Cancelling Dr. Seuss

[MarathonRunner]

Politics, architecture, and literature were produced by Christianity, really? The Parthenon is an example of amazing architecture, using imperfections to provide the appearance of perfection due to optical illusions. Definitely the ancient Greeks were supreme architects (as were the ancient Egyptians - look at the pyramids, the Valley of the Kings, and the temples that have survived, as were the ancient Romans - the Colosseum, the numerous Roman baths that still survive, the ruins in Trier, etc.). Ancient Rome provided us with amazing literature, as did ancient Greece. As for politics, weren't the ancient Greeks the first people who had a democracy? To assign these things to Christianity shows a profound ignorance of ancient cultures and their accomplishments.

[Wahoo Redux]

People are against the misuse of Christian doctrines in the public sphere. 

During covid, people were misusing science to argue against masking, vaccinations, etc. No-one suggested that science itself should not be used because of that, In fact, they argued that the public needed a better understanding of science to refute the misuse.

The implication that Christianity should be avoided in the public sphere because of misuses suggests that the overall effect of Christianity on the world has been negative. We might as well bring up Hiroshima every time science is mentioned.

I return again to "misuse" and the notion that Christine doctrine should be foisted on non-Christians.  This is not the same thing as a public health emergency at all. 

[Wahoo Redux]

a few positive things about the Crusades, which were certainly not the unalloyed Christians-bad, Muslims-good thing their detractors suggest.   They were problematic, of course, and the religious motivations undergirding them, especially the 'Deus vult' notions the Popes promulgated suggesting openly that participation therein would earn pardon from God, a place in Heaven, etc., are notoriously unbiblical, but that said, putting oneself in the shoes of an 11th c. Christian, one can clearly see how he might have decided to undertake a Crusade, in order to expel the Islamic invaders from the Holy Land, and restore Christian sovereignty to the place, freeing the oppressed Christian minority there from the rule of said Islamic invaders.

I don't see where you've said anything "positive" about the Crusades there.  EVERYONE who has an untenable cause claims "oppression" of some kind.  Where do you get that particular historical claim anyway?  Many of your claims in this arena you cannot back up.  I'm just curious.

[marshwiggle]

Don't you find it at all ironic that a charter school that advertises that it uses a classical curriculum would consider a picture of a classic piece of art controversial?

My point is, that from what was said, the school's policy is to automatically run anything by parents. So it's about what parents might find controversial, not what the school think s is controversial. (And it's premised on the idea that the school operates on a principal that parents' views matter, even when they conflict with the school's, and that parents aren't just a nuisance to be worked around as much as possible.)

[jimbogumbo]

Don't you find it at all ironic that a charter school that advertises that it uses a classical curriculum would consider a picture of a classic piece of art controversial?

My point is, that from what was said, the school's policy is to automatically run anything by parents. So it's about what parents might find controversial, not what the school think s is controversial. (And it's premised on the idea that the school operates on a principal that parents' views matter, even when they conflict with the school's, and that parents aren't just a nuisance to be worked around as much as possible.)

Yes, I understand. And yet, the parents CHOSE to send their kids to a school with a classical curriculum.

[marshwiggle]

Don't you find it at all ironic that a charter school that advertises that it uses a classical curriculum would consider a picture of a classic piece of art controversial?

My point is, that from what was said, the school's policy is to automatically run anything by parents. So it's about what parents might find controversial, not what the school think s is controversial. (And it's premised on the idea that the school operates on a principal that parents' views matter, even when they conflict with the school's, and that parents aren't just a nuisance to be worked around as much as possible.)

Yes, I understand. And yet, the parents CHOSE to send their kids to a school with a classical curriculum.

Well, now THAT's perhaps the odder part.

[kaysixteen]

Lotsa stuff here, so random responsa and observations in no necessary particular order of  importance:

1) 'classical' means different things... most of the schools in the 'classical' and especially the 'classical Christian' k12 school orbit do not really consider the Renaissance, and esp Renaissance art, the sort of 'classical' stuff they are emphasizing.  Some do not even do much art at all.   They rather consider things like ancient language study, rhetoric, logic, and the medieval Trivium to be of much greater import. 

2) I get that Michelangelo is not some scumbag perv on the net proffering kiddie porn.  Obviously.   That said, exactly what educational objective would be furthered by showing prepubescent children art that depicts full-on nudity in people, esp children?   There certainly is no tradition amongst evangelical protestantism for showing such images, or even for artists within these movements, for making them.

3) It is simply beyond any historical question whatsoever that the area of the world we loosely refer to as 'The Holy Land' used to be run by, and populated in the majority by, Christians, prior to the 7th c Islamic invasion.  Who would argue this?  (Who not wanting to appear to be an idiot or a liar, of course?).  It took centuries after the Arabs came for the place to come to be predominantly Arabized in speech and Islamicized in religion, further, and those locals remaining Christians did suffer at best second-class citizenship status in their own countries.  Therefore, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out why a Christian in Europe might well have concluded it was a good idea, perhaps even a mandate from God (esp if he was encouraged by his religious leaders to think this) to go to the Holy Land and try to expel said Muslim invaders.

4)Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater-- restricting divorce can trap women in abusive marriages, but the better solution would be to actually do something, legally and culturally, about domestic abuse (we have been beginning to do this in recent decades).   Divorce harms children.   Really, it does.  (So, of course, does being parented by never-married folks as well).  And the fact that wrt the issue of divorce, as wrt a whole plethora of issues, there are many professed Christians who disagree  with each other does not actually alter what the Bible says, whenever it is clear, as it unambiguously does concerning divorce.  Hypocrisy and lukewarm fealty to core doctrines and practices of one's professed faith does not alter these things.

5)Where does the bible teach that a Christian should forbid his children from playing with the children of unmarried parents?   Nowhere.  It is of course certainly true that any wise parent would prevent his children from close and sustained interactions with families where bad behavior is common, behavior such as drug use, sexual promiscuity, disgusting actions, etc.

[MarathonRunner]

2) I get that Michelangelo is not some scumbag perv on the net proffering kiddie porn.  Obviously.   That said, exactly what educational objective would be furthered by showing prepubescent children art that depicts full-on nudity in people, esp children?   There certainly is no tradition amongst evangelical protestantism for showing such images, or even for artists within these movements, for making them.

Perhaps to demonstrate their is nothing inherently shameful about a naked human body. Not all countries are as uptight about nudity as the USA. Here in Germany, women regularly sunbathe topless in public parks where there are playgrounds, people go nude in places in other public parks, and many saunas don't allow clothing. The human body is accepted for being a body. It's not sexualized. Children learn that bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and that their bodies are nothing shameful. They learn how to appreciate art, even if it depicts nudity, because nudity just is, it's not in any way sexualized.

[MarathonRunner]

3) It is simply beyond any historical question whatsoever that the area of the world we loosely refer to as 'The Holy Land' used to be run by, and populated in the majority by, Christians, prior to the 7th c Islamic invasion.  Who would argue this?  (Who not wanting to appear to be an idiot or a liar, of course?).  It took centuries after the Arabs came for the place to come to be predominantly Arabized in speech and Islamicized in religion, further, and those locals remaining Christians did suffer at best second-class citizenship status in their own countries.  Therefore, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out why a Christian in Europe might well have concluded it was a good idea, perhaps even a mandate from God (esp if he was encouraged by his religious leaders to think this) to go to the Holy Land and try to expel said Muslim invaders.

The Egyptians, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, etc. were Christian? I think not. They all inhabited the area of "The Holy Land" well before Christianity even existed.

[Wahoo Redux]

3) It is simply beyond any historical question whatsoever that the area of the world we loosely refer to as 'The Holy Land' used to be run by, and populated in the majority by, Christians, prior to the 7th c Islamic invasion.  Who would argue this?  (Who not wanting to appear to be an idiot or a liar, of course?).  It took centuries after the Arabs came for the place to come to be predominantly Arabized in speech and Islamicized in religion, further, and those locals remaining Christians did suffer at best second-class citizenship status in their own countries.  Therefore, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out why a Christian in Europe might well have concluded it was a good idea, perhaps even a mandate from God (esp if he was encouraged by his religious leaders to think this) to go to the Holy Land and try to expel said Muslim invaders.

The Egyptians, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, etc. were Christian? I think not. They all inhabited the area of "The Holy Land" well before Christianity even existed.

Our friend key is being an apologist for the European Christians of the 11th century who undertook the Crusades for a variety of reasons, including just regular Janes and Joes from the countryside, and even children if the folks tales are to be believed.  Sure, these people were easy to stir up, but that is no sort of justification. Overall, Kay is trying to be an apologist for all sorts of Christian hegemony, which is his right.

I find that Jerusalem fell to the Muslims in 637 A.D. and that Urban called for holy war in 1095 A.D.  That means that the Holy Land----which was holy to the Muslims as well----was established as a Muslim territory for longer than the United States has existed at this point.  You are welcome to point out that I have simplified this complicated and only distantly understood history, but still, one could understand why the Crusaders were seen as the "invaders," not the Muslims.

[Kron3007]

4)Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater-- restricting divorce can trap women in abusive marriages, but the better solution would be to actually do something, legally and culturally, about domestic abuse (we have been beginning to do this in recent decades).   Divorce harms children.   Really, it does.  (So, of course, does being parented by never-married folks as well).  And the fact that wrt the issue of divorce, as wrt a whole plethora of issues, there are many professed Christians who disagree  with each other does not actually alter what the Bible says, whenever it is clear, as it unambiguously does concerning divorce.  Hypocrisy and lukewarm fealty to core doctrines and practices of one's professed faith does not alter these things.

5)Where does the bible teach that a Christian should forbid his children from playing with the children of unmarried parents?   Nowhere.  It is of course certainly true that any wise parent would prevent his children from close and sustained interactions with families where bad behavior is common, behavior such as drug use, sexual promiscuity, disgusting actions, etc.

4) Are you saying that women should be forced to stay with an abusive husband and sort it out? Really?

5)  It dosnt say this directly, but it does say some disparaging things about bastards (could be old testament).  Perhaps it is not that direct, but it was the result of a stigma directly derived from Christian values.  In my secular world, marriage is not important (many of my friends with children are not married) and the bastardness of children is a moot point. 

[Kron3007]

3) It is simply beyond any historical question whatsoever that the area of the world we loosely refer to as 'The Holy Land' used to be run by, and populated in the majority by, Christians, prior to the 7th c Islamic invasion.  Who would argue this?  (Who not wanting to appear to be an idiot or a liar, of course?).  It took centuries after the Arabs came for the place to come to be predominantly Arabized in speech and Islamicized in religion, further, and those locals remaining Christians did suffer at best second-class citizenship status in their own countries.  Therefore, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out why a Christian in Europe might well have concluded it was a good idea, perhaps even a mandate from God (esp if he was encouraged by his religious leaders to think this) to go to the Holy Land and try to expel said Muslim invaders.

The Egyptians, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, etc. were Christian? I think not. They all inhabited the area of "The Holy Land" well before Christianity even existed.

Our friend key is being an apologist for the European Christians of the 11th century who undertook the Crusades for a variety of reasons, including just regular Janes and Joes from the countryside, and even children if the folks tales are to be believed.  Sure, these people were easy to stir up, but that is no sort of justification. Overall, Kay is trying to be an apologist for all sorts of Christian hegemony, which is his right.

I find that Jerusalem fell to the Muslims in 637 A.D. and that Urban called for holy war in 1095 A.D.  That means that the Holy Land----which was holy to the Muslims as well----was established as a Muslim territory for longer than the United States has existed at this point.  You are welcome to point out that I have simplified this complicated and only distantly understood history, but still, one could understand why the Crusaders were seen as the "invaders," not the Muslims.

The best part is that he writes this without a hint of irony from his home/office on ill-gotten lands.   

[apl68]

Also, from the stats I have seen, divorce rates are actually higher in the Christian population than the non religious in the USA.  You say divorce is against Christian values, yet they are leading the charge, with more than 30% divorce rates (including evangelicals) and supported by the church .  So, it would seem that divorce is not against Christina values, just your interpretation of them. 

Not sure about the statistic, but that's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. Since living together unmarried is much less acceptable in Christian circles, then the real question is about how many conjugal relationships break up in both groups. Otherwise it's like discussing gun crime and only referring to legally-owned guns. "Divorce" in religious terms isn't merely a moral issue for legally-married people.

Sure, you cant make a direct comparison, but if a group has a divorce rate of over 30%, it is hard to claim divorce is against their moral code or that the increase in divorce is from the non-Christian sector.  It appears that at least a third of them disagree, and likely more than half (some people who did not divorce are likely not against it in principle).  I also know many "Christians" that co-habit, so I dont know how much water that argument really holds anyway.

This leads to the obvious argument that they are not "real" Christians and that they are not living by Christian moral codes, but therein lies the problem.  If Christians cant agree on a core moral code, how can you claim that they even have one?  Even "though shalt not kill" is up for grabs with the relatively large support for capital punishment and war-mongering among many Christian circles.

A few thoughts on Christians and divorce:

There are legitimate grounds for divorce given in the New Testament.  There's adultery, and there are situations where a non-Christian spouse--one who never converted, or who abandoned the faith--abandons the believing spouse.  The latter happened to me.  The separation and divorce were not what I wanted.  But they happened, and so I'm included in those divorce statistics.  My family and fellow church members understand.  They don't hold me responsible for what my wife did to me.

There are also people who divorced at an earlier stage of their lives, but later converted.  The past is past.  How do they live now is the big question.  I know many people in my own church and others who have all sorts of things in their past that they recognize are wrong.  Now they are changed people, which is what the expression "born again" refers to.  A church is a collection of redeemed sinners who've admitted it, not a bunch of people who've been righteous all of their lives.

I also know a lot of professing Christians who, as you note, take a rather casual approach to things like divorce, remarriage/serial polygamy, and cohabitation.  In my experience, they also tend to be very casual in church attendance and other aspects of Christian practice.  I've watched the incidence of this sort of thing grow enormously in my lifetime.  In a society where there's little or no religious persecution and a long tradition of church membership, it's the easiest thing in the world to profess to be a Christian.  But how many of these dedicate their lives to actually following the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament?  How many show evidence of living transformed lives?  How many professing Christians ever have, throughout history?

Jesus recognized from the start that this would happen.  Several of his parables spoke of how many who claimed to follow him would in the end be revealed as false followers.  There's quite a bit in the Gospels and elsewhere in the New Testament about the need to live a holy life, one that goes beyond mere outward ritual observance and respectability.  Nobody is going to be perfect in this life, but Jesus' followers are supposed to be marked by progress in that direction.  A failure to progress spiritually and ethically is either a sign of a dead profession of faith, or of a believer who is not spiritually healthy.  Only God ultimately knows who belongs to him and who's just faking it.  But there's no question that we have an awful lot of professing Christians whose lives don't give much reason for confidence.

[apl68]

Now I might well engender howls of outrage here, by saying a few positive things about the Crusades, which were certainly not the unalloyed Christians-bad, Muslims-good thing their detractors suggest.   They were problematic, of course, and the religious motivations undergirding them, especially the 'Deus vult' notions the Popes promulgated suggesting openly that participation therein would earn pardon from God, a place in Heaven, etc., are notoriously unbiblical, but that said, putting oneself in the shoes of an 11th c. Christian, one can clearly see how he might have decided to undertake a Crusade, in order to expel the Islamic invaders from the Holy Land, and restore Christian sovereignty to the place, freeing the oppressed Christian minority there from the rule of said Islamic invaders.

In my secular historian role I can see making some apology for the Crusaders, understood as people acting in the context of their times.  Read the literature on the Crusades and you'll see all sorts of pro-and-con viewpoints expressed about them, and most of these interpretations make at least a few fair points.

Evaluating the Crusaders and the Crusades from a New Testament perspective, there's just really not anything good to say about them.  Sure they called Jesus Lord and had rituals honoring him.  But when they launched their campaigns of conquest or reconquest, whichever one calls it, they were modelling themselves after Muhammad and his jihadis, not after anything that Jesus taught.  Likewise today the "guns and Trump" types are taking their cues from something very different from Jesus, whatever some of them might claim about being Christians.

[jimbogumbo]

Lotsa stuff here, so random responsa and observations in no necessary particular order of  importance:

1) 'classical' means different things... most of the schools in the 'classical' and especially the 'classical Christian' k12 school orbit do not really consider the Renaissance, and esp Renaissance art, the sort of 'classical' stuff they are emphasizing.  Some do not even do much art at all.   They rather consider things like ancient language study, rhetoric, logic, and the medieval Trivium to be of much greater import. 

2) I get that Michelangelo is not some scumbag perv on the net proffering kiddie porn.  Obviously.   That said, exactly what educational objective would be furthered by showing prepubescent children art that depicts full-on nudity in people, esp children?   There certainly is no tradition amongst evangelical protestantism for showing such images, or even for artists within these movements, for making them.

Here is a link to an overview of the Hillsdale 5th grade curriculum. For art, please see the focus topics for Fall months: https://k12.hillsdale.edu/getmedia/0fb481ce-812e-4830-a094-002e5222273f/5th-Grade-Map.pdf