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Benjamin asked:
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Why is it that children in our schools are not permitted to read the Bible and men in our prisons can?
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============
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Because our country (I'm referring here to the US, but the same arguments hold in Britain) is not a
theocracy; there is separation of church and state (or so the Constitution says).
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Because children are, by definition, not responsible adults and so cannot separate fact from
superstition.
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Because schools are not prisons.
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Because if they were "permitted to read" (which actually means: "taught to believe", doesn't it?) one
bible, why not all? The Christian bible, which I assume you are referring to, is only one of many. Why
should we prefer that one?
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Because, since this is primarily a Christian country, children would not merely "read" the Christian
bible, they would be (and are) subjected to pressure to believeit. Why should they be Christians and
not Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Taoists, Buddhists... etc., all religions with millions of followers just as
zealous and certain of the correctness of their faiths as Christians? Not to mention the hundreds of
faiths with less than, say, hundreds of millions of followers... in Utah, for example, they would be (and
are) pressured to be Mormons, and to "read" (i.e., to believe) the Book of Mormon, theirbible. Should
they be "permitted" to do so in state-sponsored schools?
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If you want your child to be schooled in one of the multitudes of faiths presently existing, send that
child to the appropriate religious school; there are thousands of them. There they will learn that the
particular set of beliefs taught in that school is the onlycorrect one, and that all the rest of humanity,
from the dawn of time to the present, is and has been utterly wrong and misguided in their beliefs,
and is most likely burning in some version of hell. Am I exaggerating, even the smallest bit? No, I
don't think so. Just tune in to any religious broadcast, any faith, and check it out.
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Steven Ravett Brown
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But they are so permitted. But not in our schools (or at any rate) not as truths.
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Ken Stern
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