Christian conservative are rewriting American history

[southernhybrid]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/05/15/this-christian-guide-to-the-nations-capital-vows-to-tell-you-what-other-tours-wont/?utm_term=.eafb0a4d8e83

The article is about a group of students that take a trip to DC to learn about history. The only thing is that the group is sponsored by a conservative Christian extremist who is indoctrinating kids to believe that the US is supposed to be based on the teaching of the Bible. Apparently, this has been going on for years, but this is the first time I've read about this particular group and it does seem as if they are blaming secularists for ruining the country. WTF! Yeah. We're the bad guys and when did we get all that power that they think we have?

“We are a nation founded by people who put their trust in God,” said Stephen McDowell, co-founder of the Providence Foundation, the right-leaning Christian educational nonprofit group in Charlottesville that sponsors the tours.

“What’s our motto?” McDowell called out to the students.

“In God We Trust!” they yelled back in unison.

“America is exceptional,” McDowell continued. “This nation was unlike any in history.”

The tours attempt to explain the buildings, monuments and symbols in the nation’s capital through a Christian lens, as visible proof of religious foundations upon which the country was built.

And once again, we see Christians suffering from persecution complexes. *sigh*

Many of the parents said they appreciated McDowell’s telling of history because they felt it covered aspects that have been ignored.

“A lot of people are trying to rewrite history,” said Brent Crumpton, a dentist who joined his 13-year-old son, Tucker, on the trip.

Christianity, Crumpton said, is being “slammed” on a daily basis, citing the “war on Christmas” and “The View” host Joy Behar’s recent mockery of Vice President Pence’s faith. “Middle America feels like there’s more tolerance for other religions apart from Christianity,” he said.

The girl’s mother, Jennifer Averette, said it was her first trip to Washington and that she had heard the monuments were strategically placed to form a cross. (Historians say Pierre L’Enfant did not employ this concept when he planned the city in the early 1790s.)

“The Bible should shape policy, because that’s how America was founded,” she said.

Does this worry anyone here? Are these people just a tiny minority of extremists or has the current administration and Republican Congress enabled groups like this? Some of the children on the trip complained that they were never taught some of these things in school. Gee. Could it be because these things aren't true? Who are these people?

 

[Ruth Harris]

Who are these people?

They are those who believe that only their interpretation of the Bible is correct, and their religious views are the only valid worldview.

Does this worry anyone here?

You bet it does! This country was founded on the basis of personal freedom, not their warped view of what our country should be. This is a disgrace to the many, many Christians who would never impinge on other's personal freedoms when they are not causing harm. Plus they make the typical Christian look like an idiot when they start talking about all of the things that were supposedly done for religious reasons when they weren't - like that notion about Pierre L’Enfant placing certain monuments to symbolize the cross. He was a nominal Freemason, but I don't even know if he was Christian. The Freemasons make the same claims about the layout of Washington DC representing masonic symbols.

Guess you can tell I am not a fan

Ruth

 

[SimpleDon]

The theocrats are a minority of a minority party. But they vote strictly for theocratic politicians and they hold Republican politicians hostage to their ideology in the Republican primaries because they get out their voters to the polls.

We would do best to avoid extremists when we pick leaders, when we pick people to emulate and when we pick ideologies to run our society and our economy. We suffer when we ignore this and we are now suffering from the far right reactionaries who dominate our politics, our government, our society and the libertarian, neoliberal, free market economics that we apply to our economy. Disney politics and economics because they never existed and can never exist in a representative democratic nation such as ours. We saw this when the Republicans tried to take health care away from ten million people who gained it under ObamaCare.

Why anyone would vote for people who say that the government can't be controlled and an effective agent of positive change to run that government is beyond me. That people who believe that the government can't be run can't run the government well is a given.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Down here in Texas, we have a lot of religious people who support bad history books in our schools. It is a never ending fight to keep this crap out of our schools and textbooks.. They love David Barton.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...t-finds/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d85da8d818b2

...

• A number of government and world history textbooks exaggerate Judeo-Christian influence on the nation’s founding and Western political tradition.

• Two government textbooks include misleading information that undermines the Constitutional concept of the separation of church and state.

• Several world history and world geography textbooks include biased statements that inappropriately portray Islam and Muslims negatively.

• All of the world geography textbooks inaccurately downplay the role that conquest played in the spread of Christianity.

Yech!

 

[Lion IRC]

This country was founded on the basis of personal freedom, not their warped view of what our country should be.

America's First Nation peoples found the views of colonial invaders a little bit warped.
What their country 'should' be?

 

[Valjean]

The country was founded by Europeans, raised in a Christian tradition, but these were influenced by the enlightenment values of Rousseau and Voltaire, by the memory of the Religious Wars that had caused so much carnage in Europe, and by the importation of repressive, theocratic colonies that threatened to reproduce the religious conflicts still disrupting European politics. To head that off, they attempted a Humanist experiment, with a wall of separation between church and state.
They were OK with religion, but not with one group tithing or imposing its values on another.