Illogic of the Garden of Eden Story (2 of 2)

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Garden of Eden Genesis BibleLet’s look closer at the details of the Garden of Eden story (part 1 here). As history—or even a coherent story—it doesn’t stand up.

  • Omniscient God isn’t very knowledgeable when he goes into the Garden and doesn’t know where Adam and Eve are (Gen. 3:9). Omnibenevolent God isn’t very benevolent when it comes to delivering their punishment. This is another parallel with the Akkadian Atra-Hasis epic—those gods didn’t know everything and weren’t always benevolent either. As one commenter noted, “God’s powers can’t be that amazing if you can get them from a fruit tree.”
  • As crimes go, this one was a misdemeanor. Admittedly, Adam and Eve did disobey God, but how about just a scolding? This was the first bad act in their lives. Isn’t the trans-generational punishment out of proportion to the crime?
  • Before Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they didn’t know good and evil. Why blame them for doing something wrong when they couldn’t know it was wrong? It’s like punishing a two-year old for a moral infraction. In fact, Adam and Eve were likely not two years old themselves.
  • If Man understands good and evil today (we possess the knowledge of the Tree), why are we so bad at figuring out good and evil? Okay, let’s assume that selfishness and other base desires muddy the waters. Let’s assume that someone could know the right course of action but choose the easy or pleasurable over the right. Shouldn’t we all at least agree on what’s good? How could post-apple humans be divided on abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, and capital punishment?
  • How can getting wisdom be a bad thing? Solomon was celebrated for being the wisest man on earth (1 Kings 4:30). The Bible makes clear that wisdom is good: “How much better to get wisdom than gold, to get insight rather than silver!” (Prov. 16:16).
  • Could an omniscient God have been surprised at the result of the Garden of Eden experiment? And if he knew the outcome, why go through the charade? (It’s almost like this is all just mythology … ?)
  • Tertullian said of women, “You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law.” But read the story—Adam was with her the whole time. Why give Eve extra blame?
  • Why are their descendants cursed for all time—women with labor pain and men with difficult toil—when the descendants didn’t do anything? We see the same thinking in the second commandment (“I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me”), which probably also came from the J source. It’s nice that God lightens up in later centuries (see Deuteronomy 24:16 or Jeremiah 31:30), though this doesn’t put God’s unchanging moral law in a good light.

At this point in the Bible, Jesus wasn’t even a twinkle in God’s eye, but it is worth noting that while Jesus provides forgiveness of one’s sins, Christians are still punished for Eve’s sin.
This is an aside, but it is curious that Christian Creationists who object to humans evolving from bacteria have no problem with God making Adam from dust (Gen. 2:7). Indeed, the word Adam comes from the Hebrew adamah (dust).
The NET Bible comment on Gen. 2:17 (“for when you eat from [the Tree,] you will surely die”) makes clear that this phrase means that death will happen almost immediately, as if the fruit were coated with poison. But, of course, the serpent was right, and they don’t die. Indeed, Adam lives to be 930 years old.
Apologists respond that this instead means that they will die eventually, that this introduced physical death and they would no longer be immortal. But the text makes clear that they never were immortal. They were driven from the Garden so they wouldn’t eat from the Tree of Life. That’s what makes you immortal.
Apologists try again: they say that “die” meant spiritual death. First off, that’s not what the text says. Second, the animals were driven from the Garden as well, so there’s no reason to imagine that their death was any different than Man’s. If the animals’ death was physical and not spiritual, what’s to argue that Man’s is any different?
Christian theologians tell us that the serpent was Satan in disguise, but (yet again) that’s not what the text tells us. It was a serpent, not Satan, and that’s what Jews today will tell you. And why is the serpent the bad guy? He told the truth! He was the Old Testament’s Prometheus.
I’ll close with comments from Ricky Gervais, who imagined the snake having this to say in response to God’s punishment that he crawl on his belly for the rest of his life.

“But I already.… Oh no! Oh yeah, you’ve done me, yeah. No, we’re even now. I asked for that. Okay, cheers. Oh—how does this work again? Owww—I’m being punished. This is rubbish—I wish I could fly, like normal.”

And the Son of God died; 
it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd. 
And He was buried, and rose again; 
the fact is certain, because it is impossible.
— Tertullian

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/26/13.)
Image credit: Wikimedia
 

Never Quote a Bible Verse (and 7 Examples Where Christians Forget This Advice)

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Chick tractsIt’s not like I go through life looking for arguments. I’m just a happy-go-lucky, tousle-headed scamp skipping through life and whistling a tune who unaccountably gets blindsided by nutty Christian arguments just begging for a good thrashing. It would be rude to not comply.
In fact, I’m happy to agree with Christians when I can, and just to prove that, let me point out an article by Greg Koukl, “Never Read a Bible Verse.” His point is that you should never read just a Bible verse but rather read the entire paragraph to understand the context.
That’s good advice as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It’s true that broadening your reading to the local context can clarify the meaning of the verse and is a fairer way to approach that verse. Unfortunately, this doesn’t assure us that the Bible doesn’t say something contradictory elsewhere—it’s a big book. Said another way, the actual context is the entire Bible. Don’t quote the Bible as an authority until you can assure me that the Bible never undercuts this message elsewhere.
The problem can be illustrated with a familiar source of simplistic Christian apologetics.
Chick tracts
Chick tracts are small comic pamphlets that illustrate conservative Christian principles (or attack the usual suspects of Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism, evolution, and so on) through an illustrated story. A typical story will have a sinner scared straight by a glimpse of hell, for example. The printed tracts are cheap enough that street evangelists can hand them out to potential converts.
Let’s use Chick tracts as examples where a broader biblical context would give a very different interpretation of the point they’re making.

1. Bogus prophecy. “The Greatest Story Ever Told” is the condensed gospel story, and it can’t resist repeating several of the five claims of fulfilled prophecy in the first two chapters of Matthew. It first quotes Isaiah 7:14, “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” No, this isn’t a prophecy of Jesus. Simply following the “never read a Bible verse” rule, we can find from the context that this claim was to be fulfilled just a few years after it was spoken, in Isaiah’s own time. (More here.)
The tract also says, “The Bible prophesied that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:1–2).” Wrong again, and you’d discover that if you’d read the context. Those verses talk about a ruler who will turn back the Assyrians, who began conquering Israel in 740 BCE. Micah 5:9 says, “Your hand will be lifted up in triumph over your enemies, and all your foes will be destroyed.” Whose gospel story is this? Certainly not that of Jesus.
2. Belief in Jesus is mandatory. “Back from the Dead?” is the hilarious tale of someone who visits hell during a near-death experience. In it, Jesus is quoted from John 14:6, “No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” “It’s Not Your Fault” quotes John 3:18, which makes a similar point: “He that believes not is condemned already.”
This is one where the whole Bible is the context. Romans 5:19 says, “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.” That is, we didn’t opt in to get the sin of Adam, and we needn’t opt in to get the salvation of Jesus. No belief is necessary.
Christians seem endlessly eager to harmonize ill-fitting verses like these, but they’re still ill-fitting. An omniscient Creator would have made sure that his message got into the world clearly and unambiguously.
 


See also: Christians’ Damning Refuge in “Difficult Verses”

 
3. Works don’t get you into heaven. God turns revenge to love in “The Hit!” Someone says, “The only way anyone gets to heaven is through faith in Christ alone” with a reference to Acts 4:12. This is standard Chick: making a statement and then backing it up with just a Bible reference. I’ll agree that this verse does back it up (“Salvation is found in no one else”), but it’s just a context-free reference.
A character in “Back from the Dead?” says, “You can’t make it [to heaven] by good works” and cites Ephesians 2:8–9 and Titus 3:5. In “It’s the Law” we read, “No … good works will not take away our sins!”
Consider the whole Bible, and we find the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31–46), which makes plain that those who make it to the Kingdom do so through their good works. There is no mention of faith.
4. God hates slavery. “Kidnapped!” is about child slavery, and it tries to portray the Old Testament as anti-slavery by quoting Exodus 21:16, “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him … shall surely be put to death.” (Unsurprisingly, Chick prefers the King James Version.)
Nope. God has no problem with slavery. In fact, biblical slavery was pretty much identical to American slavery.
5. God hates fags. In “Birds and the Bees,” a little girl lectures us about homosexuality. Referring to the people of Sodom: “Today those same kind of people are back, but now they’re called Gays!” with a reference to Genesis 13:13.
Sorry, little girl, read the story. The “sin of Sodom” was rape. Yes, that’s a bad thing, but it’s bad whether it’s homosexual or heterosexual.
Little girl then says, “But God still says being Gay is an abomination!” with a reference to Leviticus 18:22, but she needs to “never read a Bible verse.” Read more widely, and it’s clear that Leviticus 18–20 are full of ritual abominations. Don’t plant your field with two kinds of seed or wear clothing woven of two kinds of material (Leviticus 19:19); don’t cut your hair (19:28); don’t use fortune tellers (19:31) (and kill them, by the way—that’s in 20:27); the death penalty is the punishment for cursing your father or mother (20:9); and don’t forget your kosher food laws (20:25).
Today, we ignore these ritual abominations. You can’t go back to retrieve one you’re fond of.
6. Only through Jesus can sins be forgiven. A gang killing gone wrong is the tale in “Gomez is Coming.” In the thrilling conclusion, we are told, “Only someone who was sinless could pay the price for our sins” (1 Peter 3:18).
Not really. In Matthew 16:19, Jesus tells his followers, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Binding means to forbid and loosing means to permit, both by an indisputable authority. The parallel verse in John 20:23 is, “If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”
If Christians today say that the Great Commission doesn’t just apply to Jesus’s original disciples but applies to them as well (it doesn’t), perhaps they’re bold enough to tell us that they can forgive sins, too.
7. The Ten Commandments. “It’s the Law” cites Exodus 20 and 34 in its references to the Ten Commandments. Whoops—here’s where being honest about the context bites them. Exodus 20 lists the original set of Ten Commandments. But remember that Moses smashed them in anger and went back up to get another set, which was put in the Ark of the Covenant. The second set is listed in Exodus 34, and it’s a very different set.
Never quote a Bible verse to pass along God’s position on a matter unless you’re certain that it is unambiguously what the entire Bible says on that subject.

Anyone who actually does everything the Bible commands
would be a criminal in every country on this planet.
— Aron Ra

Image credit: Kamil Porembiński, flickr, CC

How Long from Original New Testament Books to Oldest Copies?

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Arguments for the reliability of the New Testament are built as a chain of claims—the reliability of oral history, the short duration between events and documentation, the large number of Greek copies, and so on. We’ll look at one of these links, the time from original authorship to our best copies, to see how well it stands up.
Bible reliability cross examined blog new testament time gap from original to best copy
Source of the data
Making a spreadsheet of the time gap for every chapter in every book in the Bible was a tedious task, though not a difficult one. The oldest manuscript with a complete New Testament is the Codex Sinaiticus, dated to 350 CE. For 57 of the New Testament’s 260 chapters (22 percent) this was the oldest source, but papyrus copies are older for the remainder. These papyri range in breadth from P46, which contains more than eight epistles (letters), to P52, which has just a few verses of John 18.
That gave an oldest date for each chapter, and this list has the date of authorship for each book (from the 50s for Paul’s authentic epistles to 90 and beyond for John, Revelation, and some of the epistles). Subtract the years to get the time gap from authorship to oldest copy for each chapter.
Time gaps for gospel chapters
The chart above shows the gospel chapters in order for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The red bars indicate the first chapter in each book. The height of each bar is the time gap from the original to our best copy for that chapter.
Matthew and John each have 18 papyrus sources, Luke has 6, and Mark only 2. Though Mark is thought to be the oldest gospel, scholars have speculated that once churches had Matthew and Luke (basically second editions of Mark), Mark lost its value and wasn’t copied as much by the early church.
The time gaps for the chapters in John look pretty good compared to the others because it was the last gospel to be written and because papyrus P66, dated to 200 CE, is a complete copy. P52 (125 CE) has bits of John 18, and P90 (150 CE) has bits of John 19.
Luke also does well because of two papyri dated to 200 CE that cover most of the book. Nevertheless, 22 of these 89 gospel chapters have no papyrus copies that improve on the Codex Sinaiticus (350 CE). This problem is particularly obvious in Matthew, where it must rely on Sinaiticus for 43 percent of its oldest chapters. The average chapter time gap for Matthew is 200 years, making it particularly unreliable. Mark is even worse, at 230 years.
The height of each bar is the length of the dark period during which no one knows for sure what happened to the copies. We have enough data to repair some errors, but who knows how many errors remain and how bad they are? How much confidence can we have in a copy written centuries later than the original?


See also: The Bible’s Dark Ages

You wouldn’t believe a supernatural story if it was claimed to have happened yesterday, but we’re to believe supernatural stories about Jesus passed on as oral history for decades before being written down when we don’t even have the originals but only copies from centuries later?


See also: A Simple Thought Experiment Defeats Claim that Bible Is Accurate

Bible reliability cross examined blog new testament time gap from original to best copy
Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Ephesians
Acts and Romans both have a decent number of papyrus sources (8 and 7, respectively), but continuing down the list, it’s 4 sources, then 1, 1, and 3. Fortunately for these epistles, they are mostly in P46 from 200 CE.
Ephesians (the last six chapters on the right) looks unusually good, but that’s only because it’s a pseudo-Pauline epistle, one that falsely claims to be written by Paul but was actually written about 30 years later than Paul’s actual epistles.
Bible reliability cross examined blog new testament time gap from original to best copy
All the rest: Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1–3 John, Jude, and Revelation
The one-chapter books stand out here.
Hebrews (thirteen chapters, each 115 years tall, near the center) has 8 papyrus sources, including the excellent P46. Revelation has five sources, mostly poor. The remainder have three or fewer sources, and four books have zero sources and must be completely backstopped by Codex Sinaiticus.
Every link in the chain that builds to the conclusion, “And that’s why the New Testament is historically trustworthy!” must be reliable. When the average time gap from original to oldest copy is 171 years, this link in the chain clearly isn’t.

If the Bible and my brain are both the work of the same infinite god,
whose fault is it that the book and my brain do not agree?
— Robert G. Ingersoll

“A Universe That’s Understandable Points to God,” but How Understandable Is the Universe?

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Christian apologeticsWe can understand the universe, but why? Nobel Prize-winning physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner said in 1960, “The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural science is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.” Albert Einstein expressed a similar thought: “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.”
What some Christian apologists claim
Many Christians have seized on this, claiming that an understandable universe points to God, both because God would want us to understand it and because only a theistic approach can explain such a universe. World-famous apologist William Lane Craig gave this religious interpretation:

It was very evident to me that [naturalists are not] able to provide any sort of an explanation of mathematics’ applicability to the physical world, and this was self-confessed…. Theism [enjoys] a considerable advantage in [being able to answer this question].

Philosopher Nicholas Maxwell added:

Why should the physical universe, utterly foreign to the human mind, nevertheless be comprehensible to the human mind? We have here, it seems, an utterly inexplicable link between the physical universe and the human world…. Of course if God exists, the comprehensibility of the universe is entirely understandable.

Let me push back a little. These interpretations make a huge, unstated assumption that a godless universe could not look like our universe, but what supports this? Do they think that the dependability of physics is only due to God? Do they think that a godless universe would it be unstable, with constants, exponents, and relationships continuously changing? Perhaps in this universe, e = mc2 would be valid one moment but then e = mc2.1 the next and e = 17mc3.5 the next?
That our physics wouldn’t look like it does without God is a very bold claim, for which I see no evidence. Furthermore, “God did it” is unfalsifiable, which is a fatal trait for any theory, let alone one that claims to explain all of science’s most perplexing problems.  (I give a more thorough analysis here.)
Hold on—is the universe understandable?
Let’s reconsider the initial claim, that the universe is understandable. Sure, we can find simple relationships between aspects of reality with scientific laws such as PV = nRT, V = IR, F = Gm1m2/r2, and so on, but things become more complicated. Corrections for relativity must be added to Newton’s Law of Gravity (F = Gm1m2/r2). Ohm’s Law (V = IR) ignores capacitance and inductance, which makes calculations of time-varying voltage or current much more complicated. And the Ideal Gas Law (PV = nRT) makes assumptions about gases that limit its applicability.
The universe is understandable? More precisely, what we understand about the universe is understandable, which isn’t much help in anticipating how science will continue to progress as we push the frontiers. How much about the universe will we eventually understand?

Knowledge about the universe can be divided into four categories, as illustrated by the Venn diagram above.

  1. What we know. This has expanded dramatically since the modern period of scientific discovery beginning around 1800, which includes scientists such as Maxwell, Mendeleev, and Tesla, and even more so since the Enlightenment period, which might include Galileo, Newton, and Pascal. Imagine how small the “What we know” ellipse was 500 years ago.
  2. What we will know. No one knows if we’ll continue learning about the universe at the current rate, but it seems a safe bet that we’ll know much more a thousand years in the future (assuming human society stays safe).
  3. What we’re capable of knowing. What more could we understand if we only asked the right questions or if super-smart aliens taught it to us? Theoretical physics, like science fiction, can only take us to places that its practitioners can dream up.
    Another limit is our finite ability to create technology. To satisfy Big Physics, engineers have built the Large Hadron Collider, the Laser Interferometry Gravity Observatory, and the Hubble Space Telescope, and they’re planning next generation versions. But what if we eventually needed versions that were a thousand times bigger or more expensive? Or a billion times? Human society, even far into the future, might have limits. Without these monster machines, doors to unimaginable truths might remain closed.
  4. All foundational knowledge of reality. The final ellipse is everything—not trivial specifics like the atmospheric composition of Alpha Centauri’s fourth planet but every concept, law, and theory needed to describe life, the universe, and everything.
    Our imperfect brains have limits. Imagine an alien species that is smarter than we are to the same extent that we are smarter than chimpanzees. While we share a common ancestor with chimps from just six million years ago, we can find in chimps only the rudiments of higher-order intelligence such as humor, problem solving, and morality. Chimpanzees are our closest living animal relative, but human children surpass their intelligence at perhaps three years of age. These aliens would intellectually be to us what we are to chimps. If chimps can never understand algebra or geometry, let alone calculus or quantum physics, what would these aliens be able to understand that we could never hope to learn? And if chimps will never understand all the science behind reality, why do we think we will?
    Now take it a step further and make the aliens’ cognitive gap the same as between us and lizards. Our understanding the new science these aliens could teach us might be as unlikely as a lizard understanding a joke.

A pessimistic look at our understanding of reality
The figure above gives one version of what we know (and will know) compared to what we won’t, but that’s just an optimistic guess. Imagine if the four ellipses actually look like this:

With this interpretation, we will still make a lot of progress from what we now know to what we will eventually know, but this more pessimistic version imagines the overwhelming majority of science out of our reach, either because imagination or lack of data let us down (third ellipse) or because it is beyond our cognitive reach (fourth ellipse). Will humans eventually understand 99 percent of the science behind reality? Or 0.1 percent?
Most frustrating, we can never know how big the third and fourth ellipses are! We can never understand the size of our ignorance. We will always perceive only ellipse #1, never sure if we’ve learned most of the science or a tiny fraction, never sure if we will learn much more or if we’re near our inherent limit.


See also: The Argument from Mathematics Doesn’t Add Up to God

Let’s return to our marvelously understandable universe. The universe is indeed understandable … but only to the extent that we can understand it. And how far is that? No one will ever know. “The universe is understandable” is an empty statement.
If Christians want to find proof of God in there somewhere, they must imagine a God who tantalizes us with some bits that are understandable, makes us work very hard to understand more, and refuses to tell us just how much of this mess we will ever understand. Doesn’t sound like a proof of anything to me.

The classic theist dodge
is to declare that God answers all prayers,
but the answer can be “Yes,” “No,” or “Wait.”
This means God has fewer options available to him
than my Magic 8 Ball.
— commenter Kevin K

Image credit: Olga Reznik, flickr, CC

Religion in Public Schools: What Does the First Amendment Allow?

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separation of church and stateAs a follow-up to my recent post about prayer in public schools, let’s look at what of religion is allowed in U.S. public schools and what isn’t. As an authority, I’ve used chapter 4 of Finding Common Ground: A Guide to Religious Liberty in Public Schools from the First Amendment Center.
For brevity, this summary must avoid the nuance and make some gray areas appear black and white, and it only focuses on religious freedom in schools. Remember also that this topic is in flux. It was only in 1940 that the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that religious free exercise should be included in the liberties granted to all citizens by the 14th Amendment (1868).
The First Amendment guarantee of religious liberty in the U.S. Constitution has two clauses.
First Amendment Establishment Clause

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion

The Lemon test, from a 1971 Supreme Court case, tests this clause. A negative answer to any of the three questions below means that the law is unconstitutional.

  1. Does the law have a bona fide secular or civic purpose? The purpose of schools is education, so if the only purpose for a school activity is to celebrate a religious holiday (for example), it’s unconstitutional. On the other hand, allowing students religious exemptions from attending sex-education classes is constitutional. Accommodating a student’s religion is valid, but promoting it is not. Permitting a student essay with a religious theme is valid, but requiring it is not.
  2. Is the law neutral? That is, does the primary effect neither advance nor inhibit religion? Allowing students to be released from school to attend religious instruction elsewhere is valid, but promoting such classes is not. Religious groups must be allowed to use school facilities like any other group. Allowing a church to use a school building does advance religion, but an equal-access policy wouldn’t have advancing religion as itsprimary effect.
  3. Does the law avoid excessive government entanglement with religion? The Supreme Court case Lemon v. Kurtzman, from which this test comes, found that a state law reimbursing nonpublic schools (mostly Catholic) for secular classes was an excessive government entanglement with religion.

First Amendment Free Exercise Clause

Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]

For this clause, the Sherbert test is applied. First, the student who claims that their Free Exercise rights were violated must meet both tests below.

  1. The student’s actions must have been motivated by sincere religious belief. Religious beliefs are judged only by the student. From the standpoint of a teacher or any other observer, they don’t have to be popular, rational, or sensible; they only have to be sincere. For the purposes of this test, the belief system must “[function] like a religion in the life of the individual,” which would include secular humanism.
  2. The student’s actions have been substantially burdened by the government. The focus is on substantial. Coercion would be substantial; incidental burdens would not be. Forbidding students from handing out religious tracts to classmates might be a substantial burden, but requiring that they do it at a reasonable time and place would not be.

If the student has a valid claim (both 1 and 2 are met), we move to on to see if the government has a compelling reason to impose that burden. The government will win its case if it meets both tests below.

  1. The government must be acting to further a compelling state interest. A compelling state interest might be public health and safety, but “compelling” has limits. Compulsory-attendance laws are a compelling interest, but Amish families successfully argued that it wasn’t compelling enough after eighth grade. Teaching children how to prevent the spread of HIV through sex-education classes is a compelling interest, but this may not be compelling enough if parents object on religious grounds.
  2. The government must have pursued that interest in a manner least burdensome to religion. The school should burden a student’s religious beliefs as little as necessary. If a student objects to an assignment on religious grounds, the school might be required to find an alternative, though one student’s religion can’t determine the curriculum for the rest of the class.

These First Amendment clauses are not in tension
It’s wrong to see one clause favoring religion and the other opposed to it. According to Finding Common Ground, “Both clauses secure the rights of believers and nonbelievers alike to be free from government involvement in matters of conscience.”


See also: Movie Review: “God’s Still Not Dead: You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down”

The bottom line
Let’s consider the court’s stand on typical questions.

  • Prayer, Bible reading, and expressing religious viewpoints are allowed if they’re done by the student. School-sponsored versions are not.
  • Teachers and outside adults do not have the right to pray with students. Students are the ones obliged to be there, and it’s their rights that are protected.
  • Moments of silence are okay, but not if they are used to promote prayer.
  • Religious clubs should be treated like other clubs, though religious groups are prohibited in primary schools because of the risk of younger students being unable to distinguish student speech from government speech.
  • Religious community groups that want to use school facilities after hours should be treated like other groups.
  • Outside adults may not pray at graduation or other school events, though the law is less clear about student-led prayer. The better approach is a privately sponsored voluntary baccalaureate event, separate from graduation.
  • Rules for students handing out literature must be even handed and not favor or discriminate against religious literature. Restrictions are allowed, but schools probably can’t ban all such distribution. Teachers and outside adults, on the other hand, have no right to distribute literature of any kind in schools.

If we are just a bunch of bitter old church people, grumpy at the world, 
yelling at non-believers to get off our proverbial moral lawn, 
that does not show forth light and preserve as salt.
— Ed Stetzer of Lifeway Research at 2013 SBC

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/19/13.)
Photo credit: Kim Sacha, flickr, CC
 

Bible Reading in Schools: Still Illegal After Half a Century

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Over 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court in Abington v. Schempp (1963) decided eight to one that school-sponsored Bible reading was unconstitutional. Madalyn Murray O’Hair was the mother of a plaintiff in a similar case that was consolidated with Schempp. (O’Hair founded American Atheists, also in 1963. Above, see a photo of O’Hair, who Life magazine called “the most hated woman in America” a year later.)
But the battle continues
While it may be a day to celebrate a long-standing legal precedent, we can’t rest on our laurels. Consider the “Mississippi Student Religious Liberties Act of 2013” (SB 2633), also focused on religion in public schools. The title alone sounds pretty good—who would stand in the way of religious liberty?
The bill is full of equality language. Religious and secular viewpoints must be treated “in the same manner,” religious groups must be “given the same access,” a school district policy should be such that it “neither favors nor disfavors” religious groups, and so on. The governor’s press release said that the law “protects students from being discriminated against in a public school.” If you hate discrimination and you’re a fan of the First Amendment, what’s not to like?
Pandora’s box
But who decides what is religious? The law gives no test, so apparently the student decides. Religion in this domain is what each student tells you it is.
This puts a lot of power into questionable hands. Consider the 2011 case from Austria in which a self-described Pastafarian (member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) won the right to wear his spaghetti strainer—religious headgear, he claimed—for his driver’s license photo. Most of us can remember classmates who would delight in seeing how far they could push a rule like this. Remember that this law would apply to high school students. Might they wear a colander or a swastika (which actually is a religious symbol) or a necklace of an extended middle finger, justifying any of these as religious expression?
The law also permits religious speech from students at athletic events and in announcements made at the beginning of the school day. This is not allowed for school staff because, as government employees, their speech would be sanctioned by the government. But why imagine that putting it in the mouth of a student avoids this problem? Every student listening is obliged by law to be at school. They’re captive to all religious messages in the morning announcements.
And remember the Colander Problem: “religion” is in the eyes of student. Aside from vulgar language and time limits, the student has the talking stick. The same public forum that allows a Christian to talk about why Jesus is his savior allows the class jester to explain how Druidism or Satanism or polyamory turned his life around. Students can talk to their captive audience about the worldview of Mormonism or Wicca or Islam or (gasp!) atheism. Can the Christian parent want their child to be forced to sit through these daily messages?
The place for “Mormons and Catholics and atheists will broil in hell at 425° Fahrenheit” is in church, not the public school.
Perhaps the biggest failing in this kind of “religious liberty” is the bad light it shines on Christianity. Christian churches are already permitted, and they’re subsidized by tax-free status. Christians can already preach in the public square and hand out leaflets on street corners. But apparently that’s not enough. According to the government of Mississippi, Christianity is too weak to compete in the marketplace of ideas and needs a little boost. Home and church aren’t sufficient, and public schools need to be enlisted to fight the good fight. Is it just me who sees this as a pathetic admission of the weakness of the Christian message?
How this could play out
Consider other examples of Christian excesses from recent years. In 2007, Seattle-Tacoma airport was decorated for Christmas in a religion-free way after fights the previous year over what religious worldviews would be on display.
Don’t forget the city of Santa Monica, which used a lottery to apportion permission to set up religious displays on public property. When 18 of 21 spots went to atheist and freethought groups for Christmas 2011, Christians belatedly realized that a “let a thousand flowers bloom” policy doesn’t always work out well. (I explored the “War on Christmas” more here.)
Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re seeing the pendulum in Mississippi pushed to such an extreme that this law will swing back to smack the legislature—yet. In fact, the Christian extremists in that state have been emboldened so that this year they passed the “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act” (HB 1523), which provides protection for the Kim Davises and anti-gay bakers in that state to discriminate based on their “religious belief[s] or moral conviction[s].”
I wonder if a Jewish grocery cashier could put up a “Kosher food only at this register” sign or if a Muslim shopkeeper could refuse to serve infidels.
The trend (at least in Mississippi) is in the wrong direction, but I still anticipate that the same kind of reversal we’ve seen with religious displays at Christmas will happen here.
Bottom line
You might object that we still have the First Amendment, so we already have a backstop for any excess that gets past this law. But then why have it? Where this law duplicates the First Amendment, it’s redundant, and where it expands religious freedom, it’s illegal. It’s a solution trying to invent a problem.
But many of you will have already seen the actual purpose of this law. In these days where Christianity is hijacked for the benefit of politicians, the value of the Student Religious Liberties Act is simple posturing. Mississippi politicians, who passed the bill almost unanimously, have thumbed their noses at the Supreme Court and can now brag to voters about their brave support for Jesus.

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people
which declared that their legislature should “make no law
respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,”
thus building a wall of separation between church and State.
— Thomas Jefferson (letter to Danbury Baptist Assoc., 1802)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/17/13.)
Photo credit: Wikipedia