God in the public schools?

The people who think the public schools should indoctrinate children in whatever the local majority believes about God (as long as it's Christian, of course), may think that allowing public schools to teach about the Bible is a huge victory. You'll find some of them in the comments at the link. They should read the story again.

What the ruling says is that public schools teachers can teach about the impact of the Bible and Christianity on literature, history, and civilization. It doesn't say that a teacher can turn a class into Bible studies and preach the Word, as he or she understands it.

I'd go one better and say (as an atheist) that you can't possibly do justice to Western civilization without addressing the impact of Christianity. And you can't do that without reference to the various incarnations of the Bible.

The fundamentalists will be sorely disappointed, however. The King James Version has to be studied for its effects on literature, but its liberties with translation and the mistakes of its translators have to be taught, too. Oops, so much for Bible literalism (which was never a coherent doctrine anyway). But, since this won't be in biology class, at least they'll get a context in which discussion of Genesis is legitimate.

The teachers will need to discuss the history of Jesus's teachings, too. Much of what he thought and taught was not original but derived from the teachings of ascetic Jewish sects such as the Essenes.

Then, there's the whole history of what we now call the Bible - the writing long after the death of Jesus, the determination (by bureaucracy!) of the canon much, much later. That whole history is very muddy (see The DaVinci Code as well as more serious work) and pounds another nail into the coffin of inerrancy.

So, the people who want to put God into the public schools will be disappointed. By opening the Bible up to literary and historical scrutiny, they may encourage a worse outcome - in their view - than in not teaching about it at all. They're not looking for analysis and skepticism; they want belief.

Once the law passes (and it will), there no doubt will be zealots who tread waaay over the line into (Protestant) catechism. They'll be called to witness to their students. In most places, they'll be corrected by the administration, and that's as far as it will go, but some folks will take it further (was it Union Co. that was releasing its kids to Baptist revivals?), and then the ACLU will have to sue.

But the existing law and the new bill as interpreted are right and good. You can and should be able to teach about religion in the public schools. You just shouldn't be able to inculcate religion in the public schools. That job is for parents if they wish and their houses of worship. To take it away from them would be an establishment of religion prohibited by the First Amendment.

Originally posted on TennViews.

Update:
I am a little uncomfortable with scoffers purporting to teach the Bible in public schools, so I would have been reticent to support this legislation, but various of your remarks are over the top.

I think you want to bring Sunday school to the weekday. That's an establishment of religion and unconstitutional. You cannot qualify who may teach about the Bible by their beliefs, so I would suggest you contact your representatives in opposition to this bill. Hang on for a theocracy or at least the repeal of the First Amendment establishment clause.

It's no big deal that Jesus' teachings were reflective or incorporated older Jewish teachings

Not older. Contemporaneous with Jesus. If he adopted his message from someone else, which he did, it's hard to believe that he was the messiah.

The concept of Biblical Literalism doesn't hinge on an English translation of the Biblical texts.

I haven't seen the concept in action, but I've seen the reality. As most literalists understand it, what they read in the English Bible, usually a derivative of the KJV, is the inerrant word, no matter what scholars (who are believers, too) have learned about errors in translation.

And the Bible fares pretty well on the "written long after the events" criticism when compared to any other ancient text.

Nonsense. We have lots of books older than the New Testament. Many of them were written contemporaneously with the events they report. Many of them were not assembled by a committee, either.

there is more substance there than you seem to think there is.

I think there's quite a lot of substance in the Bible, almost all of it in the Christian New Testament. Ironically, many fundamentalist Christians love and fear the vicious and punitive God of the Old Testament, while Jews have learned a much more just and forgiving way of thinking about God. (In fairness, I don't know any fundamentalist Jews, and they do exist.)

In any case, our culture is filled with the influence of Christianity and the Bible, and that needs to be taught to anyone who hopes to understand the world. But to teach students in a public school setting that Christ was divine and his teachings are the one true religion would be rightly illegal.

Update:
You think wrong.

So the devout have been telling me for nearly 40 years! Maybe you should tell me how you want the Bible taught in public school, though I think my interpretation was fair, given your objection to "scoffers". It certainly sounds as though you wish the Bible taught only by believers, but let me know, as I could be mistaken.

List the ancient historical documents that are more historically reliable than the Bible.

How is the Bible historically reliable? Its prehistory in Genesis is myth and poetry. The Bible does record some events that are confirmed at least in outline by other sources, and the places it records are real places. But there's lots in it for which it is the sole source.

Many writings of the Greeks, the early Romans, the Persians, the Chinese, and the Indians predate the New Testament, and many of these predate even the Hebrew Bible as a written work. A list of works at least as historically reliable as the Christian Bible would be pretty long. Even the Iliad would be on it, despite its obvious bias, as well as the early Hindu scriptures, though they probably have parts too that are even more fantastic than the miracles of the Christian Bible. You know, the stuff like Revelation. Even Herodotus could make the list, and he was sort of a blogger 2500 years ago, writing down what others told him and passing judgement on their veracity, which sounds a lot like the process that gave rise to the Bible.

For more reliable than the Bible, "The History of the Peloponnesian War" is a good place to start. Pliny wrote about Pompeii about the time parts of the Bible were written down from the oral tradition, and he's pretty reliable. I'd guess, though I'm not sure, that there's work in Confucius that's more historically reliable than the Bible, too, just in a very different part of the world. I'd be very surprised not to find other works in Asia. If you want astronomical reliability, the Maya can give you that, though they wrote in stone.

Were the Essenes teaching that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God? The Savior of the World? The Messiah? God made man? Sinless?

The Essenes were waiting for a Messiah to come as savior, as promised in Jewish prophecy. But, no, they didn't prophesy the Last Supper.

Did Jesus really teach that he was the messiah? Or did his followers, especially Paul, add that in after the fact? With a few textual adjustments, you could cast Jesus as calling his followers to be themselves sons and daughters of God on a par with him (not that I do).

Hence however my interest in the adoption of the canon by the ecclesiastical bureaucracy. The more you poke around in what's canonical, deuterocanonical, or apocryphal and to whom, not to mention all the other works that call themselves gospels, prophecies, or at least scripture, the more you have to ask, why is this the Bible?