- cross-posted to:
- politics
- cross-posted to:
- politics
It’s also likely to backfire on the religious right. They better hope that the kids skip the assigned reading, much less actual discussion and debate about it in class. As many an ex-evangelical can tell you, direct exposure to what the Bible actually says is often the first step to walking away from Christian fundamentalism altogether.
There’s a reason conservative Christians prefer quoting solitary Bible verses out of context: Not only does this allow them to twist the meaning for their own personal or political ends, but it also makes it much easier to avoid the critical thinking that engaging with longer passages can provoke. On my YouTube show “Standing Room Only,” the scholar and former evangelical Brad Onishi pointed to 2 Chronicles 7:20, a passage Christian nationalists often deploy to argue that America is meant to be a Christian nation by relying on the verse’s violent implications of God promising to “pluck” the unbelievers “up by the roots out of my land.” The larger context reveals that this story is about the ancient king Solomon, and it has nothing to do with the modern nation-state, much less one on a continent unknown to the writers of the Bible.
I’m very happy my kids watch Jake Doubleyoo on YouTube, where he rightly places Christian mythology on the same level as other world mythologies.
I took an AP level world theology class my senior year of high school, and it was taught by the senior priest at my school. She, thankfully, taught it from a quite just dispassionate point of view, placing Christianity on an even level with every other religion we discussed, showing it both no favoritism, and positioning it, alongside the others, with no particular validity.
She could clearly see that I was quite quickly progressing towards a position of atheism, and I was very much getting the feeling that it was a position she, even as a priest, held as well. There was a silent understanding between us. And I felt a bit of camaraderie with her.
I learned an awful lot from that class. About different cultures and different societies and how different belief systems were formed. About how and why different people came to believe the things they do and why. It taught me a lot about different people and different perspectives. It might’ve been the best humanities course I ever took. and, because I was the only one who took the course, it was pretty much one on one.
The more you learn about religion in general, the clearer it becomes that it is entirely a mechanism to control the people. It is such a good mechanism for it, in fact, that literally EVERY culture throughout history has employed it for that very use.