Public Schools, Religion and Deception

One of society’s most fundamental responsibilities is the education of the young. One of the primary goals of that education is to prepare the young to live effectively in the world in which they will have to function. There was a time when society changed very little from generation to generation. Education of the young could rely heavily on a tradition that had sufficed for previous generations. As the world changed for economics and politics with the rise of the industrial revolution and its introduction of an ever-increasing rate of change, so it did for education. Education today must prepare students to live in a world their parents can hardly glimpse. Ironically, this awareness is a powerful stimulant for parents to flee to the perceived verities of an earlier age and to impose an education, based on that earlier age, upon their children. Nothing could be of less value to their children or to the democratic society in which they, possibly, will live.

We see this scenario being played out in our local schools. Two Board members of the Murrieta Valley Unified School District (MVUSD) initially proposed teaching a course on the Bible in literature, art and history. The Board was split with a majority favoring a course on world religions. The result has been a staff proposal to teach a one year course on the Bible in literature and a one semester course on world religions. These options are to be considered by the Board as a whole and voted on at their April, 26, 2007 meeting.

In my judgment a course focused on one religious book does little to prepare students for the world in which they will live and is in fact damaging to that goal. The text for this course is An Illustrated Guide to the Bible by J. A. Porter. Conversely a course presenting the world’s religions objectively would obviously be a benefit. The texts for these two courses are available for inspection through April 25^th at the school distinct administrative offices. There are two books used for this course, namely, Scriptures of the World’s Religions by James Fraser and Experiencing the World’s Religions by Michael Molloy. I have examined the books and the text on the Bible is, in my judgment, substantially a gloss using art and literature as a way to talk about one religious book. The texts on world religions are not the worst. However there is negligible attention paid to the large variety of religious wars and the consequences of religious prejudices. This lack of objectivity is a violation of the fundamental value of education, i.e. to learn how things really are and how things really work. There is a subtle assumption that religion is basically good even though particular religions differ radically in the way they regard human beings and in their belief systems and behavioral injunctions.

A similar lack of objectivity is the absence of the voluminous literature of religious skepticism. There are five pages concerned with secularism in one of the books, but even here it is in a very muted form of secularism, e.g. suggesting that their might be an accommodation between religion and science, indeed, that environmentalism may become a religion. Students need to know the long history of religious skepticism if they are to understand the history of religion. They should know that Socrates was forced to commit suicide for "refusing to recognize the gods recognized by the state" and "of corrupting the youth.” They should know of Lucretius’ atomistic account of the natural world. They should know that the Catholic Church placed Galileo under house arrest for the last years of his life for declaring that Copernicus was right. They should know that the Church burned Bruno at the stake for his support of science. They should know of the religious skepticism of David Hume, and the Deism of Tom Paine, Washington, Jefferson and Madison. They should know of a similar skepticism among American personages of literature, e.g. Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and our own recently deceased Kurt Vonnegut.

Students should know of the horrors of religious conflict and prejudice and why religion is so often a basis for prejudice, namely, its absolutism permits no way to negotiate differences. They should know of the deadliness of religious warfare from the Crusades and the sacking of Constantinople, and the disasters of the Children’s Crusade to the religious wars of Europe, including the slaughter of the Huguenots, which so profoundly affected the thinking of the founders in formulating the Establishment clause of the Constitution prohibiting a state religion. They should be aware of the Inquisition and the torture and barbarity visited on those who did not confess their Christianity.

Additionally, in my judgment, there should be extensive material on the nature of belief and the difference between belief and evidence.

Finally, it is important to know that of the two Board members initially proposing the Bible course, one is a pro bono lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a fundamentalist Christian group of lawyers seeking to establish a Christian theocracy in place of our non-theistic democracy, notice I did not say anti-theistic. The segue from non-theistic to anti-theistic has been a favorite method of the Religious Right in attacking secularism. They demonize agnostics, atheists and secularism in general as being opposed to religious freedom. That freedom is the freedom to express not to dominate. Prominent among ADF’s specters are gays. Ken Dickson, an ADF lawyer on the MVUSD Board, has defended a Poway student who wore a T-shirt to school emblazoned with anti-gay statements. The student was sent home for an acceptable shirt. Dickson argues that the boy’s freedom of speech was denied. Hate as free speech in an environment which children are required to be in? On that basis, as my wife Eleanor notes, students should be allowed to bring guns to school by way of the right to bear arms clause as interpreted by the National Rifle Association. Among the funders of the ADF is Eric Prince of the Amway-Prince automotive empire and founder of the private army Blackwater USA. The ADF legally fights against gays, atheists, secularism and for the legal imposition of Christian values, often called family values. They would prefer no public schools, but failing that seek to make public schools Christian in their orientation.

Bob Newhard

G. W. Bush and the Banality of Evil

George W. Bush has made much of “evil” including it as a cause justifying war. Having been assigned such an important role, it merits examination.

Hannah Arendt, whose main concern after World War II was to understand totalitarianism, was sent by the New York Times to report on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. She discovered in Eichmann a well-educated person demonstrating no hatred for the Jews, in fact working with Zionists to find a place for them to migrate to. However, when the Nazis decided that the final solution was to be extermination Eichmann found no trouble in carrying out his assignment to round up and send to concentration camps some 400,000 Jews. Puzzled by Eichmann’s ordinariness in light of the horrors he had committed, Arendt reflected on evil as she had totalitarianism in her earlier books. She offered her thoughts in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, an account of the Eichmann trial. In this study she coined her now famous phrase the “banality of evil.” That which is banal lacks originality, it is ordinary, routine and, I suggest, intellectually dull. As one commentator put it, there is no interior dialogue, no asking and answering questions, just the focus on doing the routine well. This notion of evil contrasts with that of many people, including G. W. Bush, that evil is focused on creating as much pain, suffering and death as it can.

But if evil can flow from the banality of Eichmann’s sense of duty might it not flow from other states of mind focused on the banal for different reasons?

One of the things that has puzzled me about G. W. Bush is how an individual can look at all the death and destruction he has caused and is causing and yet persist in the effort and all this in the face of no threat. What level of callousness does this take? Bush gives no evidence of creative thinking. No evidence of any significant educational impact. No appreciation for the complexity of human existence. In brief there is every evidence that Bush’s interior life is awash in banality. Some have seen in him the Dry Drunk phenomenon in which the reformed alcoholic must so continually focus on avoiding a relapse that no questioning or entertaining doubt can be permitted lest he loose his grip. This too is a form of the banal.

The point of the banality of evil is that otherwise ordinary people can create the most horrible of crimes because of the intensity of their focus on a single justifying principle. Perhaps the terrorist and religious fanatic can be understood as extreme cases of banality. If so, the importance of thinking takes on a new dimension.

Bob Newhard