politics_phone1.jpg

The Arizona House of Representatives has passed a bill allowing an elective course in Bible study in public schools. The Arizona Republic reports:

The Arizona House on Tuesday passed a bill to allow schools to offer a course on the Bible’s influence on American history and culture.

House Bill 2563, sponsored by Rep. Terri Proud, R-Tucson, allows public and charter schools to offer a high-school elective called “The Bible and Its Influence on Western Culture.” The course must address the influence of the Old and the New Testaments on laws, history, government, literature, art, music, customs, morals, values and culture.

The bill passed the House 42-15. It now goes to the Senate.

It could be that teaching more courses about the Bible might lead to fewer people believing in it. The New York Times has reported:

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.

“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

This article appears in Feb 16-22, 2012.

Getting hassled by The Man Mild-mannered reporter

13 replies on “Studying the Bible: A Way To Make Atheists?”

  1. If the course includes the work of real Biblical scholars, such as Richard Elliot Friedman, then there will many more athiests in AZ.

  2. Excellent A+ Tucson Weekly/Jim. I cannot recall where I read the following quote:”The only Bible our children may someday read is the example/legacy we leave.” The ‘J’ man set the example. Period. Another sharecare quote (above paraphrased) ‘Athiests have faith too. Faith there is no God is a belief system in translation. Good Book is Good for those who choose who love to spread good:)

  3. Which Bible? If there is ever such a course, sincerely hope it covers a lot of the revisions, deletions/redactions, and questionable translations of “the Bible” as they mean to use the word here. I’d also hope they give equal time to some of the other religions afloat, and to a few dozen of the “the Dead Gods.” (see HL Mencken, Dead Gods article via Google or Wiki)

  4. Amazing how a lot of people still wont put their faith in statistics instead of the untruths due to their chosen denial. No wonder our society is so messed up.

  5. This is so blatantly unconstitutional that the mind boggles…

    Of course, these “legislators” don’t live in the United States but are busy at the work of secession so it’s understandable.

  6. I thought I believed in god until I went to Catechism. Turned out I knew nothing about god. Jesus born of a virgin? A boat holding two of each animal?? A dead man coming back to life??? Even at 8, my mind said , “I’ll pass on the BS thanks.”

    As for the House Bill, were it a required course, and a straight up Bible study, that would be unconstitutional. But it isn’t. I don’t have a problem with an elective course at the high school level on the influence of Christianity in America. It could be a slippery slope, but it seems innocent enough. For now.

  7. The King James Version of the Bible is great literature, which I, from an atheist Jewish family, read several times as a kid. In college I took an English lit class in The Bible as Literature (taught by a great professor who was so old that her father had been a slave and who gushed how happy she was to see all of us boys who “looked like Jesus” with our shoulder-length hair but always stuck to scholarship, although she did say that it would have been great if we could take the other sections of the course too, taught by a Roman Catholic and a Jew rather than a Protestant to see if the perspective changed). And in my M.A. program in English literature I took a graduate class in Old Testament and Modern Literature which contrasted Biblical stories and later works of literature that came out of them, such as Wallace Stevens’ “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” which alludes to the Biblical story of Susanna (in the Apocrypha).

    Such a course in the Bible as literature would be great. Teaching undergraduate and graduate classes for decades, I’ve found it dismaying how students don’t understand Biblical allusions or phrases from the King James Version that are part of Western culture. I can recall teaching classes where no one would get a Biblical reference I was making — or one in the text — including those kids who were evangelical, minister’s children, who had the Bible with them at all times. Some of them were ignorant of entire books of the Bible, like Job or Ecclesiastes.

    I suspect Terri Proud is one of those people.

    Well, when I’m president, she can have plenty time to read the Bible when I deport her to the 18th century. There’s not much else to read there, and no Fox News.

  8. I would support a comparative religion course in High School — which includes Bible, Koran, Upanishads, Book of Mormon and of course Dianetics. Any one by itself attacks the wall between church and state that has allowed the USA to be open to many points of view — something not available in the Dark Ages — where the population was only exposed to other religions and ideas at risk of life and limb.

    Otherwise – this move is blatantly unconstitutional – a ruse dressed up to be as dangerous as the introduction of “Divine Design” as an alternative to evolution — or the introduction of Alchemy as alternate or supplemental to chemistry and physics.

  9. I agree with the last person to post that stated “I would support a comparative religion course in High School — which includes Bible, Koran, Upanishads, Book of Mormon and of course Dianetics.”

    I think they should include Buddhist, Shinto, Janism, and of course Paganism(since so many people are so judgemental of it!).

    I think it’s either all religions or nothing.

  10. Well I guess the posting I have read are reflective of modern America where values mean nothing. Our nation was founded by Christians-like it or not. People who were not perfect but who in wished to eventually make more perfect union. These guys knew they were not perfect. They knew their children would not be perfect. Nor their nation.

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

    So how is this unconstitutional?

    For the contributor who wrote I went to Catechism. I doubt it, if he did then he was cherry picking. I guess he did not read the sections on Social Justice (which is not Socialism). Go back and reread it please.

    If you do not believe just say that. No one has a problem with doubt or unbelief. We all should have a problem with any one who mocks others for their beliefs.

    By the way who on this earth would even read the New York Times? The Old Grey Lady is deaf, dumb and blind. Perhaps we will all be reading brail in the future.

    Our nation is on the path to national suicide forsaking the values and beliefs that in the past which made us great. Believe or don’t believe but do not mock or be intolerant of others who do.

  13. No pviverito, this nation was not founded by Christians, but by Deists and masons. After witnessing the various Christian sectarian wars leading up to the founding of the United States and the continuation of the same after the Articles of Confederation were approved, these enlightened men moved to create the First Amendment to protect our country from the imbeciles tearing it apart.

    Even the Treaty of Tripoli, passed within a decade of our nation’s founding, states “the Government of the United States of America was not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Kindly sell your falsehoods to those dumb enough to purchase them in the first place.

Comments are closed.