DANIEL: ABIDING UNDER PAGANISM

1. DANIEL: ABIDING UNDER PAGANISM

2. Daniel: Abiding Under Paganism • Introduction A. What? B. Why? (Relevance) C. Terms • Historical Contexts A. Biblical - BC B. Contemporary - AD • The Text - Biblical Lessons • Conclusion

4. “The education of colonial children was provided by a curriculum of three books in addition to the Bible: the Hornbook, the New England Primer, and the Bay Psalm book. The Hornbook, a single parchment attached to a wooden paddle, contained the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, and religious doctrines written or printed on it. The 1690 first edition of the Primer contained the names of the Old and New Testament books, the Lord’s Prayer, ‘An Alphabet of Lessons for Youth,’ the Apostle’s Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Westminster Assembly Shorter Catechism, and John Cotton’s ‘Spiritual Milk for American Babes.’ The Primer was the most commonly used textbook for almost 200 years. Another popular textbook was The McGuffey Reader. Christian faith was integrated into every facet of education in early America.” • “Influence of Christianity on Western Civilization,” Cheryl Stansberry, pg. 10.

5. “Whoever controls the language controls the debate.” “Control the language, control the culture. Control the culture, control the people.”

7. The Opinion Pages Opinionator The Stone By Justin P. McBrayer, March 2, 2015 3:25 am Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts • What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised? • … philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture. • A misleading distinction between fact and opinion is embedded in the Common Core curriculum. • What I didn’t know was where this attitude came from…So where is the view coming from? • … I learned that students are exposed to this sort of thinking well before crossing the threshold of higher education. When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read: • Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven. • Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes. • Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, I went home and Googled “fact vs. opinion.” The definitions I found online were substantially the same as the one in my son’s classroom…

8. The Opinion Pages Opinionator The Stone By Justin P. McBrayer, March 2, 2015 3:25 am Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts • So what’s wrong with this distinction and how does it undermine the view that there are objective moral facts? • First, the definition of a fact waffles between truth and proof—two obviously different features. Things can be true even if no one can prove them…Conversely, many of the things we once “proved” turned out to be false... • But second, and worse, students are taught that claims are either facts or opinions… • How does the dichotomy between fact and opinion relate to morality…Kids are asked to sort facts from opinions and, without fail, every value claim is labeled as an opinion. Here’s a little test devised from questions available on fact vs. opinion worksheets online: are the following facts or opinions? • Copying homework assignments is wrong. • Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior. • All men are created equal. • It is worth sacrificing some personal liberties to protect our country from terrorism. • It is wrong for people under the age of 21 to drink alcohol. • Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat. • Drug dealers belong in prison.

9. The Opinion Pages Opinionator The Stone By Justin P. McBrayer, March 2, 2015 3:25 am Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts • The answer? In each case, the worksheets categorize these claims as opinions…This is repeated ad nauseum: any claim with good, right, wrong, etc. is not a fact. • In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths. • The inconsistency in this curriculum is obvious… It should not be a surprise that there is rampant cheating on college campuses: If we’ve taught our students for 12 years that there is no fact of the matter as to whether cheating is wrong, we can’t very well blame them for doing so later on. • Indeed, in the world beyond grade school, where adults must exercise their moral knowledge and reasoning to conduct themselves in the society, the stakes are greater. There, consistency demands that we acknowledge the existence of moral facts… • But at the same time, the curriculum sets our children up for doublethink. They are told that there are no moral facts in one breath even as the next tells them how they ought to behave.

10. Thursday, 01 December 2011 Moral Relativism and the Crisis of Contemporary Education Written by Duke Pesta • As a life-long teacher, I might also be granted indulgence if I grumble about how little my college students actually know compared to what I learned. And although there is as much justice as exaggeration in these observations, the thing that never ceases to amaze me is how morally stunted and ethically underdeveloped our students are, how utterly unable to make even obvious moral distinctions, and how completely uninterested in differentiating between virtue and vice... • For thousands of years in the West, it was the humanities, as nursed and taught in the schools, which reinforced theology, helping inculcate moral values and instill a love of moral virtue across cultures and in the hearts of individuals…Over the last three centuries, however — a span of time that witnessed the rise of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the dawn of Naturalism and Modernism, and the dominance in our time of Post-Modernism — the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of Western Culture have been shaken, eroded, and ultimately rejected altogether by new, man-centered ways of viewing reality… • …anyone who has spent meaningful time in our institutions of learning knows just how seriously teachers and academics take their liberal worldviews…the liberal post-modernism and moral relativity that dominate our schools seek to root out traditional values and meanings in order to supplant them with the liberal, materialist creeds of academics — belief-systems every bit as faith-based as those they seek to remove. Despite the obvious contradiction and hypocrisy, liberal academics proceed blithely down this intellectually tortured path by elevating politics to the exalted place in culture formerly occupied by morality… • We have reached the point in Western education where politically leftist approaches to culture have become institutionally sanctioned, unquestioningly normative, and zealously guarded: They alone offer students a legitimate position from which to analyze and critique culture…