I'm actually fairly pleased with how my school taught religion. I went to public schools until college. Religion came up twice. It came up in social studies when we read about and discussed the history and beliefs of Hinduism, Buddhism, and possibly some other religions, but I don't recall a this point. It was mainly in the context of: this is the basics of what these religions believe. We were studying it, I assumed, because it is part of the culture of the regions. We were also studying other things about the regions.
Religion also came up in English class, sort of. We had to read portions of the Bible. The teacher explicitly stated something like: no matter what you believe, the Bible has a huge effect on culture and literature, you will need to be familiar with what it says to be an informed person.
That seemed to be true then, and it does still seem to be true now. Given that the demographics of my classes was roughly 50% Christian and 50% Jewish it meant that many of us really hadn't read the New Testament and had only rough ideas about what it said.
I also got religious training in Hebrew School, but that is obviously a completely different thing. And I did read Genesis and Exodus because of it (it was a book a year thing, but only for the older kids, so I never ended up doing all of the books. I read Leviticus on my own later and still haven't read Numbers or Deuteronomy or all of the New Testament. I tried to read The Book of Mormon once but the writing was even worse than reading the translated Bible. I am not intellectually rigorous enough to want to read this and still hold with the opinion that any book written by a divine being should be better written and easier to read.)
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Date: 9/2/08 10:36 pm (UTC)From:I'm actually fairly pleased with how my school taught religion. I went to public schools until college. Religion came up twice. It came up in social studies when we read about and discussed the history and beliefs of Hinduism, Buddhism, and possibly some other religions, but I don't recall a this point. It was mainly in the context of: this is the basics of what these religions believe. We were studying it, I assumed, because it is part of the culture of the regions. We were also studying other things about the regions.
Religion also came up in English class, sort of. We had to read portions of the Bible. The teacher explicitly stated something like: no matter what you believe, the Bible has a huge effect on culture and literature, you will need to be familiar with what it says to be an informed person.
That seemed to be true then, and it does still seem to be true now. Given that the demographics of my classes was roughly 50% Christian and 50% Jewish it meant that many of us really hadn't read the New Testament and had only rough ideas about what it said.
I also got religious training in Hebrew School, but that is obviously a completely different thing. And I did read Genesis and Exodus because of it (it was a book a year thing, but only for the older kids, so I never ended up doing all of the books. I read Leviticus on my own later and still haven't read Numbers or Deuteronomy or all of the New Testament. I tried to read The Book of Mormon once but the writing was even worse than reading the translated Bible. I am not intellectually rigorous enough to want to read this and still hold with the opinion that any book written by a divine being should be better written and easier to read.)