of the Constitution if not the religious outlook of the men who wrote it?If it had a religious basis, why wasn't God, Jesus, or the Bible mentioned even once?
Actually, this class is quite constitutional if it's an elective and does not claim that the Bible is the revealed word of God. If it was a "not for credit" class paid for privately, it wouldn't even matter, Constitutionally speaking, if it did teach that the Bible was divinely inspired...as long as dissenters were allowed to set up, conduct, and pay for their own class.
-Eric
How dare they offer elective courses that add to the diversity of the curriculum!!!
"Just what basis for the Constitution do these so called "critics" think was the basis for that document? What is the "basis" of the Constitution if not the religious outlook of the men who wrote it?"
DEISM?
I've heard the woman who started this curriculum on the radio and she says it is not a religion course, and so far no one has been able to challenge it. Good.
I heard several scientists on the radio this morning who believe in Intelligent Design (not necessarily Creationism, but science based upon constantly uncovered facts that the earth and universe had a designer). One secular science editor got in extreme trouble for even putting forth the hypothesis in his science magazine, and other scientists who are interested in taking the facts before them and conducting research are being ostracized and ridiculed. And they're not pushing a religious agenda of any sort. They just say, here are the facts...let's do some research. The science community, for the most part, is seeing red. Now...who is not being scientific? Their dread fear, I suspect, is that they might find out there really is someone greater than man.
Psssst...there is.
If it had a religious basis, why wasn't God, Jesus, or the Bible mentioned even once?
There you go, muddying the waters with facts.... ; )
I believe a NASA and Caltech cosmologist have a theory that Mars and the Earth were in synchronous orbits (360 and 720 day years?), at one time and every (something like) 144 years there would be a near pass by and an energy transfer would occur. And somewhere around 700BC a large transfer occurred that altered the orbits of both planets to where they are now. They supposedly used very sophisticated computer analysis that validates the possibility of this.
I have not heard anymore about it for about 5 years now, and am kind of fuzzy on the facts. I don't recall the analysis being conclusive, but then again, it is being compared to evolution. So being conclusive becomes somewhat arbitrary.
On which subject - Mars will be at a "close approach" in about a month.
Because the Constitution is a positive law (man-made) contract between artificial entities know as the states and the federal united states.Artificial creations, because of their artificiality, have no 'beliefs' and no 'free will'.
All the Constitution does for the People is to enumerate a few specific positive law rights, such as the right to keep and bear arms.
No one can understand the Founders intended meaning of 'Republic', or the principals of the Constitution unless they understand certain parts of the Bible, or as the Founders referred to it....'the laws of Nature and Nature's God.'
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If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave.
John Adams, Rights of the Colonists, 1772
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That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
Thomas Jefferson, Rights of British America, 1774
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[T]he laws of nature . . . of course presupposes the existence of a God, the moral ruler of the universe, and a rule of right and wrong, of just and unjust, binding upon man, preceding all institutions of human society and government.
John Quincy Adams
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The law of nature, “which, being coeval with mankind and dictated by God Himself, is, of course, superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this.”
Alexander Hamilton, Signer of the Constitution
God Bless
Ping
He said 'dunghill', but not quite in the manner in which you portray. Jefferson believed the Bible had been 'contaminated' by the early Christians in an effort to make Christianity more appealing to pagans. His desire was to glean the *pure* teachings of Jesus from the chaff of early Christian meddling.
In his letter to John Adams dated 1813, he wrote:
I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill."
Here is the actual letter if your interested in the truth instead of parroting what you've heard:
(The 'dunghill' reference can be found toward the bottom of the 2nd paragraph)
To John Adams Monticello, Oct. 12, 1813
while the phrases "laws of Nature" and "Nature's God" have a lot more to do with Deism than Christianity.
Our legal system says otherwise- From the LEGAL definition of 'natural law'
n. 1) standards of conduct derived from traditional moral principles (first mentioned by Roman jurists in the first century A.D.) and/or God's law and will. The biblical ten commandments, such as "thou shall not kill," are often included in those principles.
For giggles & grins, another Jeffersonian quote:
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of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors."
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
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Nice try though.
Back at 'cha!
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