The vice president of the United States claims that people would be much happier if the United States were a theocracy. You know, Hindus, Jews, and whites would be much happier if everyone were a Christian. He even accuses secular culture of being anti-Semitic and not welcoming to other minorities.
Oh look, it turns out that it's Christians like Vance who are spreading antisemitism by forcing Christianity in schools, and not liberal secularists. Almost as if secularism is a real solution.
Quote:In a divided America, JD Vance sees Christianity as a unifying force. His new memoir, “Communion,” blames secularism for social strife and proposes faith as the solution. The book is not just a conversion narrative; it is an argument that a more Christian America would also be a more peaceful and tolerant one.
“I do think in a very foundational sense the country is a Christian nation,” Vance tells me in an interview. Religious decline hasn’t removed social divisions, he says, but instead has deepened them: “I see antisemitism spreading ... You’re seeing an elevation of anti-Christian bias. You’re seeing an elevation of anti-White bias. You’re, of course, seeing anti-Asian discrimination.” In short, “The United States is becoming more divided against itself. And I think, again, this is the fruit of secular liberalism.”
In place of secularism, Vance champions a nonsectarian Christianity. “If an ideology was advertised as promoting unity and openness and tolerance, and in fact it has created division and discord, maybe we should try something else,” he says. “And I think that something else is to return to the Christian foundation of the country.”
For Vance, affirming America’s Christian character has less to do with doctrinal agreement or clerical authority than with a shared cultural heritage. The title of his book is a reference not only to the sacrament Christians share at the altar, but also to a common history that binds together disparate people and different generations. There is, Vance writes, a “communion between our ancestors and our descendants” — one he believes is under attack.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/...divisions/
Oh look, it turns out that it's Christians like Vance who are spreading antisemitism by forcing Christianity in schools, and not liberal secularists. Almost as if secularism is a real solution.
Quote:Jewish advocate: Texas bible story curriculum isn’t ‘Judeo-Christian,’ just ‘overtly’ Christian
Late last month, the State Board of Education approved a new social studies curriculum for Texas public schools. Controversially, the new standards include passages from English translations of Christian and Jewish religious texts.
Blake Ziegler, the Texas field organizer for the Religious Action Center (RAC) of Reform Judaism, said that the selection “gives overt coverage” to Protestant Christianity “at the expense of others.”
“If you want to teach students about religion, that’s good. That’s necessary for a robust democracy for us to have tolerance and understanding of the other,” he said. “But the way this reading list is trying to accomplish that…students are overtly learning Christian text at the expense of other faiths.”
The history of, and debates around, bible translations stretches back to translations of the Torah in the third century B.C.E.
Torah passages, part of the Christianity’s Old Testament, are part of the curriculum. Teachers will have to teach these from Christian translations. Ziegler said he opposes this, arguing that it “invokes a Christian interpretation.”
“Even where we share literature…it’s being framed through the understanding of one religion, especially when the translations being used are those that are the more evangelical faith-style translations, instead of scholarly translations you might encounter in a religious studies course,” he said.
“When we look at the way Judaism is represented, which is the only non-Christian religion presented on the list, it’s done so in a problematic way,” he said. “There is the implication that the Holocaust was also a divine punishment. That, among other issues, causes us to be concerned about risk of anti-Semitism, Jewish students being put at risk and overall religious freedom violations.”
Ziegler added that education about the Holocaust is essential to a “robust” education. The curriculum also has a unit for 7th graders on “The Diary of a Young Girl,” by Anne Frank. But that unit also includes a King James translation of a chapter of Psalms, a book in both the Torah and Christian Bible.
“Students [will be] taught to understand and process the death and suffering of a Jewish girl in the Holocaust through a Christian understanding,” Ziegler said. “The lack of a Jewish understanding of a Jewish girl’s death is problematic to us.”
https://www.kxan.com/news/education/jewi...stian/amp/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
