Texans for Truthful Textbooks Rally

I thought American Atheists opposed explicitly religious intrusion into government, not general conservatism. Since when is atheism tacitly equivalent to liberalism and not just solely the rejection of religion and God.

In my book, including Phyllis Schlafly as a prominent political/social figure and championing free market ideals don’t comprise religious polemics.

Regardless of the agenda that atheists “should” have. Everyone should be worried about a plan to selectively revise our history. That’s some scary stuff.

Failed to include a discussion of religious rights during a lesson on the First Amendment.

Rejected a proposed requirement that students learn why the nation’s founders banned government from promoting one religion over others.  (3)

How is that not omitting certain info that doesn’t align with their political or spiritual agenda of promoting the U.S. as a Christian Nation? We all know the religious right loves to claim our country was founded on Christianity, and that, given the chance, they’d slowly erode all information that contradicts their claim.

@OneSTDV

For me, part of being an atheist is looking for the truth in things and presenting a more complete story instead of one side or the other. As someone pursuing a Master’s in History, the best way to get a complete view of historical events is to understand both sides. One of my main focus areas of study is Mexico in the 19th century – it is absolutely vital to understand that their revolution was largely conservative, but that there were also radically liberal participants, and the turmoil out of it came from the inability to reconcile highly conservative and highly liberal ideas. You can’t understand the causes of that turmoil unless you explicitly study the motives and goals of each side, and how deeply they conflicted with the other. In the United States, whatever conservatives may want to say, the revolution was liberal. The founders weren’t perfect by any means – Thomas Jefferson was brilliant and contributed immensely to the country’s founding, but he also held slaves and had constant troubles with debt. It’s also likely he fathered children with one of his slaves. Should we ignore one aspect and raise up the other? No. Should we drop him from the text completely, as the Texas school board wishes to do? No. Teaching that the men who founded the United States (or any country!) were flawed individuals who managed to do extraordinary things is the best way to present a complete, truthful historical picture.

Just as I don’t believe kids should be labeled as belonging to one religion or another by their parents, I also don’t believe that children should be labeled conservative/liberal by their parents. If a school board is pushing a religiously (John Calvin over Jefferson, anyone?) and politically conservative dialogue, the children are not only missing part of the picture of their country’s history, they are also being presented with a skewed version of history that promotes one school of thought over the other.

Where race is concerned, I’m more than willing to recognize that much of US history was advanced under prominent, wealthy white males, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give voice to those of other ethnic groups or the opposite gender. The school board chose to not teach about an hispanic activist, simply because they hadn’t heard of the man. That sort of behavior is unacceptable – they are trying to perpetuate their own ignorance and views onto a generation of school children, and that is ideology pushing at its lowest form.