A list of things

Recent events for me to be somewhat pleased about:

• Obama has clinched the necessary number of delegates for the nomination
  
• I have gotten a poster accepted at a conference on the east coast
• I have now completed all obligations for my PhD EXCEPT qualifying and dissertation
• I finally finished playing the game GTAIV (though the game is so pretty that I can see myself playing it again just to explore the fake new york some more)
• I'm going to be an uncle for a second and third time

Things that are kind of irking me

• My netflix DVDs have not come in yet and I mailed them in on Friday. What the hell Netflix!
• The more I learn about McCain (even from his own website and his own speeches) the more I am shocked by how narrow minded he is despite his (nearly) 71 years of life. Although leaps and bounds more adequate than GWBush for a CiC role, I fear that his experiences have taught him nothing with respect to governance at home (I'll go into this in more detail in future posts as that critical Tuesday approaches) and that his main obama-sticking point of experience might actually win him the office despite this.
• I now have to prepare a poster for that conference on the east coast (with less than 2 weeks to do so)
• I have to write a paper for a class
• I have to grade a ton o papers as per my obligation as a TA
  
• I have to come up with a dissertation topic and I have to do that over the summer in order to qualify on time.
• I learned, despite what I had been told in my childhood by respectable elders, that the reason why public primary and secondary schools in this country are secular has very little at all to do with secularist policy makers.
  

More on that last point: Of course until the mid 19th century most schools were teaching children to read using primers and spellers written by clergymen and bursting with biblical passages and references. In high school (like university) intimate knowledge of many specific bible passages was a requirement at the time. This began to change because of two things: A) the ratio of protestants to catholics began to change with the influx of Irish and Italian immigrants in the 1800s, and B) the "Great Awakening" or evangelical movement sought to unify the splintered protestant churches by condensing what was similar and ignoring what was different about the various sub-belief systems of the reformed church.

Regarding B: This created a watered down version of biblical instruction since bible passages were interpreted differently by the different protestant churches. All such bible passages with conflicting interpretations, were taught to students devoid of interpretation. Everyone pretty much was reading the bible 'blind', that's assuming the particular school district could decide on which version of the bible was the appropriate one to use. I don't know if YOU've ever attempted to read the KJversion carefully and on your own but my experience is that it is not an easy task for the average high school kid, and from what I can tell, most adults with a high school education even have a hard time with it. Eventually this process evolved into the ditching of specific religious instruction and the incorporation of "moral" instruction in its place.

Regarding A: Christian (and Jewish) parents were not very happy about sending their kids to a public school which was indoctrinating their children in a belief system (Protestantism) not shared by them. Unitarians were sort of stuck in the middle and it ended up being a handful of them who came up with compromises. So after a spat of riots, murders, and church burnings both sides were happy to make the public schools completely secular and delegating the task of religious education to Sunday schools. The Catholic church actually STRONGLY urged members of their congregation to ignore public schools altogether and just have them pay for private catholic school. But that's another story.

I'm currently in the process of doing more research on that to make sure that the secondary sources confirm the facts, but the reason why this irks me is because I'd been made to sort of feel guilty by my elders for many years and, as it turns out, unjustly. I struggle with my views about religion and education because I think it is certainly ok for religious children to pray in school and I think that high schools should teach courses on religious texts (not just the bible) and religious philosophies (not just the christian varieties). Of course, there is nothing in the national constitution (or any state constitution that I know) that make school prayer illegal. Children are allowed to pray anywhere they'd like on school grounds during school hours, the problem is school sponsored prayer. Similarly, schools are more than welcome to provide courses on religious studies, but few want to try for either fear of complaints and litigation from uninformed parents or lack of interest from the students.

But many average religious Americans blame agnostics, atheists, and secular academics for the lack of God in our schools and this is just plain unfair. Most rational people, atheists secular or not, don't have a problem with kids practicing their religions in schools. They just don't want the teachers to be stuck in the position of inadvertently telling little Ming Tao Hsu or little Elizabeth Ebrahimi that they and their families are going to hell because they don't practice the one true religion. This is a very real and very serious problem in MANY schools around the country.

I guess I just wish that people in general were aware of the straw men they build and use in their arguments. This is one of the biggest straw men out there and one that I keep hearing over and over again in the media.