2006-11-14T09:12:53-04:00

Jon Rowe has a post at Positive Liberty where he deftly shreds the nonsense being spewed by Mike Adams about legislating morality. Here’s what jumps out at me about Adams’ screed. In the first part of his two part article on the subject, he declares himself to be the noble myth destroyer:

Part of my job as your professor is to dispel certain myths you learn in your other classes, especially sociology. If you decide to question these myths in Sociology 101, your professor is likely to assign you to sensitivity training sessions…

Needless to say, I can’t take on all of the myths you will encounter every semester at UNC-Wilmington. In fact, each semester I design a project that focuses on just one of those myths. This semester I will focus on the myth that society “can’t legislate morality.”

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2006-10-14T18:10:35-04:00

I came across this post on another blog, and a comment by someone claiming that Dawkins, in his new book The God Delusion says that Thomas Jefferson was an atheist. Here’s the comment:

I hate to bring up the name of St. Richard Dawkins too often, as I know he makes the biscuit worshippers come out in a rash. However, in his new book (“The God Delusion” – that’s what I love him for, zero words minced) he actually talks about the secularism of the founders and the evidence for Jefferson, at least, being an out-and-out atheist.

These guys were doing their polito-philosophical stuff under the influence of deists like Voltaire. I find it hard to believe that Jefferson – arguably the most brilliant man to run a country, anywhere, ever, and certainly the sort of chap I’d choose to found my nation – believed in fairies at the bottom of the garden.

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2006-10-10T09:35:46-04:00

Gotta love this kind of hatchet job on a man running for an appeals court position in Texas. They’ve outed him as an atheist and are claiming that he will therefore refuse to do his job:

Should Franks be elected in November, one would have to conclude that he will hold true to his out of touch “atheist” belief system and ignore the laws and Constitution of Texas.

Only if one is a blithering idiot, of course. And that would appear to be a requirement for being in the Texas Republican party, home to the likes of David Barton and Terri Leo.

2006-09-29T09:46:21-04:00

Jon Rowe has an excellent post once again blasting David Barton for his utterly irrational historical revisionism in regard to religion and the constitution. He points to a document I’ve never seen before, an affidavit that Barton filed in the McCreary ten commandments case. You have to read this document. The illogic is absolutely breathtaking. He points again and again to early colonial laws that were completely opposed to freedom of thought and religion as being the key to understand the nation’s founding. For instance:

In an effort to substantiate this position historically, critics often point to the Rhode Island Colony under Roger Williams and its lack of civil laws on the first four commandments to “prove” that American society was traditionally governed without the first “tablet.” However, they fail to mention that the Rhode Island Colony was the only one of the thirteen colonies that did not have civil laws derived from the first four divine laws -the so-called first “tablet.” Significantly, every other early American colony incorporated the entire Decalogue into its own civil code of laws.

Which is true, but it actually conflics with his argument. The US constitution absolutely forbids such laws from being passed today. Just look at the examples he cites:
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2006-04-19T11:12:34-04:00

Ken Brown has a post pointing to Joe Carter’s essay on the subject of theocracy and the fear of it that is often expressed by those on the left. Carter argues that accusations that the religious right is pushing for theocracy are empty political rhetoric. While he admits that “some conservative Christians in our country do want to establish a theocracy” he also argues that their numbers “are rather negligible and their political influence almost non-existence (sic)”. I’m going to agree in part and disagree in part. Yes, I think the left often exaggerates the risk of theocracy and applies the term to people who aren’t really theocrats; on the other hand, I think Carter downplays the amount of influence that true theocrats do have within the various apparati of the religious right and even the Republican Party itself.

First, let’s define who we’re talking about. I don’t think that most religious right followers or leaders are actual theocrats. A theocrat is one who believes that religious law, as defined by sacred text, should be the civil and criminal law of the land. There are disagreements among theocrats as to which laws specifically should be enforced and how to do so, but this general definition works for our purposes. I think we should define this narrowly enough that it does not include, for example, someone who applies such laws only minimally.
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2006-04-11T11:16:02-04:00

Jon Rowe has a post linking to this article by Dave Daubenmire, a guy whose sole credentials are that he once coached high school football. Now, I remember taking classes from the coaches in high school. I remember having to explain econometric formulas to the baseball coach who taught economics, one of the two required classes for seniors at my high school. I remember the basketball coach, who taught the other required class for seniors (government), telling me to go find the latest Time magazine and write about whatever was on the cover after I turned in a paper about the voting patterns of various religious groups in America. Let’s just say their efforts at teaching – which involved a lot of filmstrips and videos – weren’t exactly rigorous (and before someone tells me that their dad was a teacher and a coach and was a very good teacher, I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule; that does not, however, invalidate the rule).

Anyway, Coach Daubenmire’s amusing attempts at American history fall flat on their face right from the start when he says:

Did you know that 52 of the 55 signers of “The Declaration of Independence” were orthodox, deeply committed, Christians? The other three all believed in the Bible as the divine truth, the God of scripture, and His personal intervention.

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2006-04-10T15:41:31-04:00

Whenever you see a religious right apologist claiming that America was founded as a “Christian nation”, you inevitably find them defining the nation not from the point it was founded – the time of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – but from the time of the colonies that were still ruled by England. In particular, they like to point to documents like the Mayflower Compact and the charters of the various colonies, all of whom had official established churches, as proof that we were indeed founded as a Christian nation.

The National Reform Association, which has been around for nearly two centuries and has made repeated attempts to amend the Constitution to include language declaring America an officially Christian nation, cites those documents on their webpage. Innumerable Christian webpages refer to those earlier documents for evidence, including this one:
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2006-03-06T08:55:51-04:00

As I noted the other day, and as many other blogs have discussed, there is a bill in front of the Missouri state legislature with enormous church/state implications. It is House Concurrent Resolution 13 and it reads pretty much like something out of a David Barton pamphlet. I’m going to examine it line by line and point out some of the absurdities and misrepresentations found within it:

Whereas, our forefathers of this great nation of the United States recognized a Christian God and used the principles afforded to us by Him as the founding principles of our nation…

Both claims found here are false. Most of our “forefathers” were of course Christian (no one in their right mind could doubt that), but some of them quite famously were not. Unless they wish to erase Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin and several other prominent “forefathers”, this statement does not match the historical reality. More importantly, the notion that the principles on which this nation was founded were products of the “Christian God” are utterly false.

Nowhere in the Bible or, for that matter, in Christian theology prior to the Enlightenment, will you find anything like the principles of political equality and unalienable rights found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Nowhere will you find anything even close to the first amendment anywhere in the Bible, nor anything analogous to any of the other founding principles of our nation. You will find all of those ideas in the writings of Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and Montesquieu, but not in the Bible.
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2005-09-19T13:21:14-04:00

I’ve been trying to find out what was said at that press conference called by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools – you know, the one with Chuck Norris – earlier this month. As it turns out, after savaging Mark Chancey’s scathing report on the suitability of their curriculum as the efforts of “far left, anti-religion extremists”, the NCBCPS has actually incorporated those criticisms into new revisions to that curriculum and they announced those revisions at the press conference:

At the time, National Council officials lambasted Chancey’s report and the Texas Freedom Network. A statement still posted on the council’s website Sept. 16 labeled TFN “a radical humanist organization” and said the group was “desperate to ban one book — the Bible — from public schools.”

It also said Chancey’s report “cites several passages from the teacher’s guide to the curriculum out of context, and clearly misrepresents the curriculum’s contents and objectives.”

Nonetheless, many of Chancey’s recommended changes — including substantive ones — are reflected in the latest revision.

For example, Chancey faulted the curriculum for assuming a Protestant view of the Bible in the material’s very first section, titled “Introduction to the Bible.” It had asserted that “there are 66 books in the entire Bible” and that Scripture has “two major divisions” — the Old Testament and the New Testament.

However, Chancey noted, Jews do not accept the New Testament as part of the Bible. Therefore, it is accepted practice among biblical scholars to refer to the Old Testament as the “Hebrew Bible.”

In addition, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians accept several books as part of the biblical canon in addition to those that Protestants accept.

The revised curriculum now begins the section by saying, “The term Bible means ‘books,’ but refers to different volumes for different religions. For example, ‘the Hebrew Bible’ of the Jewish faith contains 24 books…. While the Old Testament of the King James translation and other Protestant Bibles contains 39 books, it consists of 46 books in the Catholic Bible.”

In another example, the new version removes a citation, presented as fact, of an urban legend that attempted to prove the historical veracity of a famous passage from the book of Joshua. It had suggested that teachers tell their students to take note “in particular the interesting story of the sun standing still in chapter 10. There is documented research through NASA that two days were indeed unaccounted for in time (the other being in II Kings 20:8-11).”

A statement on NASA’s website says the agency never made any such claim.

I’m trying to get my hands on a full list of the revisions to see if they took out or revised the numerous other examples of shoddy scholarship, like the use of Carl Baugh’s creationist videos or David Barton’s pseudo-historical research. I’ve written to Mark Chancey to get more details. And while Chancey commends the NCBCPS for making the revisions, I can only laugh at the contradiction between the hysterical ad hominems they threw at him and the Texas Freedom Network when the report was released and their now admission that many of those criticisms were accurate. And note that they had just revised the curriculum in March of this year and it was that revision that was used in Chancey’s report in the first place. The only thing that changed in the last 6 months is the existence of his report, the same report that they disingenuously claimed was a vicious attack on the Bible and totally without foundation only a few weeks ago. Always good to see people who claim that teaching the Bible is the key to building moral behavior among our children engaging in highly dishonest rhetoric.

2005-08-23T10:50:04-04:00

Our fevered friends at StopTheACLU have issued a “Code Red Alert” because the ACLU is trying to get the courts to allow people of different religions to be able to swear on something other than the Bible when taking an oath in court (they don’t have specific links, so you’ll have to scroll about halfway down to find it). They’ve filed suit in North Carolina, which forbids people from taking an oath in court on anything other than the Bible. And naturally, the anti-ACLUers are up in arms over it. And their reasoning is quite amusing:

We are a Judeo-Christian country, not a Muslim one. The facts are not in dispute. America was founded on the Judeo-Christian faith. It is estimated that 52 of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence were Christian men. Many of them encouraged the Bible to be taught in classrooms (to the chagrin of the ACLU).

First of all, there is no “Judeo-Christian faith”. Judaism and Christianity are separate religions. Christians have faith in Christ, Jews do not. Second, the ACLU’s suit actually seeks to allow Jews to swear on the Hebrew scriptures rather than on a Christian bible that contains a New Testament that they reject entirely. They want to focus only on Muslims swearing on the Quran because, well, Muslims are the current bad guys. But the ACLU’s position is broader than that and would also allow Jews, Hindus and other religions to not have to swear an oath on a book they reject. Thirdly, there were no public schools at the time of our founding. But wait, it gets better:

If you have any such doubt, I encourage you to visit this site for the many quotations of our Founders and note what the Father of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, stated “We’ve staked the future of all our political institutions upon our capacity…to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”(NOT the Koran, ACLU).

How many different ways can one passage be idiotic? Let us count them. First, the quote is completely fictitious. Madison never said it and that has long been acknowledged even by David Barton. It is one of about a dozen fake quotes that have been passed around for decades now based on Barton’s work despite his public letter admitting they are false. The webpage that they suggest you link to contains almost all of the other fake quotes too, including this Patrick Henry fake quote with an amusing attribution:

“It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.” [May 1765 Speech to the House of Burgesses]

This quote is usually passed along without any specific citation, but this is the second one I’ve seen. The first one only said that it was in response to the Stamp Act, which was also in 1765 but not until October, so this can’t be referring to that. The obvious problem, the thing that should tell anyone with even a 5th grade understanding of American history that the quote cannot possibly be authentic, is that there was no nation in 1765. How could Patrick Henry possibly have referred to “this nation” 11 years before we even declared independence? We were still British colonies at the time, not a nation, and we certainly hadn’t been “founded” as a nation yet. And there was little “freedom to worship” in the colonies in 1765 as most colonies had established churches. Even funnier, they actually have two entirely different versions of the same Madison quote! And for crying out loud, it even has quotes from Thomas Paine ostensibly supporting the notion of America as a “Christian nation”! Anyway, back to the Madison “quote”…

Second, Muslims accept the Ten Commandments, as they accept all of the Torah as being divinely inspired. The 5 books of Moses are scripture to a Muslim just as much as the Quran is.

Most importantly, the anti-ACLUers don’t seem to have thought this through very well. The whole notion behind swearing an oath, and this goes way back even to John Locke, is that if someone swears an oath to their God they are more likely to be honest because they know that their God will punish them if they’re not. The fear of eternal punishment allegedly keeps them in line (which is nonsense, but that’s the premise). But if you force, say, a Hindu person to swear an oath on the Bible, you are already forcing them to be dishonest right from the start. So the whole purpose of having an oath is defeated if they are swearing to a God they don’t believe in. But these Christian Supremacists don’t really care about things like honesty, they just want you to have to pay homage to their beliefs.

2005-08-01T18:22:19-04:00

The full report on the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools’ Bible course curriculum is now available from the Texas Freedom Network. The report was written by Mark Chancey, a professor of Biblical studies at Southern Methodist University. As Chancey notes, the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools has quite a select group of supporters and they’ve managed to compile an entire curriculum on how to teach about the Bible without a single Biblical scholar on either their 8 member Board of Directors or their 50+ member Advisory Committee. They do, however, have Mr. and Mrs. Chuck Norris on that committee, so no doubt they’ll have great material on spinning back kicks and bad movies. The list of folks who endorse this curriculum is staggering and they include everyone from the American Center for Law and Justice to Kent Hovind’s Creation Science Evangelism, which hardly boosts their credibility.

One of the interesting things that Chancey notes is that the entire curriculum is written from a peculiarly Protestant viewpoint. One would think that a non-sectarian and informational rather than devotional class about the Bible would include, for instance, an examination of the history of the development of the Bible, the different versions of the Bible in use by Christian churches around the world, the Jewish perspective on the Biblical texts that were written in Hebrew and how they developed, and so forth. But this curriculum contains virtually none of that information:
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2005-08-01T13:34:48-04:00

One of the growing trends around the country is school boards allowing schools to teach an elective course on the bible. The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools (NCBCPS) has been very active in lobbyign school boards to do so and selling them their textbooks for such a class in the process. Such courses are legal as long as they are, in the words of first amendment scholar Charles Haynes, “taught academically, not devotionally.” Schools can teach about the bible, about what people believe about it, but they may not endorse biblical teachings or any particular religious belief. But in practice, of course, this distinction rapidly breaks down. Such classes are being approved by school boards precisely because they want to endorse Christianity and that is exactly what the curricula are generally designed to do. And this morning’s New York Times points out just how far such courses go in achieving that goal.

The National Council says that their curriculum is used by 312 school districts in 37 states, reaching more than 175,000 students. And as the times notes, “The national council’s efforts are endorsed by the Center for Reclaiming America, Phyllis Schlafly’s group the Eagle Forum, Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council, among others.” But in truth, this may well be little more than a way of smuggling in creationism:

Some of the claims made in the national council’s curriculum are laughable, said Mark A. Chancey, professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, who spent seven weeks studying the syllabus for the freedom network. Mr. Chancey said he found it “riddled with errors” of facts, dates, definitions and incorrect spellings. It cites supposed NASA findings to suggest that the earth stopped twice in its orbit, in support of the literal truth of the biblical text that the sun stood still in Joshua and II Kings.

“When the type of urban legend that normally circulates by e-mail ends up in a textbook, that’s a problem,” Mr. Chancey said.

Tracey Kiesling, the national council’s national teacher trainer, said the course offered “scientific documentation” on the flood and cites as a scientific authority Carl Baugh, described by Mrs. Kiesling as “an internationally known creation scientist who founded the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Tex.”

This is all quite laughable except that 175,000 students around the country are being taught this nonsense. Carl Baugh is an utter fraud, acknowledged so even by his fellow creationists. He and Kent Hovind are the only major creationists still using the Paluxy footprints as “proof” that humans and dinosaurs lived together at the same time, decades after this claim was debunked by their fellow creationists. And this ridiculous story about NASA’s computers proving that the sun stood still is the sort of thing believed in only by the truly stupid or delusional. The folks who put together this curriculum are scraping the bottom of the barrell for claims that even their fellow creationists realized were false a very long time ago.

In addition, the curriculum also quotes approvingly from Christian Nation apologist David Barton and claims that the bible was “the blueprint for the Constitution.” As Haynes says, they must not have read the Constitution. If the Constitution is based upon the bible, then one should be able to point to provisions in the Constitution and to their analogs in the bible, but there are none. On the other hand, one can trace provisions of the Constitution directly to the work of Enlightenment thinkers like John Locks and Montesquieu, the men who actually did lay down the blueprint for our Constitution.


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