Bible Man Better Be Able to Deflect Lawsuits

wow that’s just. wow. maybe at one of these classes the bible man teaches, he can show the kids how to burn the constitution without hurting themselves.

These people just do not learn! How incompetent does one have to be to make these kind of decisions. Have they not been paying attention to Cranston?

This will lead to another lawsuit in which they will spend a lot of money losing, and then have to spend even more paying the legal fees.
The stupidity is mind boggling.

I remember watching Bible Man as a tyke, but unlike Veggie Tales or even Adventure in Odyssey, I thought it was kind of confusing and stupid back then. Can’t imagine how I’d feel it about now.

Eventually, if you yell at a dog long enough, it will stop rubbing it’s ass on the carpet.

Dang it I wish I could help with this one :/

How about Durham, NC being found the nation’s most tolerant city based on different statistics? https://www.dtmi.duke.edu/news-publications/research-news/durham-ranks-1-for-most-tolerant-city-in-the-us 

It’s not hard to find examples of the South not being as stereotypical as it seems if you actually try.

Believe me, a lot of us down here also wish the ignorant faction would keep its ignorance under a basket. Sometimes–most times–it is better to NOT shine the light of ignorance.

Durham and Raleigh are part of the “Research Triangle”. Lots of universities there and they deliberately attract well educated people for work

A few Questions:
Is it possible to separate morals and religion?
Can we teach morals without teaching religion?
If a god does not exist then do morals exist? If morals don’t exist, then are our morals fabricated and who is responsible for fabricating them?
The public school systems
teach morals all the time but they are the morals that the state deems
valuable, ie. homosexual unions, environmentalism, etc. Does this mean that it is appropriate for the schools to teach the morality of the current school board?
Who defines which morals can be taught and which ones cannot? For example, one school board might believe that it is moral to worship god and immoral to ignore god. Another might say that it is moral to teach that homosexual behavior is healthy and normal while another might disagree. Why do we teach one versus the other?

I don’t necessarily think that I have the answers to any of these but I think that they are good questions to think about.

Well I feel the need to point out to you that our “government” is in fact a democracy. So those morals you so seem to hate, those definitions of what’s “right and wrong” are chosen by the majority of people from within the society you live in. It seems to me that your problem is not with the “government’ telling you what morals you should have, but the society you live in.

So yes, pull your kids out of public school so you can teach them your values which conflict with everyone else’s in your community all the while claiming you are not the one who is the problem on society.

What is the alternative?

I honestly think these school boards have a “that won’t happen to us” mentality. They see it happening elsewhere and they think, “no one in OUR community is a godless heathen. This foundation is just picking on us out of nowhere because they hate people who do what is right.”

Honestly, we might laugh at the Christian Right’s persecution mentality, but they truly believe it to the depths of their soul. It is completely stupid, but they really believe that they are the victims of an all out, unprovoked assault. It isn’t a put on for most of them, and that I think is the scariest possible thing.

I hope lawsuits pop up all over the place for things like this. Isolated incidents obviously aren’t sending the right message.

Letting it be decided by a higher authority. Either directly at the state level (which works fine in many countries) or maybe by something bigger than current school districts, so that policies aren’t so fractured between small areas.

In any case, something fundamental like the curriculum shouldn’t be able to be influenced by parents.

We are not much of a democracy. The media distorts reality, large corporations have unbalanced power, and the minority often yells louder then the complacent majority. So you cannot make the claim that it is the majority that decide. Even if this is true is that what we really want. Isn’t this why we have a Democratic Republic?

I would not say that I hate morals, they are ideas that should be contemplated not dismissed by some strong emotional reaction.

My problem is with a government that has overstepped its authority and now seems to think that it has the right to define my rights and what my children should be taught. This has nothing to do with majority after-all most Americans are still Christian and most still believe that homosexuality is morally wrong.

Perhaps this is another reason for state education. Lets take traditional morality out of the classroom so that we can replace it with morality defined by the corporation or the media or the loudest protester or whoever else happens to pull the strings of the current administration. To take this a step further, perhaps we should also centralize the government as much as possible so that there is less diversity and fewer dissenters out there who can rock the boat.

There is a whole, very well-developed field of secular ethics, just as there are Christian ethicists, Jewish ethicists, Muslim ethicists, etc. Yes, that includes morality, and so yes, it is eminently possible to separate morals and religion and to teach morals without teaching religion or without supposing one way or another about the existence of deities. There are a variety of ethical and moral frameworks you can adhere to without being religious. I am personally a distributive justice gal myself, but it’s just one of many approaches.

Most of the approaches — religious or not — do lead you to the same answers on the types of ethical dilemmas people face in their day-to-day lives, so personally I don’t lose much sleep over how people choose to structure their personal morality (or not structure, as the case may be; most people do not score to highly on the Kohlberg stages of moral development).

We live in a secular country. This is not Iran; it’s not a theocracy. That plays in intimately with what public institutions should support! There are certain moral principles that are common to just about any non-fringe approach to morality and ethics, and those are the ones that are (and should be) taught in public institutions.

As for the examples you mentioned — homosexuality, environmentalism — I can understand how certain frameworks would frame them in moral terms, but I think the state’s interest in teaching or not teaching them has to do with science. Not morality. A preponderance of evidence says that homosexual behavior is indeed normal; it’s inborn and it occurs not just in humans but throughout the animal kingdom. A preponderance of evidence says that there are problems–pollution, water shortages, etc.–caused by humans’ interaction with the environment. Just like we expect medical students to be learning the most up-to-date techniques for diagnosing and treating disease, it’s completely appropriate for us to expect that kids are taught up-to-date science in schools — and that it be acknowledged when our best understanding of the evidence changes and where the limits of our understanding are.

Maybe next school year ‘Koran Kid’ will appear as Bible Man’s sidekick! 

In my dreams, I’d dress a midget up a kid and bring him in costume to the next board meeting and make this suggestion, then sit back and watch the entertainment. Somehow I think the irony might be lost on them however…

Interesting, this sounds good in theory but the fact is that there is not a scientific board analyzing data and making a non-biased determination on what is moral and what is not. The fact is that we are all biased and formulate our opinions based on filters that we have created for ourselves. The morals that are taught in schools come down to what the government deems appropriate and this is defined by biased organizations such as corporations or activist who have other priorities in front of truth.

Just a couple of additional details I would like to point out:

I disagree that we live in a secular country. We live in a Christian country with a secular government as it should remain.

I and many others disagree that the evidence shows that homosexuality is normal. This is disputable and there is a lot of evidence that shows that it is not normal and not healthy.

Bible Man – Slimier than a frothing gob of Santorum, more ignorant than a meditating monk, and able to leap tall legal precedents in a single bound.

“Surely you do not think that it is best to ignore morality altogether and let our children somehow stumble upon it? Don’t parents have the responsibility to guide their children in the best way they see fit?”

I think this is a really interesting question.

My initial reaction to this was that the morals I learned growing up weren’t so much from actual explicit teaching — although that was certainly present! — but from example. Recognizing on my own when people did the right thing, even when it wasn’t convenient or easy for them and even when it had negative consequences, was much more powerful than anything my parents could have said or did. And there are certain values that I’ve just absorbed that have nothing to do with morals: reading books is awesome, don’t make people wait for their dinner, and never throw up anywhere but the toilet. (Perhaps my values are weird, but they’re deeply ingrained.)

When I realized I didn’t believe anymore in the religion I was brought up in, it didn’t change my morality one whit. Nor did it change how I parent my own child, really. Maybe if I’d been brought up in a more Fundamentalist environment I’d feel differently, but I wonder how much parents’ moral teaching and guidance (as opposed to their moral example) influences their children. I’ll be pondering……

Once again the last time I checked it was individual citizens who went to the polls to vote, not corporations. Now yes, corporations have a huge power imbalance when it comes to dictating the national dialog in the media, but they still have to convince the individual person to believe their crap. So yes, the majority does decide, they may be stupid are tricked by corporations, but they still get to decide. And while some protections must be put in place via the constitution (such as individual liberties and rights) to think that the majority of people should not have a voice in government is elitist. 

Of course the government has the right to define your rights, that’s where your “rights” come from! There are no “rights” outside of government institutions. Also the “government” is not some third party entity that came here from space, it is made up of your fellow citizens, who where elected by your fellow citizens!

Also democratic institutions are the only real defense against corporate domination you so fear. This is one reason libertarians come off as so stupid. By privatizing schools as you seem to wish for people to do, you are in fact giving even more power to corporations to control what it is your kids learn by using market forces to control schools. Sure you may think you have some magic power of market choice, but what happens to you great power when say G.E. goes to every private school in your state and gives them free textbooks that while teaching history, also promote the greatness of G.E. you think your one small tuition is going to compare to the saving a private school will get by using free textbooks? And that’s just one example.

No, only through democratic government oversight can education not as easily be manipulated by the wealthy and corporations since education, and not profit can be the end goal.

There isn’t actually reliable evidence that suggests homosexuality is inherently not normal and/or inherently not healthy, you imbecile.

“Morals” are just social norms that have been endorsed by the majority at large.  At their core, though, they are merely “prosocial behaviors”, which are inherent to our species and have nothing to do with religion. 

For instance, it was once “moral” to own black people and limit the rights of women.  These morally correct beliefs were also reinforced using religious dogma (amongst other things).  Yet, I doubt anyone here would look at such beliefs as “moral” today, which calls into question your idea that morality is something that must be learned.

In fact, morals stem from our dependence on one-another and the self-benefits therein.  The actual morals are malleable, but the underlying concept of prosocial behavior is not.

At my school we got Robert Munsch and Roberta Bondar
Fucking Eh!

Fair enough!

I’m homosexual and the last time I looked it seemed like being gay was quit normal, just like being heterosexual was normal.

Also, why isn’t being gay healthy??? I haven’t had any serious problems since coming out, no broken bones, no serious sickness, nothing. The only problems I have are with allergies, which I’ve had since I was a kid. Your whole post is full of stupidity and ignorance.

Koran Kid would like shut them down far faster than the lawsuit will.

God-Man beats everyone:

http://www.fecundity.com/pmagnus/godman.html

Jeez… I remember being in elementary school in December, and having a “winter holiday assembly”. Guess which holiday was primarily discussed.

As the only Jew at my school, I was extremely uncomfortable. Halfway through the assembly, there would be one Channukah song. Everybody in my class, and multiple teachers, would look at me during this segment, as if to say “look how accepting we’re being! Don’t you feel so much more comfortable?” 

Furthermore, everyone was required to sing. We didn’t stick to non-religious Christmas songs. 

I’m not sure why these assemblies bothered me so much. Probably because it pronounced how different I was from the other kids, and it didn’t seem like a good thing. 

I am somewhat encouraged by the fact that the comments on  the TV stations webpage have been overwhelmingly taking the school board to task and chiding them for taking actions that will likely put them in the same situation Cranston has found itself in. Apparently there are some rational thinkers, but they aren’t on this board.

I have to agree with you, FSq, even though I was born, raised, and live in the South.

And Yahoo News…GAH! It makes my head hurt. I can feel my I.Q. dropping as I scroll through those intelligence-devoid comments.

 But they don’t believe in dinosaurs…

If you ever need and further reason to weep for the future of this nation (US), just read any random comments section at “Yahoo News”.

Try this, pick a random Yahoo News section of comments, then go to CBC.ca and choose a random story. It is truly incredible how different the tone and content of the comments between the two countries are….*sigh*…

Then my work here… is done.

“I disagree with what evidence shows” is just a fancier way of sticking their fingers in their ears and singing at the top of their lungs.

The rest of us have thought about these questions and answers.  Please stop posting until you have also.

They obviously have so much money they have to think of ways to rid themselves of it? If Cranston schoolboard decides against an appeal, their religious beliefs have already cost them $173,000. They don’t care about the students or the schools, all they care about are their own stupid beliefs, as long as the cash isn’t coming from their own pockets, eh?

Leave off the “you imbecile” and that was a good comment. With it… not so much.

“there is a lot of evidence that shows it is not normal and not healthy.”   Citation needed….. Bible reference does not count.

I don’t think that follows inevitably. Giving people an influence on educational policy is an important part of local politics.

The danger comes from mono-cultures where the majority is strongly religious, themselves educated in a cold-war environment, and intolerant to the point of xenophobia.

Unfortunately, in that neighbourhood there’s no easy answer like “more power to school boards” or “less power to school boards”, since parents, teachers and politicians are all pervaded by the same religious influence (see Cranston).

All that can be accomplished without allowing them to introduce destructive policies. School boards simply have too much power and discretion. Deciding how to invest funds is one thing. But beyond that it can become dangerous as shown all too often

Interesting to look down the row of bowed heads: old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy, old white guy … wow, what are the odds of that happening?

Never heard of it (Tiny Toon)