Kinda shows you the mental capacity of the population of the town where I grew up.
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Green Eggs And Ham.
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Ah yes, C-beams glittering in the dark…
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Paul Feyerabend went a bit further and argued that we would be better off without frameworks altogether! Or rather, we’d be better off without the delusion of any One True Framework.
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Do schools in any other country ask parents to give permission for children to read a set book? It certainly never happened to me in the UK in the sixties and seventies nor to my children here in Norway in the last 25 years.
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I don’t think that’s true at all - at least not in terms of the “New Testament” at least. We haven’t progressed as much as we like to think in the intervening millennia and the early Church Fathers were probably at least as smart as anyone today (as is evident from their own writings.) The more recent analyses of the core texts etc. based on later discoveries would tend to imply that they knew exactly what they were doing, to the point that different theological schools are all still largely visible but this is often dismissed as simple inconsistency. And this is clear at all levels - from entire books, where the letters of Paul are counterbalanced with others, down to the level of individual verses in the gospels which have sometimes been modified multiple times by different hands, and that’s without getting into the miscopying aspect.
Which does, of course, lead to the cherrypicking “problem”, since almost any assertion can be made with textual backup. I do wonder at times if that may have been the actual intention. 
My history teacher in the N London suburbs when I was 13: “You all need to get adult tickets for the library. If the librarian asks why, I’ll give you a letter.”
Being a horrible little swot I rushed straight to the library, on the way home from school, and asked for an adult ticket. No problem: I got one there and then.
First part I agree with, second part I regard as more questionable. One important fact to consider is that words change their meanings with time - take the word didaskalos as a well known example. The attitude of writers to the NT was significantly different from that of Jewish writers to the OT; for them meaning rather than exact copying of letters which had a sacred/magical significance was of importance.
Put it like this; although there are doubtless people who are well paid psychological manipulators who know exactly what they are doing and why, most of the people who support censorship of anything that doesn’t agree with their fundamentalist beliefs are not doing so for educated reasons but for upbringing, emotional blanket and social peer pressure reasons. I don’t know into which category the author of, say, the Chick Tracts falls, but the idea that everybody like him is a cynical manipulator seems a little unlikely.
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This is a good point. I was in a class about the Bible where the Bible was being taught academically, rather than religiously or polemically. The professor emphasized at various points that the people working with the Bible cared deeply about its integrity. Note that this is not the same as, nor does it contradict, the idea that the Bible did not change.
This is something my folklorist friend talks about sometimes. He’ll be in a conversation with someone and they’ll bring up an old family legend or tell a story about something that happened in town. He’ll casually point out that the story is a really common myth shared among a lot of people, and some people get very offended at “being called a liar.” His response is always, “You’re not lying. No one is. Myths don’t need anyone to lie in order to propogate.”
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You don’t think that in the absence of the Christian framework, we’d simply invent (or have invented for us) a different one, and likely one that’s created for with specific purpose.
The Bible at least has the benefit of being incoherent enough that we can (and have) attach pretty much any narrative we want to the book (which is responsible for Christianity’s remarkable longevity - the people can make it into whatever they feel socially necessary).
I fear the framework that would be constructed for us (and the majority would likely embrace) might well be far less malleable than Christianity is and rather than focused on keeping God in the hearts, might be aimed at keeping a man (or party) on the throne.
(I’m a non-believer, but my experience is that many, if not most, need to believe in something beyond the rational.)
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That seems a little subtle for US grade school, TBH. Heck, it’s a little too subtle for the vast majority of the US grade school teachers I’ve met. Assuming this was the intention, it went right over the heads of any but the brightest and most precocious students.
I think it’s more likely that the teacher was going to teach Farenheit 451, some admin squawked the day of, and since they didn’t have a permission slip ready (because they assumed they wouldn’t need one) they had the students write one instead. To me, that’s a much more psychologically plausible explanation for this whole thing.
ETA: Even if this was the intention, it’s not a good way to get the point across. Teachers mostly want students to make a good-faith attempt to try to connect with the material and to listen to what they say. Using “reverse psychology” this way might get some of the more anti-authoritarian students to be like, “wait a second, why am I writing this stupid permission slip?” but any student who doesn’t want to assume the teacher is arbitrarily wielding authority and just wants to work hard and do well in the class would essentially be the butt of a joke by the teacher, all of which sounds pretty counterproductive unless this teacher is secretly trying to undermine the education system in the first place.
Also, gotta say the whole discussion about the evolution of Bible, myth, and folklore is really really off topic and also waaaaaaaaay more interesting than the actual topic. Think about it next time you see an “off topic” comment (yes, even one you really really disagree with).
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I merely used the Christian Bible as one example. What I mean is that we’d be better off as a species if more than just a minority of humans did not believe in things and entities that aren’t real for existential solace. But human nature is such that most do. The trouble with basing ethics and morality on a non-existent authority is actually just what you said, it becomes an instrument of control and to excuse injustice, because non-existent authority can be used to rationalize whatever depravities people do to one another. Simply put, there’s no point in believing in any Higher Power unless its on your side. It’s the ultimate call to authority fallacy and thus the bane of reason.
Human nature, however, does not tend toward the especially rational. So no, I don’t think humans, such as they are, will ever entirely abandon irrational beliefs. It’s unfortunate, but reality often is, and to believe our species would abandon irrationality is itself an irrational belief.
Non-human intelligence, or humans who alter or have their nature altered, may not have that handicap. Since we are, for the first time, making discoveries and developing tools that could conceivably facilitate alterations to human nature, we may soon have to confront the unprecedented possibility of it actually changing. For all our history and pre-history, humans have basically been the same.
Just to be clear, I’m ambivalent about that at best. The capacity to become more rational is but one of the unknown scope of possibilities.
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I think you’re simplifying things way too much. Read the Old Testament and tell me again that the ancient Hebrews imagined up a God that was on their side to rationalize the violence they did to other people. It’s almost exactly the opposite (e.g. Book of Job).
I mean, this is kinda how things worked before 500 BC but backwards in terms of causality. The Alice people worshiped the goddess Alice and the Bob people worshiped the god Bob, and if the Alice people beat the Bob people in a fight, that meant that Alice was a stronger god than Bob. It wasn’t the Alice people making up stories about Alice being stronger than Bob to justify their violence against the Bob people; it was basically the complete opposite of that – the Alice people believed that the fact that they were able to commit violence against the Bob people proved that Alice was stronger than Bob.
But around 500 BC during the Babylonian captivity, the Hebrews had to explain why their awesome, mighty God had turned on them, and they came up with a bunch of stories about how God has certain expectations about how people are supposed to think and behave. That is, the intent behind this new God concept wasn’t an attempt to justify the behavior they had already engaged in. It was an attempt to regulate the behavior of people in the future to try to forestall God turning on them in the future.
And I think if you look historically, you will find that the role of religion has been to limit behavior to certain acceptable ways of life rather than to retroactively justify actions. And I completely agree with @tlwest that if western society hadn’t ordered itself using the Christian framework, they would have ended up inheriting or inventing some other framework for ordering itself.
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Not in Germany. And I think it is rather strange because I would consider protecting children from their parents and providing alternatives to their education an important aspect of the mission of school.
But I think in America the idea that parents own their children and are entitled to total control is more prevalent.
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What’s the difference? If I tell you not to smoke and punish you if you do because “God told me to”, how am I not rationalizing my own abuse of power?
I also want to point out that I said rationalize, not justify. There is no justifying imposing arbitrary rules, and non-arbitrary rules require no superstition to justify them.
I would say it’s used to hold power over people for both purposes, or more specifically to rationalize injustice of both types. Religions are Panglossian. The ancient Hebrews maintained their culture through the Babylonian exile because they interpreted Nebuchadnezzar as a tool of their God to punish them for not following the rules their ancestors’ leaders made up to rationalize imposing their will on their ancestors and hang on to power.
I agree, except that it didn’t order itself. A dictator named Constantine ordered it, literally. Rulers make the rules. The ruled are not generally given any choice in the matter.
ETA: And just to reiterate, I’m not saying all effects of religion are bad. I’m saying that religion is an unjust institution because it rests on a false premise. If someone doesn’t kill his neighbor, that’s objectively good. But if the reason he didn’t do it was because of a superstition, what happens when he realizes the superstition is false? And if he doesn’t ever realize it, what’s to say the superstition won’t convince him to stone a woman for surviving rape?
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Hmm, I still think religion is a little more complicated than a clever king pointing at an imaginary man, but you’ve definitely given me some stuff to think about. Thanks!
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Likewise, this discussion has given me food for thought as well.
Yes, there’s more to it, and perhaps my earlier remarks were overly simplistic. But at it’s root, I do think that’s pretty much what religion is. Specifically, I think religion is a memetic virus that survives and crowds out competing memes through the levers of power.
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you said a mouthful, brother.
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Slaughterhouse 5!
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Slaughterhouse 5 was crap compared to Slaughterhouse 1 through Slaughterhouse 4.
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Not too subtle. You’d be surprised. And you’d be surprised at how many kids would have gotten it right away. But more to the point, if it was a stunt then they’ll discuss it as a class at some point and break it down.
Personally, I suspect it’s just a regular permissions slip. Though I do think that people are getting it slightly worng. It’s. not as if the kid needs a slip to jus tread 451. If a kid has the book in the hall or is reading it during free time no one is going to aks for their permission slip. The slip isn’t actually granting permission to the kid, it’s granting permission to the teacher. And teacher authority is a category that we seem more than happy to control and curtail in service of "protecting the children.’
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