Christians, I do not wish to offend you. But this might be a comment you’d rather skip.
As an ex-Christian atheist and someone who used to study the bible in its original languages, this got my attention. The Guardian article has a link to the actual proposed law, and if you have any interest in this at all, you should look it over because it may be coming to you next:
What really got my attention initially was how this law does not go into effect for four more years, but they’re setting it in stone now, and then when it does go into effect, the various passages are separated from each other: it’s almost like they don’t want you or these teachers to see how they have the same general theme.
But then I saw how the proposed law says that each work must be read from “text that is identical to the version featured in the ISBN” provided for all the works, and then it specifies the exact translation for each biblical passage. Okay, but then if you read down the list, the English I classes have to read Lamentations 3 out of the 1917 version of the JPS Tanakh.
What??? The 1917 JPS Tanakh is a version of the Jewish scriptures, specifically for Jewish use, translated from scratch because at the time there was no good English translation. English-speaking Jewish people were having to use Christian translations that rely on texts that do not honor Judaism, and that do not even have all the same books. The 1917 JPS Tanakh solved that, and of course now there are newer versions of that and other Jewish scriptures.
In short, the 1917 JPS Tanakh is a (somewhat dated) Jewish “bible” for Jewish people, written exclusively by Jewish scholars and rabbis in accordance with Jewish history and customs. For Jews. It is very explicitly NOT a Christian work: by design it eliminates all the messianic prooftexts Christian translations rely on. And all of this is exactly as it should be.
So why do Texas schoolchildren have to swerve all the way from the explicitly Christian KJV and NIRV (the preferred translation of the Texas law for the Old Testament) all the way back to a century old Jewish translation created by Jewish people solely for Jewish people, to get specifically what Texas government officials want their developing brains to see?
Well, you can skim them yourself. Lamentations 3 is a passage about people suffering because they’ve angered God, but if they recognize that this suffering is all for their own good and just trust in the Lord, everything will get better… maybe. Meanwhile the language describing the punishments suffered by these erring people is extremely descriptive, almost overwhelming in detail, but the Tanakh much more so, IMO:
But that’s just one of ten chosen biblical passages in the proposed law, and regardless of translation they all have roughly the same theme.
When I read the specific passages the state of Texas wants these young kids to read, I see them teaching kids to be happy little wage slaves, to not rebel because that brings God’s wrath, to avoid working in tandem with their neighbors and community to create change for themselves, to never evaluate a situation in terms of the power imbalance inherent in it, to simply accept everything that happens to them as being in the hands of a distant, unreliable higher power that they cannot ever outrun or deny, and to just let themselves be abused and exploited, accepting whatever comes as “God’s will” because “love endures all things” and “love never fails.”
(As an aside, the bible passages are not the only ones in the proposed curriculum reinforcing this view; check out the frequent appearance of gems like The Children’s Book of Virtues, edited by William J. Bennett. They’re going to be getting frequent doses of it starting in kindergarten.)
But regarding the chosen biblical passages, these passages are not at all representative of the bible as a whole, nor anything even close to it. And certainly no words in red that might extol the virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, or self-control: these would be the fruits of the spirit that Christianity is supposed to bring, but they’re entirely missing from the Texas curriculum.
Rather, in all of the chosen Texas passages, there is no victory, no reward for industrious labor, no sense of community whatsoever, nothing that could be construed as light at the end of the tunnel. It’s ALL the same theme: individual suffering because you probably did something to deserve it, don’t look to others to help you, don’t worry about it, don’t try to change it, just endure. And above all else, obey without question.
I mean, look at these. Feel free to disagree; I included links to either the passage or to Wikipedia for the longer ones so you can read them, or about them, for yourself. But I want it to be apparent at a glance that these are NOT neutral selections, nor even of any particular literary significance: these are all morality tales with a very specific point that have been removed from any possible context not by me, but by the state of Texas:
Matthew 6:25-34 is best read in context, but the state has omitted that, so this passage boils down to don’t worry about anything but being a good person, don’t worry about taking care of yourself or your family, just trust and God will make sure you have everything you need.
The book of Jonah is about the prophet who didn’t want to go be a nation’s buzzkill so he told God no, so a fish swallowed him up until he was sorry for it, then puked him forth so he could obey. Then once Jonah obeyed he was still angry, so he went out into the desert and God gave him a plant as a shelter – only to then take it away and tell Jonah he was wrong to acknowledge his own emotions. Jonah is a cautionary tale not just about disobedience, but obedience with the wrong attitude.
1 Corinthians 13 always chills me to the bone, because as sweet as it may seem, this is the passage that is INVARIABLY thrown at abused women wanting to leave an abusive marriage. The passage starts off well, but everyone always ignores that bit about hypocrisy and skips straight to what “love” is supposed to mean to the reader. This is the biblical heart of “pray and stay sweet” lessons, especially for women and those not in positions of equal power. Plus, it’s a lie: real love doesn’t and shouldn’t “bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things.”
David and Goliath: if you have insane levels of courage and don’t worry about your own safety, selflessly throwing yourself into suicidal battles for others, God will bless you.
The Beatitudes: everything you think is bad is actually God’s blessing toward you, and the less you do to challenge or change these things the more blessed by God you will be.
The Twenty-third Psalm: I don’t have to worry about looking after myself because God will protect me and take care of everything.
The Tower of Babel: if you try to work with your neighbors and community to better yourself and your communal life, God will personally knock it all down and scatter you just for having the nerve to try.
Ecclesiastes 3: Life is what it is and God is gonna do whatever God is gonna do, so nothing really matters anyway.
The book of Job: where do I even start. They chopped up this book hard, assigning chapters 1-7, then 11, 14, 19, 28, and 38-42. That’s the beginning of the narrative, then part of Job’s lament, Job’s asshole friends, the odd bit about wisdom not being present in the earth, and then the end where God tells Job to suck it up because he’s God and Job is not. Even I have no idea why the state of Texas has chopped up an already complex book and made it even more incomprehensible, except to point out that the inclusion of chapter 28 – the bit about wisdom being absent from the earth that sounds like an anti-vaxxer’s dream prooftext – is probably because of this:
[God] said to human beings,
“Have respect for the Lord. That will prove you are wise.
Avoid evil. That will show you have understanding.”
I don’t know about wisdom being missing from the world, but it’s definitely missing in Austin.
Great post. But I don’t understand the notion that we must tiptoe our way around the beliefs of those in a chosen lifestyle. It is something I’ve never really understood. I guess it made sense when they were 90+% of the United States and have a history of getting up to persecution and outright violence/murder when they feel their faith is “under attack” or even if someone else does not sufficiently believe in their interpretation of their holy texts.
But since their numbers have fallen off a cliff it seems to make less and less sense all the time.
I suspect it has a lot to do with knowing how thin-skinned those that have strongly-held beliefs about things with no evidence can really be.
But I’m not sure I’ve ever read or heard a sentence that says similar things about groups that understand evidence-based things: “I don’t wish to offend those that understand germ theory, but…” I guess it’s because evidence-based things, by design, have resilience built-in - they demand that you doubt. Invite you to look into the facts yourself, and so on.
everything. [The Tower of Babel:] if you try to work with your neighbors and community to better yourself and your communal life, God will personally knock it all down and scatter you just for having the nerve to try
Wow. That’s so fascinating. This is a belief of mine and I have no idea where I got it from. I mean I got it from my parents, but they’re not religious. I wonder which ancestor passed this down.
The lesson of the Tower of Babel is even more than that. It’s about not lifting your expectations, not assuming ideas above your station, staying in your assigned lane in life even if you hate it. What you see here is the “divine punishment” for that.
But for many centuries that idea was actually a given, unless you were born to wealth, and it was only huge, societal upheavals like the Great Plague or a series of unending wars or famines that rearranged everything every few hundred years. And even then it’s only in the last century that humans in general have enjoyed a level of privilege and prosperity that means for most of us, we have never known a starving person or been in fear of it ourselves, for example. Never having to fear hunger or a bad crop season was not something most of these people could even imagine.
So if the ancestors of which you speak were born around the turn of the 20th century and were neither rich nor landowners, and could thus expect a life spent in a service or trade, they’d have had this exact same kind of “don’t get ideas, just do what you’re told and be grateful it isn’t worse” drilled into them by their own parents. Mine certainly were. And I’m absolutely certain that’s why the state of Texas wants to reintroduce the idea to young minds.
But it’s your belief. Does it serve you? You can find out where it came from. If you accepted this belief in your own life and can’t remember it, it may not have been passed down: it could be something that was just really painful for you as a young person and you took the lesson and shoved away the painful memory that delivered it. (I also have a friend who’d insist it’s a past life thing and you should do a regression to find out, but that’s not really up everyone’s alley, lol.) Anyway, if it is of interest to you, you should look into it in whatever way appeals to you, you might be surprised at what you find. Learning who you are and why you are the way you are is never a waste of time, IMO.
The lesson of the Tower of Babel is even more than that. It’s about not lifting your expectations, not assuming ideas above your station, staying in your assigned lane in life even if you hate it. What you see here is the “divine punishment” for that.
I’ve always loathed the “lessons” of things like that as well as the anti-Promethean instinct in so many individuals.
Fuuuuuck that noise.
I can identify so much more with the likes of Stewart Brand:
"We are as gods and might as well get good at it. "
Fuck all that lowly self-defeatist bullshit.
Did I watch Cosmos at a very impressionable age as well as Star Trek? You bet I did.
Christians, I do not wish to offend you. But this might be a comment you’d rather skip.
As an ex-Christian atheist and someone who used to study the bible in its original languages, this got my attention. The Guardian article has a link to the actual proposed law, and if you have any interest in this at all, you should look it over because it may be coming to you next:
https://tea.texas.gov/curriculum-and-instruction/instructional-materials/house-bill-1605/draft-rule-text-for-agency-recommendations-to-the-sboe-for-literary-works-list-0.pdf
What really got my attention initially was how this law does not go into effect for four more years, but they’re setting it in stone now, and then when it does go into effect, the various passages are separated from each other: it’s almost like they don’t want you or these teachers to see how they have the same general theme.
But then I saw how the proposed law says that each work must be read from “text that is identical to the version featured in the ISBN” provided for all the works, and then it specifies the exact translation for each biblical passage. Okay, but then if you read down the list, the English I classes have to read Lamentations 3 out of the 1917 version of the JPS Tanakh.
What??? The 1917 JPS Tanakh is a version of the Jewish scriptures, specifically for Jewish use, translated from scratch because at the time there was no good English translation. English-speaking Jewish people were having to use Christian translations that rely on texts that do not honor Judaism, and that do not even have all the same books. The 1917 JPS Tanakh solved that, and of course now there are newer versions of that and other Jewish scriptures.
In short, the 1917 JPS Tanakh is a (somewhat dated) Jewish “bible” for Jewish people, written exclusively by Jewish scholars and rabbis in accordance with Jewish history and customs. For Jews. It is very explicitly NOT a Christian work: by design it eliminates all the messianic prooftexts Christian translations rely on. And all of this is exactly as it should be.
So why do Texas schoolchildren have to swerve all the way from the explicitly Christian KJV and NIRV (the preferred translation of the Texas law for the Old Testament) all the way back to a century old Jewish translation created by Jewish people solely for Jewish people, to get specifically what Texas government officials want their developing brains to see?
Well, you can skim them yourself. Lamentations 3 is a passage about people suffering because they’ve angered God, but if they recognize that this suffering is all for their own good and just trust in the Lord, everything will get better… maybe. Meanwhile the language describing the punishments suffered by these erring people is extremely descriptive, almost overwhelming in detail, but the Tanakh much more so, IMO:
Lamentations 3, NIRV
Lamentations 3, 1917 JPS Tanakh (Lamentations begins on digital page 999 - printed page 978)
But that’s just one of ten chosen biblical passages in the proposed law, and regardless of translation they all have roughly the same theme.
When I read the specific passages the state of Texas wants these young kids to read, I see them teaching kids to be happy little wage slaves, to not rebel because that brings God’s wrath, to avoid working in tandem with their neighbors and community to create change for themselves, to never evaluate a situation in terms of the power imbalance inherent in it, to simply accept everything that happens to them as being in the hands of a distant, unreliable higher power that they cannot ever outrun or deny, and to just let themselves be abused and exploited, accepting whatever comes as “God’s will” because “love endures all things” and “love never fails.”
(As an aside, the bible passages are not the only ones in the proposed curriculum reinforcing this view; check out the frequent appearance of gems like The Children’s Book of Virtues, edited by William J. Bennett. They’re going to be getting frequent doses of it starting in kindergarten.)
But regarding the chosen biblical passages, these passages are not at all representative of the bible as a whole, nor anything even close to it. And certainly no words in red that might extol the virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, or self-control: these would be the fruits of the spirit that Christianity is supposed to bring, but they’re entirely missing from the Texas curriculum.
Rather, in all of the chosen Texas passages, there is no victory, no reward for industrious labor, no sense of community whatsoever, nothing that could be construed as light at the end of the tunnel. It’s ALL the same theme: individual suffering because you probably did something to deserve it, don’t look to others to help you, don’t worry about it, don’t try to change it, just endure. And above all else, obey without question.
I mean, look at these. Feel free to disagree; I included links to either the passage or to Wikipedia for the longer ones so you can read them, or about them, for yourself. But I want it to be apparent at a glance that these are NOT neutral selections, nor even of any particular literary significance: these are all morality tales with a very specific point that have been removed from any possible context not by me, but by the state of Texas:
Matthew 6:25-34 is best read in context, but the state has omitted that, so this passage boils down to don’t worry about anything but being a good person, don’t worry about taking care of yourself or your family, just trust and God will make sure you have everything you need.
The book of Jonah is about the prophet who didn’t want to go be a nation’s buzzkill so he told God no, so a fish swallowed him up until he was sorry for it, then puked him forth so he could obey. Then once Jonah obeyed he was still angry, so he went out into the desert and God gave him a plant as a shelter – only to then take it away and tell Jonah he was wrong to acknowledge his own emotions. Jonah is a cautionary tale not just about disobedience, but obedience with the wrong attitude.
1 Corinthians 13 always chills me to the bone, because as sweet as it may seem, this is the passage that is INVARIABLY thrown at abused women wanting to leave an abusive marriage. The passage starts off well, but everyone always ignores that bit about hypocrisy and skips straight to what “love” is supposed to mean to the reader. This is the biblical heart of “pray and stay sweet” lessons, especially for women and those not in positions of equal power. Plus, it’s a lie: real love doesn’t and shouldn’t “bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things.”
David and Goliath: if you have insane levels of courage and don’t worry about your own safety, selflessly throwing yourself into suicidal battles for others, God will bless you.
The Beatitudes: everything you think is bad is actually God’s blessing toward you, and the less you do to challenge or change these things the more blessed by God you will be.
The Twenty-third Psalm: I don’t have to worry about looking after myself because God will protect me and take care of everything.
The Tower of Babel: if you try to work with your neighbors and community to better yourself and your communal life, God will personally knock it all down and scatter you just for having the nerve to try.
Ecclesiastes 3: Life is what it is and God is gonna do whatever God is gonna do, so nothing really matters anyway.
The book of Job: where do I even start. They chopped up this book hard, assigning chapters 1-7, then 11, 14, 19, 28, and 38-42. That’s the beginning of the narrative, then part of Job’s lament, Job’s asshole friends, the odd bit about wisdom not being present in the earth, and then the end where God tells Job to suck it up because he’s God and Job is not. Even I have no idea why the state of Texas has chopped up an already complex book and made it even more incomprehensible, except to point out that the inclusion of chapter 28 – the bit about wisdom being absent from the earth that sounds like an anti-vaxxer’s dream prooftext – is probably because of this:
I don’t know about wisdom being missing from the world, but it’s definitely missing in Austin.
Great post. But I don’t understand the notion that we must tiptoe our way around the beliefs of those in a chosen lifestyle. It is something I’ve never really understood. I guess it made sense when they were 90+% of the United States and have a history of getting up to persecution and outright violence/murder when they feel their faith is “under attack” or even if someone else does not sufficiently believe in their interpretation of their holy texts.
But since their numbers have fallen off a cliff it seems to make less and less sense all the time.
I suspect it has a lot to do with knowing how thin-skinned those that have strongly-held beliefs about things with no evidence can really be.
But I’m not sure I’ve ever read or heard a sentence that says similar things about groups that understand evidence-based things: “I don’t wish to offend those that understand germ theory, but…” I guess it’s because evidence-based things, by design, have resilience built-in - they demand that you doubt. Invite you to look into the facts yourself, and so on.
I guess I just find that rather interesting.
Wow. That’s so fascinating. This is a belief of mine and I have no idea where I got it from. I mean I got it from my parents, but they’re not religious. I wonder which ancestor passed this down.
The lesson of the Tower of Babel is even more than that. It’s about not lifting your expectations, not assuming ideas above your station, staying in your assigned lane in life even if you hate it. What you see here is the “divine punishment” for that.
But for many centuries that idea was actually a given, unless you were born to wealth, and it was only huge, societal upheavals like the Great Plague or a series of unending wars or famines that rearranged everything every few hundred years. And even then it’s only in the last century that humans in general have enjoyed a level of privilege and prosperity that means for most of us, we have never known a starving person or been in fear of it ourselves, for example. Never having to fear hunger or a bad crop season was not something most of these people could even imagine.
So if the ancestors of which you speak were born around the turn of the 20th century and were neither rich nor landowners, and could thus expect a life spent in a service or trade, they’d have had this exact same kind of “don’t get ideas, just do what you’re told and be grateful it isn’t worse” drilled into them by their own parents. Mine certainly were. And I’m absolutely certain that’s why the state of Texas wants to reintroduce the idea to young minds.
But it’s your belief. Does it serve you? You can find out where it came from. If you accepted this belief in your own life and can’t remember it, it may not have been passed down: it could be something that was just really painful for you as a young person and you took the lesson and shoved away the painful memory that delivered it. (I also have a friend who’d insist it’s a past life thing and you should do a regression to find out, but that’s not really up everyone’s alley, lol.) Anyway, if it is of interest to you, you should look into it in whatever way appeals to you, you might be surprised at what you find. Learning who you are and why you are the way you are is never a waste of time, IMO.
I’ve always loathed the “lessons” of things like that as well as the anti-Promethean instinct in so many individuals.
Fuuuuuck that noise.
I can identify so much more with the likes of Stewart Brand:
"We are as gods and might as well get good at it. "
Fuck all that lowly self-defeatist bullshit.
Did I watch Cosmos at a very impressionable age as well as Star Trek? You bet I did.
This is insane. These little weasel bastards running that state government are downright evil.