Bible Okay, God Not
A study shows that high school teachers in Britain have found a way to teach Bible stories that suits them: excise all references to God. The prevailing rationale among the teachers for their hellish editing? They fear the pupils might find religious teaching too "boring, old-fashioned, and uncool." It's a dubious assertion and, likely, just a pretense to avoid teaching something the teachers don't agree with. Anyway, here's the LINK, and here are two excerpts:
"God is being edited out of religious education lessons in schools for fear that His presence might bore children.
"A study at Exeter University found that biblical accounts of the Good Samaritan, David and Goliath and Joseph were taught as ethical stories, with no reference to God, in increasingly secular classes on religion."
"Prof Terence Copley, who led the study, said that observations of RE lessons showed that stories such as Joseph were told without any of the 50 references to God that appear in the Hebrew Bible narrative.
"'During the presentation of biblical text, God in the narratives is often consciously or unconsciously edited out by the teacher,' Prof Copley said. 'This might be occurring because teachers interpret the goal of learning from religion to mean learning secular morals from religion. Teachers often ignored the God-centred dimension of the Bible in which God as the hero acts as the driving force behind events.'"
