The requirement forces Oklahoma teachers to "reference" the role of the Ten Commandments in America's founding, so as a historian & teacher, let me offer this suggestion:
"Although some idiots today insist that the Founding Fathers were inspired by the Ten Commandments, they absolutely were not."
Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters issued this memo today requiring teachers in all schools to keep a Bible in their classroom and teach from it as a historical document. (Via KOCO 5 News)
Oh and the "historical context of our country" is that the Founding Fathers knew from hard personal experience that the mixing of religion and government had caused centuries of war and chaos across Europe, so when they set up a new country here THEY VERY EXPLICITLY DID NOT DO THAT.
That was kind of the exact reason the pilgrims came here. As a person who was super-religious for half her life, I'm always amazed at how many self-proclaimed Christians either don't know this, forget it, or can't see w/5 seconds of reflection why mixing religion & govt is terrible for religion.
The one I’ve always wondered is why they’re cool with letting judges decide who is and isn’t a real Christian, by adjudging whether their beliefs are “sincerely held”.
Anabaptists and baptists are two different groups. But yeah, Anabaptists are also traditionally fond of the separation of church and state.
Except the Münster group and, well, things went badly for them and they no longer exist.
"They imploded spectacularly and were remembered by Mennonites generations later with embarrassment and shame" is probably more accurate, at least from my experience, but.
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God -- Thomas Paine
Any who believes the Founding Fathers were inspired by the 10 Commandments or the Bible has definitely not read the Founding Fathers' writings, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution, and probably not the Bible either.
The Thirty Years War -- wars of state+religion, killing 1/4-1/5 of what is today Germany -- was no further back in their rear view mirror than the American Civil War is in ours -- 150 years.
The pasts that are aren't dead, not even past, are many...
Hate to say this, but from the political party that couldn't remember the lesson of the vietnam war some 25 years after that conflict "ended", we want them to remember separation of church & state? Even though, its written in some really important document or two. Oh, yeah they hate that document.
Good morning class. Today we will learn that Judah fucked his daughter-in-law (bc he mistook her for a prostitute) and the resulting baby was an ancestor of Jesus.
"Today, children, we're going to learn about coveting your neighbor's wife. Please turn to the assigned reading from the Song of Solomon and the story of David and Bathsheba. Don't forget to ask an adult any questions you have about adultery!"
these people are desperate to co-opt taxpayer-funded education to proselytize religion. it's like they know their ideas can't succeed on their own merits
So that's the thing, isn't it? The law is unconstitutional but if it gets upheld by the bribe patrol then showing all the ways the founders purposely avoided enshrining religion in law is a proper application of the insistence teachers use the Bible to teach.
One point I like to make and you can tell me if I'm wrong is that the English colonists writing the constitution were just emerging from an England whose successive monarchs changed religions and killed and oppressed the previous monarchs adherants resulting in civil strife across generations.
Can this be a "Jefferson Bible"?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffers...
He Founded. He Fathered. He espoused Deist views in historic context of "the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power "
I would genuinely love a mass movement of teachers teaching Bible Belt children why the Bible is not a useful source for either history or morality, and all the incontrovertible reasons the USA was explicitly *not* founded as a Christian nation.
