Tuesday, January 17, 2006

And here come the ACLU screams in 3... 2... 1...

New Braunfels, TX school district adding Bible class to its elective curriculum

If they had announced that they were creating an elective class about the Koran, I'll bet nobody'd blink an eye. In fact, didn't a few California school districts actually force elementary schoolers to endure a study of Islam and the Koran a couple of years ago?

Anyway, as irritable as the pseudo-intelligentsia will be about this, it's true -- the Bible is something that our founding fathers knew forwards and backwards and it influenced them a great deal.

Back in the early 1990s, I was taking a graduate class in English Lit at a university in Texas. The professor was a woman, probably in her fifties, unmarried and rather crabby just as a general personality trait. I didn't mind her, actually, but I found her to be unbelievably ignorant in one major thing: she seemed to have no idea of the Bible's influence on the literature we were reading at the time. I'm not the kind of person who sits in a classroom and makes a nuisance of herself preaching to everyone -- not by a longshot. In fact, I often just keep to myself and let other people talk. But we were discussing one piece of lit from the Enlightenment that was an OBVIOUS knockoff of one of the books of the Old Testament. As she discussed it and asked questions, no-one spoke up. Finally I said something to the effect of "I found this to be incredibly similar to the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament of the Bible." The prof looked at me blankly -- I swear to you, this was an OBVIOUS CORRELATION, not something arcane or obtuse, and she had NO IDEA. Most of the rest of the class was spent on angry feminist literature, poems about women being brutally raped, etc... eesh. It was lovely, really. I endured it quietly and said little else, and got an A, but MAN I was shocked at the ignorance, and while it's not a valid leap to assume that ALL profs are that ignorant, I'd be willing to venture that a goodly number of them are.

The Bible, like it or hate it, is a work of literature that had/has a profound influence upon Western culture and deserves close academic study for that reason alone.

But don't tell the ACLU.

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