Texas’s selections of readings that students must read are specific selections of verses and interpretations biased toward a particular view of theology and morality. It chooses mistranslations. Texas is requiring historically misleading passages and interpretations to preach to students–an outrageous rejection of the founders’ belief in church and state separation.
These passages and interpretations don’t help one understand history or literacy, but mislead in favor of a particular historically false theological interpretation that doesn’t aid in understanding the Bible’s historical or literature value.
At the nation’s founding, the Bible was not the most quoted text. This claim comes from a study that includes a lot of sermons reprinted on pamphlets, so, every time a religious sermon was printed on a pamphlet, which happened a lot back then, that counted as quoting the Bible. Additionally, these weren’t founding fathers quoting the Bible, but preachers preaching.
The most cited authors at the time of the founding were: Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke.
The period when the US Constitution was drafted has the lowest church attendance in US history.
The Federalists did not cite the Bible at all around the founding. The Anti-Federalists cited the Bible as nine percent of their citations. The Federalists, those who wrote the Constitution, did not cite the Bible when arguing for the Constitution. They believed in separation of church and state.
Christianity is a deep part of American culture and history, but people falsely exaggerate its direct role in the founding of the country.
Many state governments violated the principles of separation of state and church, but when the founders, who were sent by the states, came together to make a Constitution, they left such violations out of the new federal government and forbade acts that would create an established religion.
Utter nonsense. Requiring public schools to post the ten commandments in their classrooms is forcing a particular religion down the throat of every child, using taxpayer funds. It is advocating the value of the Bible over other religions or non-religion. If a Muslim majority school district required every classroom to post lines from the Quran, people would be outraged. Unless the class is literally studying religion or that area of history, posting religious texts is advocating that or those religions and is an act of establishing an official religion.
When you see a rainbow you are seeing light split through water. No one sees the same rainbow as you because they are seeing a different split of light split through different water. You can’t see a rainbow from the side because it only splits toward you. You can’t get to the bottom of the rainbow, because you are always seeing it straight on. That’s why it is a good place to hide the gold.
If you want to believe God explains the things science can’t, that is your right to believe what you want. But you shouldn’t be designing a school’s science curriculum, because that idea undermines what science is. That is an ideology of ignorance, while science is a process of discovery.
“While religion is not banned in public schools, the Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that state-sponsored prayer in public schools violates the First Amendment.”
“Texas will require all public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments under a new law that will make the state the nation’s largest to attempt to impose such a mandate.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced Saturday that he signed the bill, which is expected to draw a legal challenge from critics who consider it an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state.”
“Texas has become the latest state to pass a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms. The bill, which is already being legally challenged and is unlikely to pass constitutional muster, is part of a recent trend of red states attempting to inject religious texts into the classroom.”
“There’s a slight of hand when people declare the United States is a Christian nation. The nation was clearly founded on enlightenment principles that included freedom of religion and separation of church and state. These principles were put into the Constitution, and we know their meaning because we have the writings of the founders. At the same time, the country was a mostly Christian populace whose culture evolved from a Europe that had been Christian for many hundreds of years. Of course much of the ethos of such a society is going to be infused with Christian ideas, which themselves had been infused with Jewish, Roman, and Greek ideas. The country was and is majority Christian; in this sense it was a Christian nation. The country is and has always been heavily influenced by Christian culture, so also in that sense it is a Christian nation. But, at the nation’s founding, the founders explicitly created a government that was not supposed to implement Christianity upon its people, so in that sense it is not a Christian nation. As the country’s religious diversity grows, it becomes less of a Christian nation unless it can maintain some underlying Christian culture that goes beyond religious belief.”
“In June, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, signed a bill mandating that all public school classrooms display a poster of the Ten Commandments. Just over a week later, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters declared that “every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom,” later telling PBS News Hour, “the separation of church and state appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution.”
Since 2023, four states have attempted to mandate or are considering legislation mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.”
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“Even if a bill mandating that schools display the Ten Commandments gets struck down, legislators supporting the bill still get to tout their record as strident Christian conservatives.”