The goal of the Bible Literacy Project is to promote courses in public schools that encourage students to become more familiar with the Christian Bible, to the exclusion of other books. The excuse for this blatant effort to use public schools to push Christianity on children above all other religions is that all children ought to have an academic knowledge of the Christian text because the Christian Bible is central to American culture. Intelligent people will recognize the gap in this justification’s logic. If the Christian Bible is really so central to American culture, it shouldn’t be necessary to teach anything about the Christian Bible in public schools.
A deeper irony is that the curriculum produced by the Bible Literacy Project for public school use has been produced not by scholars who have engaged in an academic study of the Christian Bible. Instead, the writers and editors are Christian believers without an academic background in the study of their own religion. The result is that the materials of the Bible Literacy Project have been found academically lacking.
That’s bad enough, but there’s the further problem that academic programs to study religion, even at the top universities, often lack the academic rigor that other disciplines require. As non-religious students involved in these programs will testify, religious studies programs usually start with the presumption of the value of the religions that they study, and the students and professors alike are often tainted with the idea that religious studies programs are more for the training of religious functionaries than for the honest, open study of religions as aspects of culture and influences on history.
If the genuine scholars of religion are so frequently mixed up in the very faith that they are supposed to study, how much more will public school teachers who have no formal religious scholarship, but are Christian believers, be confused and misguided by the second-rate materials of the Bible Literacy Project?
A real study of the influence of religion on history and culture in the United States would require a multicultural approach, including a study of the role of non-Christian religions. That role has been substantial, and is ignored by the Bible Literacy Project.
All in all, it seems that students of courses designed by the Bible Literacy Project will emerge from their classes profoundly ill-informed on the role of religion in American public life.
Are you sure you are talking about the Bible Literacy Project? The one developed with 40 scholars and supported by the ADL?
Maybe you are confusing them with the National Council on Bible Curriculum in public schools, which is a seriously wingnut outfit.
Yeah, really, “Anon”? The Bible Literacy Project has been exposed as a piece of fruity garbage with a particular slant against particular denominations of Christianity. It’s pseudo academic trash.
Says Reverend Barry Lynn of the materials developed by the Bible Literacy Project AND the National Council on Bible Curriculum: “Some of the material being proposed for classroom use in South Carolina reads more like a Sunday School lesson than objective academics.”
An ADL endorsement is not a relevant factor. That’s a political endorsement, not an academic one.
Wait for an article tomorrow that will give some choice examples of why the Bible Literacy Project should not be taken seriously – and not just from a non-believer’s perspective.
“Officials at both the AJCongress and the ADL acknowledged some problems with the textbook they endorsed and said that they preferred comparative religion courses to classes focused solely on the Bible.”
Some endorsement, “Anon”.
In my opinion both comparative religion and Bible knowledge is helpful.
A case in point, the writers at this site. They seem to have no religious background to draw on and so make the must amusing and often incorrect conclusions about religion. For example, in one of the archive articles that floated through the comments for a few days recently, one of the writers referred to religious leaders as “priests”. Yet, when a link to the article was finally produced, there was not even one Roman Catholic in the article. Besides a lack of understanding about the Reformation, writers also have appeared not to know the difference between the Old and New Testaments, or the general contents of various books of the Bible, to say nothing of actually having read the Bible. Their grasp of Buddhism or Hinduism is equally unfortunate. The writers do know politics, so they can talk about the Bill of Rights just fine, and document everything on that five ways from Sunday, but when they write about religion they are truly clueless.
It’s a shame, really, because they could have a unique perspective to offer on religion, if they actually knew anything about it.
You often make the most amusing assumptions.
Iroquois, “priest” is a good general term for religious functionaries, and does not not just apply to Roman Catholics.
Fool’s right:
Random House Dictionary:
priest /prist/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[preest] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. a person whose office it is to perform religious rites, and esp. to make sacrificial offerings.
2. (in Christian use)
a. a person ordained to the sacerdotal or pastoral office; a member of the clergy; minister.
b. (in hierarchical churches) a member of the clergy of the order next below that of bishop, authorized to carry out the Christian ministry.
3. a minister of any religion.
–verb (used with object)
4. to ordain as a priest.
All Catholic clergy are called priests, but that doesn’t mean that all priests are Catholic clergy.
There are other interesting assumptions you make too.
I love it when these guys whip out their dictionaries to do battle when they have no intrinsic personal knowledge of a subject. Okay guys, I see your random house and I raise you a Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary:
. Fool is not only wrong, but deeply offensive.
Are you a Catholic? If you aren’t, then you have no intrinsic personal knowledge of the subject of Catholicism.
Are you a Protestant? If you aren’t, then you have no intrinsic personal knowledge of the subject of Protestant Christianity.
In either case, by your standard you’re excluded from talking about the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism because you don’t have “intrinsic personal knowledge” of both.
There are legitimate dictionary definitions of “priest” that are not restricted to Catholicism. That makes the use of the word “priest” in a non-Catholic context legitimate. That makes your objection wrong, which is why you have to pull out the “but you don’t have the experience of it” bullcrap.
If you continue with this line of argument, I never want to hear you ever criticize a Muslim or a man ever, ever again. Yes, you may have had many encounters with Muslims and men, but so have we had many encounters with Christians of all sorts, and you don’t have “intrinsic personal knowledge” of what it is to be a Muslim or a man.
Oooh, oooh, another one:
You also don’t have “intrinsic personal knowledge” of what it means to write articles on the main blog, so by your standards all your criticisms here are illegitimate.
Thought I’d just chime in, being a lapsed Baptist…don’t know if that’s intrinsic knowledge or not.
It’s funny, Iroquois, but the one valid point you had you didn’t hammer: the “poor grasp” of the Old Testament God vs. the New Testament one. Your comment on the “seeing God” post did a good job of showing how one might approach the Bible on its own terms. But why bother, when those terms are so self-contradictory? This, I think, is the point of the IT posts, and it’s a good point. The way man’s relationship with God shifts throughout the Bible is (and was) to me one of the reasons we can’t trust it en masse. Had the Bible been the work of a single individual or single group of individuals with a singular vision it would be worth engaging on its level — as it is it’s a protean collection of wildly disjunct documents, canonized (read: hobbled together) more out of political practice than anything else. I await a post detailing the paradox of the Holy Trinity in a monotheistic religion — on the one hand God curses those who worship more than one deity but then in Genesis uses the pronoun “us” to refer to himself (themselves?).
Zerwick has an essential point.
Christians use the whole “atheists ignore the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament” thing to defend their religion, but the truth is that they themselves are deeply inconsistent on this point, and the atheist critique is all too apt.
Christians reject the Old Testament when it’s convenient for them, and embrace it when it’s convenient for them. They take a literalist interpretation when it’s convenient, and use a figurative interpretation when it’s convenient for them.
They pick and choose, and then when anyone criticizes Christianity, they say that they’re misunderstood, which is easy, given that Christians are so completely inconsistent.
I feel I must point out that also in teaching about the bible to the exclusion of all other religious texts, what about those religions without religious texts? Do they get excluded as well, even if you add in the Koran and all other “texts”?
Well, I am new to this site, and when people are as angry as you all seem to be, I doubt I’m going to persuade anyone. I’ll just say that I was pretty impressed, when reading about this, by the fact that the Bible Literacy Program includes several prominent Jews among its endorsers. It’s probably not perfect, but they are at least making an effort to consult with leading Jewish groups, and acknowledging the HEBREW SCRIPTURES rather than the “Old Testament.” Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center is an endorser and he is a major advocate for religious freedom and pluralism. So “pseudo academic trash” seems, um, a bit harsh?
You can see their endorsements page here.
http://www.bibleliteracy.org/Site/PressRoom/Press20050922/Press051130Endorsements.htm
Zerwick, would you discard the field of mathematics because mathematicians don’t all have the same viewpoint? I mean, there’s Archimedes, Gauss, Einstein…none of them saying the same thing. The Bible interests me because it DOES have all those different and authentic voices. The covenant with Abraham (be fruitful and multiply) is much different from Moses’ covenant (commandments) from messiah Jesus (God so loved the world). But of course all of those remarks are about the believer personal level, not the Bible-as-academic-study level of religion.
Fool, Fool, Fool, what am I going to do with you?
Who? Where? What website are you looking at? This is a common error Catholics and former Catholics make, assuming that all Christians have the same beliefs, since the Vatican has a fairly monolithic belief structure thing going on. If you had taken a comparative religion course, or even compared notes with a few people of different denominations, there is no way you could have made that kind of statement.
Jim. Or should I call you Father Jim, since you are a priest of atheism. Or maybe Rabbi Jim, in the sense of
So how do you get personal knowledge of something? Watch this:
Hey Zerwick, you used to be Baptist, can you tell us if Baptist clergy are ever referred to as “priests”? What title do they go by?
Of course, Rabbi Jim, if I had never run into any actual Baptists in my sheltered existence, I could have googled a Baptist website and checked to see how they refer to their own clergy there. Do feel free to add to my knowledge of men, as you seem to be able to post the most unexpected photos–also the shoelace thing is working out quite nicely, what with expanding my zodiac karma and all. Don’t let me prevent you from defending a Fool, though, if that’s what you really want to do. When you guys write about religion, I’ll just yawn and try to be polite, even if you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.
Which brings us back to my original point, that Bible study and comparative religion are both useful. I have take courses in both, as electives, and would recommend both, as electives. Knowing what is in the Bible can be useful for literature students, as Shakespeare quoted the Bible extensively throughout his plays. If you don’t recognize the lines, you won’t understand the allusions. The text of other religious works is less important for western students–I find it’s more valuable to understand something about the belief system. For example, what are the two major forms of Buddhism and how are they different? What is the eightfold path for Buddhists?
Mathematics does not pretend to have absolute TRUTH. Religion does. That’s the difference.
You can’t seem to handle the inadequacy of religion to fulfill its own promises. That’s your problem. Confront it or leave religion.
No, Po Boy, you have missed the point. They’re both discoveries in progress. Looks like YOU’RE the one with some ax to grind. Maybe you would benefit from some education about religions. You don’t seem to understand the difference between proselytizing and education.
Anon, testimonials from Wheaton College and Chuck Coleson? A fairly lengthy excerpt of the book can be read here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=u58DyaEIZk4C&pg=PA3&dq=The+Bible+and+Its+Influence&sig=hZnBKy7etePd1UzI1oBsltL41K4#PPA345,M1
After looking at part of this book, I can say if I had children I would not want them using this textbook. In particular, why does Revelation–a book little read in my own tradition–need its own chapter (chapter 13) and why does the last chapter on separation of church and state contain selected quotations that appear to support establishment of religion. The text also has a lot of interpretive stuff, stuff that I feel is best left to someone to read the Bible, formulate their own answers, and pick out for themselves what is important rather than have someone else’s interpretation spoon-fed to them.
We had pastors and ministers. But I understand the idea here. The word “priest” originally was just another word for clergy (from the late Latin word for “elder”: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=priest), but after Martin Luther and his whole deal protestants began breaking away from that term to differentiate themselves from what they saw as corruption in the Catholic priesthood. Thus the connotation the word carries today. Although technically it doesn’t apply only to Catholics; that’s just the modern appropriation.
I usually shy away from arguments such as these because religion is a fundamentally personal thing — I don’t think people should be required to justify their beliefs unless those beliefs are encroaching on someone else’s, or hurting someone. However, I will say that most Christians (Baptists anyway
) would disagree with the statement that religion is a “discovery in progress”. What I was taught is that the Bible is the first, last, the only word on God, and that it’s complete. Our failure to understand it is OUR failure, not that of the book. So you can imagine my guilt growing up, challenging the ideas in the Bible and assuming these thoughts were being borne out of sin. Not so much fun.
The Bible is not a perfect document, for the reasons we’ve outlined above, not the least of its imperfections being the portrait of God it offers. It was written, as you say, by many PEOPLE (underscore that) with different interpretations of what a God should be. In a novel this friction would make for riveting analysis but the Bible isn’t supposed to be a post-modern, Buñuel-esque masterpiece; it’s a document for living. I’m not speaking to anyone else’s opinions but my own here but it’s failed to win my trust in all the years I studied it (did Bible camp and weekly studies religiously — pun intended — until I was in college). I need my God to be less flighty, less schizophrenic, and without such an unflinching proclivity for genocide. But that’s my two cents. I apologize if I’ve made anyone feel uncomfortable.
I don’t find what you are saying at all strange, Zerwick, or at all at odds with my own religious tradition. The Bible contains much that is troubling and not consistent with Jesus’ teaching. Reminds me of the billboard “Don’t make me come down there again, signed, God.” But I think the Baptists tend more towards literalism. Even the Baptists, though, are still busy reviewing their translations as new information becomes available.
If you take the definition of priest as “a mediary agent between humans and God” this fits Roman Catholic ideology, as the priest is the one who hears confessions, (necessary for forgiveness of sins and therefore entry into heaven), and whose participation in communion is instrumental in the transubstantiation ritual of changing wine to blood. In medieval times the priest was also the only one who could read the Latin scripture, so was the one who could also interpret the will of God. The Protestant Reformation was a reversal of these traditions. Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into German meant anyone could read the Bible. And “justification by faith” replaced justification by a priest. The whole religion was now in the hands of the grassroots, who no longer needed a priest to access God. God’s grace was everywhere and one had only to reach out and take it.