With a dramatic introduction, the Burlington County Times reports on a disturbing hostage drill at the Burlington Township High School.

BURLINGTON TOWNSHIP — The scenario has played out in real life across America: Gunfire echoes through a school and students are held hostage.

Thankfully, school shootings are not all that common and I hope they never have the air of familiarity implied by this opening line. But the phenomenon is concerning enough that it is perhaps understandable that schools would desire to have procedures in place to handle such situations. These drills are also a part of the recommendations spoken of in President Bush’s Conference on School Safety implemented in response to a wave of school shootings last year.

“You perform as you practice,” Superintendent Chris Manno said prior to the exercise. “We need to practice under conditions as real as possible in order to evaluate our procedures and plans so that they’re as effective as possible.”

What are these “conditions as real as possible?”

Two Burlington Township police detectives portrayed the gunmen. Investigators described them as members of a right-wing fundamentalist group called the “New Crusaders” who don’t believe in separation of church and state. The mock gunmen went to the school seeking justice because the daughter of one had been expelled for praying before class.

Be on alert for right-wing, fundamentalist Christians. We’re a dangerous set. We’re responsible for how many school shootings now? Zero I think it is, but I may not be able to count quite high enough to keep up.

Do you think the resolution passed last week by the UN Council on Human Rights against the public defamation of religion will be of any help? Probably not. It was, after all, pushed through by the Islamic nations on the council in response to those Danish cartoons and only specifically mentions Islam. Were we to take it seriously, it would probably only result in the inability of any group to claim exclusive truth. Victoria, Australia has a similar law which has already resulted in prison sentences for Christians who sought to warn against teachings in the Koran.

And unlike the violence following the depiction of the Prophet Mohammed in a free and independent newspaper, all that is likely to happen in response to this portrayal of Christianity is some discussion and maybe a formal complaint. Regardless of how we are depicted, we tend to be a relatively peaceful lot. Something about “turn the other cheek” and “love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you” restrains the believer from turning out in violent protest.

(Yes, I’m aware of “Christian” violence such as those despicable acts occasionally carried out at abortion clinics. These actions, however, are not embraced by the Christian community and are generally condemned by the church as antithetical to the fundamentals of the Christian faith.)

Related Tags: school violence, Christian fundamentalists, defamation of religion

From PublishersWeekly:

A three-year old controversy over a book espousing a young-earth Creationist view being sold at the Grand Canyon visitors center has resurfaced, with renewed media attention and more they-said, they-said hullabaloo.

In spite of the ongoing squabble, a National Park Service spokesman said it’s unlikely to review the sale at the Grand Canyon National Park of a popular book that says the canyon was created during the global flood recounted in the Bible. “The fact that we haven’t done anything in the last three years is kind of a decision,” David Barna, NPS chief of communications, told RBL.

Since 2003, when New Leaf’s Master Books published it, the store has sold Tom Vail’s Grand Canyon: A Different View. The arguments began right away. All seem to agree the book contains exquisite photos, but the storm has been over Vail’s assertion the Grand Canyon was created just a few thousand years ago.

At this point, said Barna, the book is shelved under an inspirational category. The scientific community wants the book gone, but Barna said the park’s interpretive staff wants it to stay “because they’re not afraid of alternate views. And they think debate itself is healthy.” Barna drew a comparison to Civil War battlefield sites, where visitors may find books with various perspectives of the war’s causes. read the rest

David Barna seems like a reasonable man with a reasonable stance. Maybe he is helped along by the steady sale of the book in question, I don’t know. But I’m still wondering why it is so imperative that all agree on this issue. Perhaps it is because, as a commenter on a Free Republic discussion asserts,

Better, I’d think, to form a common worldview while young than have to start from scratch as an adult confronted with an unwelcome reality.

I’m not sure what the unwelcome reality is, other than perhaps the fact that others have different opinions. Nice argument for public education. And it really is the root of the problem. To develop a common worldview, we need a common upbringing under central control. That is the purpose of socialization. And it is the purpose of our public education system.

Related Tags: homeschooling, socialization, Grand Canyon, Tom Vail

Occasionally, an odd search term brings a visitor to my blog, and I often wonder what they were thinking when they typed in their search. Perhaps, like I used to do, they were merely bored and typing in strange queries to see what would happen. I used to be quite highly ranked on the search engines for the search, “chicken mop.” I haven’t noticed anything that odd recently, and actually have wondered at the increased relevancy of search terms bringing my random visitors.

This one isn’t that odd, really, but it does leave me questioning about what people imagine the role of the state to be in our lives: “should a public preschool allow religious discussions among peers?” And if you look at the search, there I am at number seven with an odd excerpt that probably would have lead that person to believe that I am against homeschooling.

But is there seriously any doubt? Or just what kind of society do we want to live in? Are we really desiring a society which allows the state to listen in on private conversations to ensure that no religious expression occurs in the public domain? A public school teacher is an agent of the state (that is straight from my new teacher inservice training in Texas). As such, the teacher may not legally represent any religion while in the classroom. Your behavior outside the classroom is under scrutiny, as well, but thankfully for more common conceptions of decency rather than religious expression. However, as an agent of the state, it is also the duty of the public school teacher to protect the constitutional rights of the students in the classroom.

The topic spurred the release of a letter to all school districts from the former Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley (under President Clinton) outlining the school’s duty to protect the religious expression of children in line with Supreme Court Rulings. Among other things, the letter lines out clearly that

…schools may not forbid students acting on their own from expressing their personal religious views, or beliefs solely because they are of a religious nature. Schools may not discriminate against private religious expression by students, but must instead give students the same right to engage in religious activity and discussion as they have to engage in other comparable activity. ed.gov

Or do we want the government to control our thoughts, as well?

Related Tags: eduction, public schools, freedom of religion, religion in school

My email box has been flooded recently with a variety of links regarding the inherently violent nature of religion with only one clear conclusion to be drawn: religion is a social ill which needs to be corrected. Or, to use their terminology, a cultural virus to be vaccinated against.

Richard Dawkins equates religious instruction with mental abuse. While the doctrine of hell may cause sleeplessness in some, it needn’t. There is another way. And at any rate, teaching it certainly isn’t as painful as experiencing it.

In a lecture delivered to Amnesty International, psychologist Nicholas Humphrey asserts that while freedom of expression is a fundamental right, it should be limited in an area fundamental to who we are as humans: the expression of religion. Comparing imparting one’s religious values to female circumcision, he argues that the “cultural virus” (Dawkin’s term) must be eradicated by separating the parent from child. He provides an interesting test:

…I want to propose a general test for deciding when and whether the teaching of a belief system to children is morally defensible. As follows. If it is ever the case that teaching this system to children will mean that later in life they come to hold beliefs that, were they in fact to have had access to alternatives, they would most likely not have chosen for themselves, then it is morally wrong of whoever presumes to impose this system and to choose for them to do so. No one has the right to choose badly for anyone else.

Now, I have a question. Since I came to Christ as an adult, once I had an alternative to the pseudo-scientific dogmatism presented to me in the public school and the spiritual vacuum provided by my parents, I guess the teaching of America’s public schools fails the test. I would not have chosen that path for myself and made appropriate corrections to that path once the necessity became clear. So we are back to the question of who is best qualified to make decisions for the child until he is cognitively mature enough to make such decisions for himself. The parent or the state?

Another attack on religion, from someone who also proposes changing the Constitution to read “Freedom from Religion” instead of “Freedom of Religion. And a distorted argument. I had to read it twice to make sense of it, but as a note of clarification, “religion” does not deny the existence of objective truth, and thus using or referring to the scientific method by a Christian does not negate any religious views of the world.

These arguments do not occur in a vacuum and ideas have consequences. Lenin targeted the “bourgeois” (and parents lost the right to give their children a religious education), Hitler targeted the genetically “inferior” (and made sure there was no way for a child to be educated but through the public schools, completely eliminating private schools and encouraging children to spy on their parents for the state) and Pol Pot, in his plan for a classic, utopian society, targeted all religions and completely reorganized the fundamental system of the family.

Dawkins’ and Humphrey’s ideas are not new. The natural consequences are documented in the photo essays linked above. While many are beginning to claim that religion is the source of the world’s wars, we cannot overlook the genocide which has occurred in the attempt to eradicate it.

As Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl writes in The Doctor and the Soul,

I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.

(The photo is of an unidentified girl, tortured and then murdered in the Cambodian genocide. The photo is from the Cambodian Genocide Program archives.)

Related Tags: religion, science, Dawkins, science and religion, genocide, education, parental rights

Many on my side of the homeschooling fence subscribe to one or more of these philosophies, which gave me pause to think. Are we worshipping idols, family style?

The bad fruit of misunderstanding God’s foundational purpose is often a form of idolatry. Our family (or worse yet, the family-integrated ministry model) becomes a sort of idol. Idolatry is when we substitute or place a created thing in the rightful place of the Creator. When we get ourselves backwards and pursue as our primary goal the family-integrated thing, the homeschooling thing, the patriarchy thing, the breeding thing, the modesty/home-baked bread thing, or the “making sure our boys are tough warriors and not wimpy” thing, instead of God’s glory, idolatry is just around the corner. Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with any of these things I have just mentioned. But they are means, not ends.

Although I personally feel I run close to (if not in) this basic movement described, I have also experienced the judgmental “legalism” which I think the author is referring to in this article. I have on occasion been on the receiving end of not-so-kindly-worded criticism from other Christian homeschoolers about placing my children in Sunday School, the fact that I don’t particularly advocate corporal punishment or the fact that I don’t particularly oppose it either. I have seen others, even those new in the faith, held to an artificial standard of behavior which, although derived from biblical principles, does not quite carry the weight of scripture.

In short, I have known people who attempt to impose an outward expression of godliness without concerning themselves for the heart. I have also known atheists and agnostics who displayed more genuine love and compassion for their fellow man than most devout Christians I know. That bothers me. The bible does not tell us we will be recognized by the world by any outward sign…in our dress, number of children, employment of the mother, style of worship music we listen to or the structure of our local church.

By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.
–John 13:35

Yes, the family is not the end and those things which preserve the family are not the highest goals. God’s glory is the purpose and increased focus on the family is a means to an end. But there is one thing Mr. Barfield leaves out, which is acutely relevant in a church plagued by the same social ills as the rest of the world. If we do not have the means, how will we ever accomplish the ends?

Related Tags: homeschooling, family, church, idolatry, breeders, patriarchy, family worship, legalism

OK, I posted the link to the first part of the article I wrote for Homeschool Enrichment Magazine that posted on Crosswalk. Now, all three sections are up. I hope you enjoy it.

Part I:

http://www.crosswalk.com/family/home_school/1443897.html

Part II:

http://crosswalk.com/family/home_school/1445926.html

Part III:

http://crosswalk.com/family/home_school/1446683.html

Related Tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, Christian, faith