Teaching the Bible and Religion, Properly

THERE REALLY IS NO CHOICE, no argument. The Christian Bible should be, needs to be, must be taught in public schools. No, students needn't be required to read the entire Bible, nor even parts of it. But the Bible must be mentioned, and must be placed in proper historical contest, within all ancient history classes, all European history classes, and all Amerian history classes. At my high school I took World History and American history, and the Bible was never even mentioned. That was a mistake, made in the days when the complete separation of church and state extended to public schools, and the Bible, its very existence, was not mentioned. I can hear the Christians hallelujah-ing, praising God, Christ, and the author of this essay. I can hear the progressive secular humanists hissing, wailing, gnashing, throwing stuff, and looking for a rope with which to hang the same author. Both violent mobs,both points of view, with their narrowness, insular idiocy, and stupidity, are woefully wrong, and hardly even worth illuminating. A pox on both their houses. Despite the fact that I despise the Bible, for its gratuitous violence, for its obscenity, for its ignorance of reality, and for the fact that it is widely regarded, amazingly stupidly, as the true "Word of God', despite its obvious shortcomings, the fact remains theat the Christian Bible is the most important book in history, and remains so today. Despite my hatred and utter contempt for the Christian religion, the Christian religion has long been and remains today among the most important,influential powerful institutions in human history, and remains so today, and to not study it, in an historical context, is academically, intellectually criminal. Teaching the Bible and the Christian religion in public schools from a devotional point of view, attemting to convince students that both are the true Word of God, is indoctrination, brainwashing, propaganda, and..criminal. We should and must teach students how to think, but never ever what to think. When students read Shakespeare, or Faulkner, or Steinbeck, they the studnets should and must decide what to think about theses great books, what to think about any book they read, including the Christian Bible. All students, all human beings, should and must decide for themselves what religion, if any, to embrace. Religious indoctrination of children, either in the home, or in the school, is criminal child abuse. The mind is a terrible thing to indoctrinate. No western civilization history class sould omit mention of the Christian Bible, the Christian religion, or the Koran, and the Islamic religion, or the Torah, and the Judaic religion. All of these have played a seminal role in the history of western civilization, and must be included in the course, in high school or in college. These institutions must be taught from a critical, scientific, historical factual perspective, without any devotional content or indoctrination. Some might assume that the very act of teaching these things is a form of indoctrination, because teaching them at all, in any context, implies reverence for them. Nothiing could be further from the truth. All sacred scripture, being books, have human authors, and all religions are inventions of the human mind and culture, and have a history, and all can be explained in terms of their influence and significance in cultural historical development. The students can take it from there.