The truth is, if you are going to have any understanding of the last few millennium of humanity you must have a clear and deep understanding of Christianity.
This from a man who went to see Shakespeare in Chicago again last night. It's more true than ever. Cultural ignorance is a disease propagated by a bad school system.
Joe Sobran has just written an article you MUST read. It is a truth we must grasp. In it he says in part:
The whole history of Western Civilization is rooted in religion. Unless you understand Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, along with the rise of Islam, you don’t understand the events that shaped the modern world. The issues of the Reformation were still alive when the United States was founded, when slavery was debated, when the Civil War tore the country apart, when Prohibition was adopted, when Joe McCarthy assailed “godless Communism,” when John Kennedy became the first Catholic American president.READ the whole thing, It's not that long.The Christian Right is closer to its own historic roots than most Americans, yet the media and the history textbooks treat it as a marginal, virtually un-American movement. This isn’t “multicultural”; it’s anti-cultural. It refuses to take America’s real origins seriously, adopting the Supreme Court’s shallow and ahistorical interpretation of the separation of church and state.
1 comment:
So the culture was shaped by the religion? So? The schools do a perfectly good job of teaching this. They teach the slight influence it had on framing the constitution along with the other greater influences. They teach its influence in framing our calendar and our holidays. They teach its influence on art and architecture. The public schools do not deny the influence of religion on all sorts of things, including how it held back science and would love to continue to do so. The public school system teaches the facts about the cultural iinfluence in a balanced way that also touches on the bad of such influence as well as the good. That is what pisses you off. That and the fact that the school system only teaches that relgion shapes culture and refuses to teach that religion contains any truth. The school system gets it right in teaching the facts of the influences without passing much judgement on whether the influence is good or bad. It just is. Get over it.
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