Bible Censorship

You need to know the Bible. Yes, you, and you, and you. All of you reading this, whether or not you’re a Christian. A couple of months ago I did a blog entitled “Shakespeare and the Bible.” I pointed out how many phrases in modern language are rooted in Scripture; for example, “skin of my teeth,” “the powers that be,” and “I told you so.” To avoid the Bible is to cut off civilization from a critical aspect of human history.  John Harvard, who founded the prestigious school that is named after him said that all the students of his institution should know how to “read the original of the Old and New Testament into the Latin tongue and resolve them logically.” In fact, as you may know, Harvard was founded to train clergymen. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find many students there who have ever read the Bible with any seriousness, including Harvard’s alum President Obama. (He doesn’t even go to church with any regularity since he won the election.) And it wasn’t just Harvard. Yale and Princeton, to name just two, were also founded on the basis of training students to become ministers.

Today, 37 states actually have laws FORBIDDING that any public funds should be spent on religious training. In 2006, the Supreme Court case Locke v. Davey upheld the decision of a Washington State scholarship program to withhold promised funding from an otherwise qualified student after learning that he had decided to major in theology at a local Bible College. This is crazy, and downright intellectually dishonest. In medieval times, theology was known as the Queen of the Sciences. Today, a way to get sent home from school is to bring a Bible and place it next to your textbook. The result is a generation which is partially illiterate about a huge section of human history. You don’t have to believe the Nicene Creed of the ecumenical council of 325 to understand its significance to the development of western culture. Without the Bible there is no comprehending of what philosophically drives today’s jihadist terrorists or what has given us the Common Law system on which our legal standards are based. We need to bring back the Bible as literature, if not revealed truth. The Ten Commandments define not only moral law but who we are as a people.  It’s time to ignore the cries of a handful of militant atheists who are creating a generation ignorant of its past and incapable of determining its future.