An interesting experiment...

In honor of the Out Campaign, I was originally going to write a small version of this post as a Facebook status but it wouldn't fit.  So, here is me rambling about something that I have been thinking about when it comes to the Bible and public schools.

Throughout the past 60 years or so in the US, and more so in the past 30 there has been a push by the religious right to push for the Bible to be taught in public schools.  Even Republican politicians bring up bills to be voted on in state legislatures that would require teaching of the Bible in public school classrooms.  Separation of church and state clearly makes this illegal and rightly so.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson sums up my view on the topic:   "I don't have an issue with what you do in the church, but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me they've got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school. Because that's when we're going to fight."

This struck with me immediately.  Yet, digging a little deeper most atheists like myself know there's a lot more to the Bible than just what gets taught in Sunday school.  In 2010, the Pew Forum quizzed different groups with the same knowledge quiz of religious knowledge.  Atheists/agnostics scored the highest above all other religious demographics on the quiz.  While this came as little shock to the atheist/agnostic world (most people aren't born atheist/agnostic, they come to their conclusions after researching the religion they left as well as others they may have converted to or researched along the way) the mainstream media was amazed. 

Yet, I know this is going to sound a little extreme coming from the atheist guy, but what if we taught the Bible in public schools?  Now the bible can be taught in public schools as a work of literature (which most people don't know is legal) so if we teach it as such then what we should do is teach it from the beginning.  Start at Genesis 1:1 and teach a chapter a week all the way through Revelation beginning with 6th grade through 12th grade an hour a day, no skipping verses.  Let students discuss the multiple creation stories in Genesis.  Let students try to comprehend how God killed every single mother, father, teenager, baby and elderly person along with a majority of earth's plants and animals.  Shakespeare has nothing on the Bible as a book of death.  If you think Tarantino movies are bad for kids, let them watch Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ starting at age 3 by themselves with no adult supervision.  Then let's see which one scares them the most.

I guarantee that by the end of middle school we as a society would probably be rushing to get the bible out of society all together because our kids start learning skepticism at a young age (Santa & the Tooth Fairy, anyone).  Then why do we as a society take a young child's skepticism and start beating it out of them by the time they are old enough to drive?