In Oklahoma they are passing a law to mandate a Bible be in every classroom.
I don't have as much of an issue with this as I do with hanging the (Protestant Evangelical) ten commandments on the wall. The Bible, like many other religious texts is an important book...
Just one little question:
Which Bible?
Ya'll say "The Bible" like you have a Pope and there is only one. That's not true. So... which one?
If you don't know then maybe you are not qualified to make such mandates.
@futurebird my brain is silly, but it got me thinking if we could use LLMs to rewrite the King James version but make it for ants??? Then spread copies all over the internets so other LLMs ingest it. And maybe even self publish it on Amazon and give it all 5 star reviews. Then put copies in all those schools...
@futurebird 🧵 As a former student of Theology and Religious studies, I have a simple explication for which many Americans will hate me: THE bible doesn't exist. We only have different corpuses of text collections and translations.
Why?
(People who believe that God personally dictated even one of these collections of texts, please stop reading!)
I try to keep it simple: Just imagine: In earlier times, people passed on traditions orally. There is a tribe that is enthusiastic about the great
@futurebird 🧵 ant queen by the river and tells stories about it around the campfire. For the children it is embellished like a fairy tale, on feast days an epic is recited. Mythical structures are created, including legends. The story of the ant queen is wandering. The tribe from the mountains doesn't know what a river is, and they adjust the landscape. The tribe that wanted to steal the ants only focused on ant eggs. And there is the tribe that makes war, speaks ill of the ant tribe and changes
@futurebird 🧵 the history.
Later, people begin to write down important things. They find ant stories everywhere, are fascinated how many, and write them down. They themselves have never met the tribe, never seen ants. Every writer influences their choice, their way of writing.
A lot of time later, people fascinated by ants (but knowing not much) find some of these papyri. Many are nearly destroyed, so they try to reconstruct the texts. Sometimes they take pieces of several writers together.
@futurebird
I'd be bringing the Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha. I want those kids to see all the academic comments and know people argue about meaning and study context.
@futurebird the Bible and the Ten Commandments must be taught, not only present.
However, this order for the Bible is a policy, not a law. That came from a memo by the superintendent of schools.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court is entirely unlike the US Supreme Court as it pushes back against the state's GOP movement to establish religion, specifically Evangelicalism, in schools.
Both the Bible and the Ten Commandments requirements will probably go to the court.
It depends on how you read the bible. I recall at USAFA our English professor had us read a biblical story...but it so happens it was the one about Rachel menstruating on the statues of idols, under her skirt. Turns out the bible also has some stand-up humor in it, too.
Soooo, let's see how this pans out, teachers teaching from a book that won't even be (technically) allowed to be in the library.
Rachel bleeding on the statues...gotta love it. Fundamentalists have had their heads screwed with, most since birth.
@futurebird The Ethiopian Bible comes in two flavors: the narrow canon and the wide canon. The latter contains well over 80 books. Some have never been translated into English, though there is an online project working toward such a goal.
When I was doing seminary work, we consulted this page when considering scripture (in particular the “Canons of various Christian traditions” section): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon
@futurebird Even those of us with a Pope have multiple! Granted we at least know which books we’re getting every time, but the translations are all over the place.
@futurebird whelp, fwiw, i think all branches of christianity and judaism all have a bible that contains the ten commandments. it’s the rare part of the bible that literally everyone agrees on
@futurebird ... and once the theocrats get in power, they'll spin their wheels on the bullshit differences between them like a bad Marvel vs DC argument.
@futurebird "which bible?" all the most popular ones? So there should be copies of Quran, Vedas, King James', Torah, Adi Granth, Tao Te Ching, Book of Mormons, etc, in every classroom
The cannon of MC Hawking makes this point (A Brief History of Rhyme, Chapter 15) ;
"They need to read a book that ain't so damn old
Let reason take hold
Though truth to be told
They're probably already too far gone
Withdrawn, the conclusion foregone
But maybe there's still hope for the young
If they reject the dung being slung from the tongues
Of the ignorant fools who call themselves preachers
And listen instead to their science teachers"
If I were a teacher there I would teach about nothing but the Sermon on the Mount.
OK, we're starting a 3-week unit on "Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven."
Then we'll have 4 weeks on "Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you."
And then we'll have 2 weeks on "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them," which is about infallibility, because if you've ever watched how hard birds work you know that Jesus didn't know fuck-all about birds, so what else was he ignorant about hmm?
Let's see, then 2 weeks on "Do not judge, or you too will be judged ..."