Preaching what they don’t know
It’s one thing to preach what you don’t practice, but what about preaching what you don’t know? This appears to be the case with a majority of Americans according to a quiz given by Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University. We are not just talking about Americans being ignorant of other religions, but ignorant of Christianity and the Bible, of which 80 or so percent of Americans claim personal allegience to.
According to this article by Professor Prothero his students have told him, via a quiz he gives each year, that Paul led the Israelites out of Egypt and Moses was blinded on the road to Damascus. Other formal studies have shown that only one in three Americans can name the four major books of Christianity and that one in 10 think that French army commander Joan of Arc was the wife of Noah.
So, what’s the fix? How do we get Americans to actually study their own religious texts, much less the religious texts of other cultures? Many, including Professor Prothero, believe we should bring the religious texts into our secular schools and teach them from a secular, non-belief point of view. I, for one, consider this a pipe dream even though I support it in theory. Despite the general ignorance, the majority of Americans believe the stories to be factual accounts and they really don’t want to know anything about them.
I think the change has to start somewhere else and that somewhere else is the pews of religious institutions. Until these institutions quit teaching there views as 100% true and accurate as well as the exclusive owner of “The Truth”, we’re going to continue to be largely ignorant and there’s nothing we can do about it. Lets also not forget that many of a sect teaches that belief is the most important thing in the world.
Simply put, if faith and knowledge contradict, it is knowledge that must go, never faith. Faith must be guarded at all costs so even if we were to work out a neutral course on religious texts, it would be just a matter of time before someone threw a fit about having their faith in a particular text, sentence and/or story spanked by knowledge.
Heck, we’ve got people throwing a fit because people use BCE/CE instead of BC/AD. Do you think they could handle being exposed to the fact that Jews don’t believe in the factualness of the Christian texts, that Muslims do not consider Jesus the son of Allah and that some of us non-theists do not think Jesus existed in the first place? And that’s before we get to Buddhism, Hinduism, paganism, Wiccans, Satanists, Raeliens, deists and so forth with their respective holy books and beliefs.
Yea, I just heard their heads explode too.
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[...] that would otherwise provoke a lot of doubt. As Bligbi points out in a recent blog entry, a great number of Americans are woefully ignorant of the content of the Bible. The post mentions a book by Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy, which shows that many [...]
[...] that would otherwise provoke a lot of doubt. As Bligbi points out in a recent blog entry, a great number of Americans are woefully ignorant of the content of the Bible. The post mentions a book by Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy, which shows that many Christians [...]
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I agree with you wholeheartedly.
On the surface, Prothero’s suggestion looks reasonable. However, does he also recommend a special Western-culture course in Greek/Roman mythology, the History of Drama, or World Music? No, of course not! Because regardless of what devious language he uses, his agenda is ramming the bible down the throats of public school children.
And I’m really sick and tired of religious types talking about what great literature the bible is. Yes, there are some beautiful passages in various books. But there’s also plenty of inartistic crap. Could anyone read the dry-as-the-desert rulebooks Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and not be bored out of his or her mind? The first book of Chronicles is loaded with uninteresting lists. The gospel of Luke? At least half of the minor prophets? Most of the non-Pauline epistles? Yawn.