Bible Studies in NC Schools
[link:http://www.journalnow.com/news/state_region_ap/article_4206c50e-810b-11e2-8c7e-0019bb30f31a.html|
Arika Herron/Winston-Salem Journal Winston-Salem Journal
A measure introduced at the North Carolina legislature would allow the state's public high schools to offer Bible study.
Senate Bill 138, proposed by Sen. Stan Bingham, R-Davidson, on Tuesday, would allow local school boards to offer students elective courses for credit on the Old Testament, the New Testament or a combination of the two.
No student would be required to take the courses, but the courses would provide academic credit toward graduation.
As a former high school history teacher, I don't have an issue with this being added as an Elective. When I was still teaching our Dept Chair was a Methodist minister on the weekends for a small church. M-F he taught history, civics etc and coached JV Ladies basketball teams. Just don't mandate that I teach bible studies. Any serious look at World Religions in my classroom would definitely include a good look at the Quarn, Torah, Hindu's Veda, Buddhism, the Book of Mormon and of course Christianity. I'm sure good ole NC will pass this bill...
= new reply since forum marked as read
I went to a Presbyterian college where everybody had to take 6 hours of Religion to graduate.
The first course was Nature and Function of Religion. It blew my mind. It was about what is a religion? What is a ritual? What is a myth? What is a symbol? Why do we have rituals? etc. Could have been used as an English credit course b/c of the large number of authors we had to read. Freud, Feuerbach, Rudolf Otto, Jacob Needleman, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Dostoyevsky (Notes from the Underground).
The second course I took was Old Testament. It was about the history of the 12 tribes and textual analysis with computers was just beginning. It didn't hurt that the professor was a brilliant linguist who knew ancient and modern languages.
Your average bible-beating preacher could not pass either of the courses I took from this brilliant linguist. They wouldn't take a course this hard because they don't want people to be educated about the bible. They want parrots who don't think. I already had an angry white guy tell me it was bad that I took courses in this stuff because "ya gotta have faith". No thinking allowed.
I didn't think to tell him that I found out what a huge mess the bible is at a christian college from professors who had degrees from seminary at Harvard and Princeton.
