War Liberal

wow, you can't make these folks happy, you approve a elective bible study class, and a preacher complains because there is a nude picture of adam and eve? geez, as long as the course is an elective, I guess you are in Alabama after all, I'm surprised it's not mandatory in order to get your diploma...

You read that whole thing, Mac? I got bored about fifty pages in and just watched the movie instead.

The world is just upside down! John Giles even opposed the course, I'm guessing because it doesn't require students to endure proselytizing by a**holes like him.

Skip the boring bits, like Leviticus.

I suggest they add Hebrew and Greek and get right down to textual analyses. Or just skip the controversy and offer a course on the Popol Vuh and the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The Dem-Repub reverse is because this particular text treats the Bible quite irreverently, from the fundie point of view, urging students to consider other culture's creation myths, etc. IIRC the bill specifies that this text and only this text be used for the class, which may wind up being a stumbling point since it seems to directly contradict the law about some committee somewhere getting to choose & approve textbooks. Last Sunday the Mobile Register printed an op-ed criticising the text by one Dennis L. Cuddy, a greatly watered-down version of Mr. Cuddy's typical rants. Pretty much, anything this guy is against, I'm for. (to be fair, they also printed an op-ed supporting the bill.)

Besides, everybody affected by Western culture should read the Bible. Except the boring bits, like Leviticus. :)
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"One pastor is upset because a book used in the course has nude pictures of Adam, Eve, and Bathsheba."

One of these days, that guy's going to read Song of Solomon and his head's going to explode. That's if he actually reads the Bible. I think most of these characters have some sort of condensed version of the "end-times" prophecies along with a Cliff's Notes version of the other 98% of the Bible, with fear of teh homogay in red text.

Actually, I think they read Leviticus, which is really boring (but has a lot of that stuff which they take out of context to ban anything they think is dirty) then skip ahead to the end to see what happens. They certainly aren't reading the Gospels or the Prophets.

Plenty of people who agree with these folks have, in fact, read the Bible from cover to cover (no Apocrypha or anything like that, of course). Sometimes more than once, or even once a year.

What's odd to me is how many people DO read the Bible and just completely don't absorb the inconvenient parts. How many times has someone read something in Leviticus and asked their Sunday School teacher why it's ok to eat shrimp or cut their hair and the answer isn't from the Bible at all?