Tag Archives: Book

News

Texas rolls back liberal anti-American bias from textbooks

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Story here on Eagle Forum.

Excerpt:

By a 10-to-5 margin, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) just told liberals to stop “messing” with social studies textbooks.

For years, liberals have imposed their revisionist history on our nation’s public school students, expunging important facts and historic figures while loading the textbooks with liberal propaganda, distortions and cliches. It’s easy to get a quick lesson in the virulent leftwing bias by checking the index and noting how textbooks treat President Ronald Reagan and Senator Joseph McCarthy.

When parents object to leftwing inclusions and omissions, claiming they should have something to say about what their own children are being taught and how their taxpayers’ money is spent, they are usually vilified as “book burners” and belittled as uneducated primitives who should allow the “experts” to decide. The self-identified “experts” are alumni of liberal teachers colleges and/or members of a leftwing teachers union.

In most states, the liberal education establishment enjoys total control over the state’s board of education, department of education, and curriculum committees. Texas is different; the Texas State Board of Education is elected, and the people (even including parents!) have a voice.

Texas is uniquely important in textbook content because the state of Texas is the largest single purchaser of textbooks. Publishers can hardly afford to print different versions for other states, so Texas curriculum standards have nationwide influence.

So what are some of the changes? Are they positive?

The review of social studies curriculum (covering U.S. Government, American History, World History and Economics) comes up every ten years, and 2010 is one of those years. The unelected education “experts” proposed their history revisions such as eliminating Independence Day, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Edison, Daniel Boone and Neil Armstrong, and replacing Christmas with Diwali.

After a public outcry, the SBOE responded with common-sense improvements. Thomas Edison, the world’s greatest inventor, will be again included in the narrative of American History.

[…]The SBOE specified that teaching about the Bill of Rights should include a reference to the right to keep and bear arms. Some school curricula pretend the Second Amendment doesn’t exist.

[…]Texas curriculum standards will henceforth accurately describe the U.S. government as a “constitutional republic” rather than as a democracy. The secularists tried to remove reference to the religious basis for the founding of America, but that was voted down.

[…]Discussions of economics will not be limited to the theories of Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Adam Smith. Textbooks must also include Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market theory.

History textbooks will now be required to cover the “unintended consequences” of Great Society legislation, affirmative action, and Title IX legislation.

This is the only article I found that had actual details of the changes. The rest were just left-wing posturing and vague accusations. But that’s the left-wing media, I guess.

I still haven’t given up on my dream of living in Texas, and this is just one more reason why. I could actually send my (future) kids to public schools in Texas!

Mentoring

MUST-READ: Brian Auten reviews new apologetics essay collection

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The post is here. The book is called “Contending with Christianity’s Critics”. It is a collection of essays edited by Paul Copan and William Lane Craig. He has a chapter-by-chapter breakdown. Do you ever wonder where I learned to argue on all these topics? Well, take a look at Brian’s post.

Just look at some of these chapter summaries, and think of how you could serve the Lord just by effectively telling the truth about him!

Chapter 2:

“At Home in the Multiverse” by James Daniel Sinclair looks at the issues in current cosmology regarding the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. Sinclair differentiates between the strong and weak anthropic principle and shows some of the problems with positing “many worlds” to explain the fine-tuning: “The Many Worlds advocate is engaged in a problem called the Gambler’s Fallacy.”(3) Sinclair explains that if we have prior knowledge of many worlds, then this fallacy is not taking place. But, “if I am simply inventing Many Worlds, then I am engaged in the fallacy.”(4) Sinclair then addresses six problems facing the multiverse hypothesis.

Chapter 7:

Part two, The Jesus of History, begins with Robert H. Stein’s essay: “Criteria for the Gospels’ Authenticity.” Here Stein lays out a clear presentation of the positive and negative criteria for historical authenticity. The positive criteria: multiple attestation, embarrassment, dissimilarity, Aramaic linguistic and Palestinian environmental phenomena, tradition contrary to editorial tendency, frequency, and coherence. The negative criteria: contradiction of authentic sayings, environmental contradiction, and tendencies of the developing tradition. Stein’s exploration of each is helpful and enlightening, allowing him to conclude that “The burden of proof now clearly shifts from the need to prove a passage’s authenticity to the need to prove its inauthenticity.”(16)

Chapter 8:

“Jesus the Seer” by Ben Witherington III focuses on the two key phrases used by Jesus: “Son of Man” and “kingdom of God.” Witherington’s goal here is to find where these two concepts occur together in the Old Testament. Witherington’s chapter contends that “there is no nonmessianic Jesus to be found at the bottom of the well of historical inquiry. Jesus made some remarkable claims for Himself and His ministry; the historian’s job is not to explain the claims away but rather to explain them.”(17) When the historian is faced with certain facts about Jesus and his claims, they cannot be ignored: “A historian has to explain how the high Christology of the church could have arisen after the unexpected and precipitous demise of Jesus through crucifixion. This conundrum becomes more puzzling, not less, for those who don’t believe in Jesus’ rising from the dead than for those who do.”(18)

Chapter 9:

“The Resurrection of Jesus Time Line” by Gary Habermas establishes the time line starting from the late first century and works back to the death of Jesus about 30 AD. According to Habermas, “current critical scholarship even agrees to the exceptionally early date of this proclamation [of the resurrection] as well as the eyewitness nature of those who made the claims.”(19) Habermas provides an overview of the time line: AD 60-100 The composition of the Gospels; AD 50-62 Dating the “authentic” Pauline epistles; AD 34-36 Paul’s first trip to Jerusalem; AD 45-50 Paul’s later trip to Jerusalem; AD 30-35 Back to the date of the actual events. Habermas shows that this time line is not a point of controversy, but accepted by the majority: “Virtually all critical scholars think this message began with the real experiences of Jesus’ earliest disciples, who thought that they had seen appearances of their risen Lord. It did not arise at some later date. Nor was it borrowed or invented.”(20) Habermas sees this as “the chief value of this argument. It successfully secures the two most crucial historiographical factors: (1) the reports of the original eyewitnesses, which are (2) taken from the earliest period. This is the argument that has rocked a generation of critical scholars.”(21)

Chapter 13:

“The Coherence of Theism” by Charles Taliaferro and Elsa J. Marty. Here the authors seek to defend the coherence of the concept of God. They address six attributes: “necessary existence, incorporeality, essential goodness, omnipotence, omniscience, and eternity.”(26) They point out: “The attributes of God are therefore not a patchwork of arbitrary characteristics. Each one is, rather, interconnected, and together they form a coherent whole. Appreciating this helps one avoid the more crude depiction of God one finds in Dawkins’s work.”(27)

Chapter 15:

“Did God Become a Jew? A Defense of the Incarnation” by Paul Copan aims “to show that the incarnation, though a mystery, is a coherent one.” Copan’s task: “(1) briefly review the scriptural affirmations of Jesus’ humanity and divinity, (2) highlight three important distinctions to help us understand the incarnation, and (3) examine the question of Jesus’ temptation in light of His divinity.”(29)

The other chapters are ALL good, addressing real questions that you will hear if you ask people in your office or in your family why they are not willing to investigate whether Christianity is true. This is incredibly practical. It’s all muscle, and no fat. It’s an arsenal – tailor-made for people who are concerned about God’s reputation, and who want to love him by defending his existence and character in the most effective ways.

Further study

If you like podcasts, Bill Craig explained the different chapters in a recent podcast. But Brian’s text review is superior.

I highly recommend this book and “Passionate Conviction: Contemporary Discourses on Christian Apologetics”, along with Lee Strobel’s “Case for…” books, as the basic building blocks of an amateur apologists’s arsenal.I especially recommend Lee Strobel’s “The Case for a Creator”.

You may also be interested in a new book offering a detailed response to the New Atheists, called “God Is Great, God Is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable & Responsible”.

Commentary

Should parents try to protect their children from all risky behavior?

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Story from the National Post. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

A few suggestions for anxious parents who typically hover on the edge of the playground with a first aid kit: Let your child lick a 9-volt battery, just to see what happens. Encourage them to try to drive a nail. And by all means, let them play with fire.

These are among the activities extolled in a new book entitled 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), the latest in a growing backlash against hyper-parents who try to insulate their children against every scrape, perceived threat and potential disappointment. Underlying this less-is-more parenting philosophy is a belief that today’s bubble-wrapped children are missing out on the way childhood used to be. The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls became sensations by teaching the video-game generation such potentially perilous skills as building a snow fort or using a bow and arrow.

[…]The book’s title is “deliberately provocative,” he says, and it is meant as both a guidebook for fretful parents who want to loosen up and a “call to action for over-protected children,” with instructions on safe ways to experiment with dangerous things.

“We create a false impression in our minds that children are in peril all the time and everywhere, when in fact, according to the most recent studies, this is the safest time in history for children,” he said. “There couldn’t be a better time to be running around outside playing.”

If I ever got married, I wonder what my wife would think of me encouraging all our children to do dangerous things? I’ve heard that wives also don’t like it when fathers try to get their children to adhere to moral rules, either (because of moral judgments and sanctions, you know). But I think danger and moral rules are good for children, in the long run. I don’t want a cowardly moral relativist for a child.

Anybody here have the Dangerous Book for Boys? Or the Daring Book for Girls?