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The Content Cluster Muster (11.01.18)
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Mike Gundy Saying How We All Feel
Have 'Em Delivered
Write to the Editor
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Theology That Bites Back
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It is hard to believe that anyone would be stupid enough to drive a school bus into a flooded low-water crossing. On the other hand, maybe it’s not so surprising when you consider the stupid things that are accepted in our society today.
Since it received about 1/100,000 the coverage of the so-called MAGA bomber, here’s my suggested content for the week:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/media_yawned_when_emrealem_ricin_packages_were_mailed_to_trump_and_leading_republicans_a_mere_em4_weeks_agoem_.html
That link contains a lie. The letters were not deadly in any way, shape, or form. They contained ground-up castor beans. Since castor beans have ricin in them, the packages tested positive for ricin, but the castor beans would have had to be treated in an extensive process to extract the ricin and concentrate into deadly form, and none of that was done. The letters didn’t have a prayer of doing harm to anyone. They were no more deadly than the original packages of castor beans that he had mail-ordered off the internet. And, to further hurt the narrative, the… Read more »
Jonathan wrote: The letters were not deadly in any way, shape, or form. As if that had anything to do with the disproportionate mainstream media coverage given to each story. Jonathan continues: … the castor beans would have had to be treated in an extensive process to extract the ricin and concentrate into deadly form, and none of that was done. Jonathan seems to be engaging in a disinformation campaign of his own. The letters from the Utah man contained ground castor seeds. The process to refine ricin is not trivial, but Jonathan is incorrect to suggest that the seeds… Read more »
A bracing post today on education, uhm, reform. If half the posts during No Quarter November are as I good, I’ll be smiling all month. There must be some things in there worth discussing and I’ll nominate the second paragraph, since I’m not quite sure where I stand. Is it sin for Christian parents to send children to public schools in America today? Ooh. That’s a tough one. I can easily see how sin could be to blame. The sin of laziness, or cowardice, or a failure to love the children enough to make sacrifices for a godly education could… Read more »
It’s a sin to turn off discernment and just educate your kids in whatever way is easiest and cheapest to you. That’s what has usually happened when kids go to public school. That is not ‘fathering.’ That is something else. I don’t know what it’s called. But I think public school is the right choice for some people. Rarely, RARELY, would I say it is the right choice for a young lady over the age of 10. I would also only rarely say that a mid-teen aged young man should be home schooled. What options are available in that area,… Read more »
A lot of young parents don’t realise how much the school environment has changed in the last 15 years. It seems like just the other day we were at school ourselves, so we subconsciously figure since it was (mostly) okay for us, it will be okay for our kids. The evolution of cellphones, the gender agenda, and the explosion of social media have changed everything. The early millennials were protected from a lot of that and had grown up and left school by the time social media really became a thing. Before it was only your classmates who could try… Read more »
Isn’t there a judgement call that needs to be made as to how much education Christian children can receive from the ungodly? Surely you could hire a Buddhist adulterer to tutor you child in math for an hour or two a week. But I agree that turning your children over to be raised as pagans is sin. Where is the line between the two? And do any of us have to right ultimately to make that kind of determination for another person?
Maybe a Sikh. Buddhists are notoriously bad with inequalities. As a father, every man is in charge or raising his sons and daughters. This involves education – both what we would consider scholastic and what we would consider moral or religious. You cannot raise your children without educating them somehow, even if they are never didactically taught anything by you or anyone else. They are still getting an education, learning about the world. You can try to separate the scholastic and moral educations. We’ve been trying to do just that in the USA for the past 150-200 years, but it… Read more »
Indeed. We don’t have Scriptural authority to call it a categorical sin to submit our children to a government school. It is also not a categorical sin to let your children climb tall trees, play with fire, or dance beside a cliff. But if we turn the discussion to the difference between folly and wisdom, there is still a lot that remains to be said. A wise parent must know exactly what is at stake in letting their children dance near a cliff. A foolish parent will find out, after the fact, what risks and consequences they should have paid… Read more »
This is an excellent comment, and points to where and what kind of failure parents (and pastors) may be responsible for on the question of government schools.
“Is it sin for Christian parents to send children to public schools in America today?” I think the answer here has a lot to do with capacity. If the parents themselves are, to put it bluntly, too stupid to see the problem, they can’t exactly be faulted for their own stupidity. Is it a sin for parents who know better? Well, I would add just one extra qualifier here. If for some reason they are incapable of any alternative, suppose both parents *need* to work and they have no friends or family willing to assist, you’re absolved as a matter… Read more »
I should add the caveat that obviously not all public schools are the same, and if you have specific reason to believe yours is fine, that exempts you from my logic train.
That kind of puts an end to the whole thing doesn’t it? I mean, I happen to know one of the 4th grade teachers is a Christian and a wonderful lady. Ha!
That doesn’t alter whether or not it’s a sin, it just means it’s easy to pretend it isn’t a sin. Well, I understand where you’re coming from. Let’s put numerical values on these things to get my point though. Let’s suppose the corruption of a school is equivelent to a year. A school at 1980’s level of corruption isn’t as bad as a school at 2005’s corruption. Ok, well, since different areas of the country are slouching towards destruction at slightly different paces, those schools are going to progress on different arcs. So, at what numerical point on this scale… Read more »
Just spitballing here, but if the scriptures require that you give your children an explicitly Christian education, (which I’d say they do), then you might say any school that isn’t explicitly Christian would be ruled out. After a brief look, it seems that any public school in the USA after 1963 would then be nixed.
But then we shift to the question of supplementing an academic education with Christian teachings to produce a Christian education. Or perhaps supplementing a Christian education with non-Christian academic instruction. Lots of room for opinions in all this.
If we’re getting down to the nitty gritty, we have to define what “an education” is as a self contained construct. I have three kids. they’re learning all the time. Which parts of their day count as the “education” part where these moral requirements are applying? Certainly it can’t be “all of them” because it flatly isn’t possible to have every part of your life have absolutely no secular component. There’s no explicitly Christian supermarket for example.
I know you’re not serious, but you could have the most wonderful Christian teacher but a horrible curriculum, LGBTQ book reading in the school library every Thursday, really bad classmates who expose your child to awful stuff on their phones, etc. A homeroom teacher can only do so much…
I suspect that some of Doug’s comments are correct even though I sent my children to public school.
I must say, that primary seemed okay. I’m not really happy with one of the highschools, but the other is working out really well educationally, and I think morally. This is probably because of strong Christian leadership within the (secular) school.
We have supplemented the teaching.
I do like the idea of young children learning literary and history from the Bible. And I think I will encourage homeschooling (or Christian schooling) to my children in the future.