A Good Book

I did some wash yesterday and discovered two more pennies. So, here’s another two cents worth of my thoughts and questions on a subject that interests me: Oklahoma’s mandate requiring all public schools teach the Bible and the Ten Commandments starting in the fall of 2024. From what I’ve read, it appears to be part of a long running battle. Apparently, Oklahoma already dictated the teaching of the role of the bible and religion in US history, but teachers weren’t doing it. So, this is designed to rectify that.

Now, I don’t live in Oklahoma and for all I know people there are happy with the way their kids are being educated. But this focus on the bible and the Ten Commandments feels awfully religious to me and fraught with peril, given that there are more than 200 religious denominations in the US. People tend to talk about being Christian as though it’s a singular thing, but in reality, Christianity appears to be similar to a million blind people touching an elephant telling you they can describe the elephant in perfect detail and are willing to fight each other about it.

But where I think the rubber really will meet the road is when they have to decide what translation of the bible they’re going to use. Because oddly enough, even though we talk about The Bible, it’s been through a lot of iterations (900 English translations since the 16th century) driven primarily by dogma and there are a lot of pieces, which is why we talk about the books of the bible. I wish Oklahoma the best of luck, but I think they should have left the bible and the Ten Commandments to the churches and the private schools they sponsor and concentrated on reading, writing, and arithmetic.