When Chemists Attack

CNN has reported that Georgia has approved state sponsorship of Bible classes in schools. Why? Here are a few opinions from supporters of the idea.

“I don’t think you can understand Shakespeare, that you can understand a great deal of literary allusions or that you can understand a great deal of Western civilization without understanding the role of the Bible,”

[…]

“It’s going to challenge the faith of some students and it may foster the faith of others,”

Georgia hopes to skirt the obvious Constitutional problems with these classes by saying that

The classes must be taught “in an objective and nondevotional manner with no attempt made to indoctrinate students.”

My take? This will end badly. Teaching a Bible class to a set of students with diverse religious backgrounds without some of them (or their parents) seeing the class as a form of indoctrination will be impossible. Even if all the students are Christians, teachers run the risk of running afoul of the ways different sects of Christianity interpret parts of the Bible. (one example: Biblical literalists vs. old-Earth creationists). Add in complaints from the sprinkling of kids who have non-Christian parents, and you’ve got a recipe for nothing but trouble.

The schools will bail once they get slapped with enough complaints and lawsuits over the classes. This will occur only after a lot of taxpayer money is wasted on the whole process.

Having said all that, I actually do believe that knowledge of the Bible is helpful. (A great way to lead someone away from the path of fundamentalism is to have them actually read that book they’re being so fundamental about – all of it – and to learn about the history of that book.) But, I just don’t think that it’s possible in our current social environment to have Bible classes in public schools that don’t “indoctrinate” in some way. We have enough of a time keeping religious indoctrination out of biology classes. How the heck would we keep it out of a Bible class?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 4:01 pm and is filed under The culture wars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.