Here is a post on freedom of religion. In our country the major battles on religious freedom are being fought over school choice. Yet most people don’t see it that way. So they advocate school choice by pointing to the differences between the quality of government-run schools and private educational alternatives. That misses the fundamental problem with the government-run school monopoly. When we fail to instill positive virtues in children, we miss the most important part of their education.
Since what we regard as virtuous depends upon what we believe about God, government-run schools cannot do a good job of instructing our children in virtue. What do government-run schools do instead? They strive to make secularists out of our children. Essentially, to avoid the controversy over religion, advocates for public education would have us believe that we can exclude any mention of both the devil and God in our children’s education. So our children grow up believing that both the devil and God are myths. Not good! Not good at all!
“La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.”
(“The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.”)”
Charles Baudelaire
(a silkmoth Ceratomia hagoni / Julie Cook / 2017)
Perhaps the author of today’s quote knows a thing or two about the devil as his life
was speckled with troubles…
as those who were familiar with Monsieur Baudelaire associated him with darkness and depravity…
so perhaps it is true what they say about the devil knowing his own…
But I must say that I totally agree with Monsieur Baudelaire’s observation that it is indeed
one of Satan’s main ploys…
that being to lull us into the notion of his nonexistence.
Last night I was watching a newsy talk show.
I have to be really picky and choosey over the “news” I watch as most outlets that claim
to be News oriented…
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thank you Tom for sharing
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Thanks for the comment.
I was in elementary school when they outlawed prayer in the school. So I guess you have me beat by a few years.
Given what you just said, I gather the Bible instruction you received was somewhat haphazard. The Bible is a great storybook, but stories are only part of it. There are laws, prophecies, history, and theology as well.
The public school system in this country has roots that go back to the 1830’s, at least. Therefore, even when you got your education, the system was well advanced towards secularization. The problem? Well, you observed it. Christians may all largely use the same Bible, but we do have disagreements that matter quite a bit to some people. So once a school system becomes fairly large, teachers start finding it difficult to instruct on religion without offending somebody.
In truth, most Christian Churches use to be far more similar than not. The main difference today is how seriously a Christian takes the Bible.
If someone believes that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and they have put their faith in Jesus, then they are a Christian. Do they have to go to the same church I go to? No.
What most Americans fail to understand how important even instruction such as that you received was. Please check out this series => https://citizentom.com/2016/10/16/who-is-this-man-by-john-ortberg-part-1/. I suspect you would find Ortberg’s book eye-opening. You may not think what you were taught matters. It did.
When I was 17, I told my mother I was not a Christian. I did not believe anymore. She said I was still a Christian. It took me decades to figure out what she understood that I did not. In a fundamental sense, because I had renounced my faith in Jesus, I was not a Christian. However, I still practiced a Christian moral system. I just did not realize that I was doing so.
At one time the United States was so thoroughly Christianized, there was no moral system that anyone accepted except Christian morals. When some did something “wrong”, people unthinking used Christian standards even if they had never opened a Bible because that is what they had been taught.
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I trust completely in the Promises of John 3:16 and I know that Jesus is my Savior because He cannot lie and His Word tells me so …and I had to come to this through trial and tribulation … The School planted the seeds but experiences provided the fire that I had to go through and the cross I had to bear before I sought the saving Grace of Jesus Christ who is Lord … and thank you for your detailed response and explanations.
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That’s great! We each find the way to our Lord (who is the Way) if we wish to do so. Glad you did too!
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He came to seek and to save that which is lost and I was definitely lost when He found me. God bless you.
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As are we all.
God bless you as well.
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I was raised in a public school where the Bible was read as a story book after lunch by the teacher and we opened the morning session with The Lord’s Prayer and each week we all had to pick a memory verse from the Bible …. and the Catholic kids sat there sweating and fidgeting and feeling uncomfrotable ….and we didn’t have any Muslims in the class ….so they did not have to sit through our evangelical foray for the day — I got all this religion mixed with my revised History and Arithmetic and Reading and English and Biology and what have you from fairly wet-behind-the-ears teachers mostly fresh from Teacher College … and the would rather tell stories from their personal lives than stick to the cirriculum …. I endured all this for 12 long years and the part about the religion didn’t do me any good and it didn’t do me any harm and I graduated and went to work and got married and raised a family and paid my taxes … all without too much wear and tear … so that is my story and I do not feel like I was all that “Different” from everybody else. By the way I had a hard time “Living What The Bible Teaches” because there are so many different voices out in the world telling us different things about “What the Bible teaches” and very few if any of the people teaching about the Bible ever agree on much of anything .. so I think Bible Teaching is kind of a moot point from the git go .. So my position is, “Let those who want their kids to learn more about God than about how to cope in the world have their rights to raise their kids as they please and let’s stop all the back and forth about whether schools should be secular or religious or public or private because both kinds serve a purpose.
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Just realized I did not reply directly. See below.
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I’d never heard of the FFRF before.
Thought that was the ACLU.
But I guess they kind of showed their hand when they backed the publicly funded Muslim foot baths.
The District of Columbia once utilized the Bible as a public school reading text.
The chairman of the school board and author of that plan was Thomas Jefferson.
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Books were expensive back then, and everyone wanted a Bible.
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This task concerning children if the parents did what they should and instill values at home. Yes, they should be reinforced at school, but begin with the home where the parents introduce the church to assist.
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Whenever I bring up this issue, I some version of the comment you just made. What is frustrating is when it comes from someone who is an active advocate for the faith. What you just observed sounds reasonable — it is what we were all taught — but it doesn’t work.
Keep in mind the purported purpose of public education. Supposedly we need a public school system to make certain poor kids get an education. For some reason we are suppose to believe education is a right that requires government-run schools. Yet even if education was a right, lots of the relatively well-to-do send their children to private schools that don’t cost anymore than our expensive public schools. So the excuse for the existence of the public school system just isn’t true. The system exists just because some people want to control it. The motives of these people may be diverse, but they are also questionable.
Were you taught religion causes wars? Even as old as I am when I was in school I was taught that religion caused wars. Little positive was said about Christianity and Judaism, and Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and so forth were so scarce not much was said about them either.
Now we have multiculturalism, the belief that all cultures are equally valid. So what does it mean when they say all religions are equally valid? Well, that is a bit of trickery. Secularists do not think what they believe is a religion. They consider their beliefs scientific or just pragmatic. Multiculturalism is in a effect an across the board putdown of religious belief. Effectively, all religions are equally untrue.
What does the Bible say about the instruction of children?
When children spend most of their day in school, it makes no sense for a Christian to send their child to a secular school for instruction, not when the Bible calls upon us to put God’s Word at the forefront of their education. As best we can, we want our children put live as the Bible teaches. So we instructors who believe, and we want a curriculum that reinforces what the Bible teaches.
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