The Masks of Pluralism in Public Education

There are many masks shielding the real purposes behind much of contemporary of American Public Education.  There are various masks disguised under the category of pluralism, and they are very deceitful and increasingly are altering public education.

It is distressing to see the mask of secular humanism apparently applauding the Islamic faith.  This is done under the guise of advocating equal representation for all religious beliefs, which is really in essence the discounting the validity of any.  From the Islamic position there is a pretense of peace, but a peace really dependent on ignorance. By promoting the Islamic faith in the public schools, the secular humanists really hope to calculate in the long run the categorization of all religious beliefs as but superstitions.

There are three basic monotheistic belief systems:  the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic.  These are all lumped into one category by the secular humanist, as well as the multiple faiths of the Far East and others.  But are all the faiths the same?  No one could consistently argue that most faiths have contributed in various ways to the progress of humanity, and on the other hand negative observations can be made regarding the history in all faiths.  But it can well be argued that the Christian religion and the Judeo-Christian values have overall contributed more the welfare of humanity than all others.

The term “Judeo-Christian” has been used in America since the 1940s to refer to standards of ethics held in common by Judaism and Christianity. It is also used in a historical sense for the common connections between the faiths.  But notice there is no such harmony between the Islamic faith and either Christianity or Judaism.

The Jewish Conservative columnist Dennis Prager, for example, writes: “The concept of Judeo-Christian values does not rest on a claim that the two religions are identical. It promotes the concept there is a shared intersection of values based on the Hebrew Bible, brought into our culture by the founding generations of Biblically oriented Protestants, that is fundamental to American history, cultural identity, and institutions.” (Prager, Dennis. “The Case for Judeo-Christian Values, part 5” February 15, 2005. Accessed: 2008-07-12.)

It has been observed as well that:  “Most of the ten universities founded before the Revolution taught Hebrew. To graduate from Harvard, students had to be able to translate the Old and New Testament from Latin to Hebrew. Orations at graduation were in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, and a personal friend of the leading Jews of Newport, told the story in 1771 about an American Jew who brought a letter in Hebrew he received from Hebron in Judea to Stiles to be translated. (Reiss, Oscar, Jews in Colonial America, 1925, pp 40ff.) In 18th century America, “Harvard assumed that no Christian gentleman could be considered truly educated unless he could read the Bible in its original tongue.” (American Jewish Historical Society, ajhs. org. scholarship)

Christianity developed from Judaism, where the Islamic faith developed from the so called religious revelations of one man, Mohammed, who could neither read nor write, but who made up his own stories from what he had heard from the Hebrew and Christian religions in his caravan journeys with his uncle in Arabia and Syria.  He started the Islamic faith by making himself the greatest of all the prophets.  He calls the two religions, “People of the Book,” but according to his teaching they changed it all, while he gave the right breakdown of it as recorded in the Koran, the book of Islam.

The secular humanists wish to categorize the Bible and the Koran into the same category, both in which there is little or no cognitive support for true education, and thus devoid of any real knowledge.  The Koran developed from about 650 AD, which is over half a millennium after the New Testament writing and about a millennium or 1,000 years after the final Old Testament book, and close to two or four thousand years, depending on ones interpretation of when the first books of the Bible were written.

It has been observed: “The impetus for collecting Mohammad’s revelations in a single volume came after Mohammad and other important Muslims started dying off.”  (Robert Spencer-The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran,  p. 29) Thus, the book was written from manuscripts copied by followers during Mohammad’s spiritual trances and what a few followers had memorized although there many different accounts.  The Bible in contrast, however, has over 40 authors and is a combination of history, drama, poetry, parables, philosophy, worship literature, and apocalyptic writings—material the Muslims accuse the Jews and Christians of having distorted.

The Christian the message is that Jesus is the Christ, and it becomes the unifying force of the whole Bible and the logos, rationally bringing all knowledge together as Romans 11:33-36 so beautifully confirms saying:  “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!  For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been his counselor? Or  who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and to Him, are all things, to whom be glory for ever. Amen.  (AV)  Pluralism in education does not give this!

The Muslim teaching about Jesus is as a great prophet, but not as the Christ, the Son of God.  A contrast between the two can be seen from the Koran 2:28 that says:  “Who is an enemy of Allah, and His angels and His messengers, and Gabriel and Michael! Lo! Allah (Himself) is an enemy to the disbelievers.”  In Matthew 5:44-45 the Jesus Christ is quoted as saying:  “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, for he makes his sun to rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” What a contrast!

The Muslims in the Koran’s ninth Sura (9:29,30) are given the explicit exhortation to wage war against the Jews and Christians and subject them to Islamic law, “Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah…and follow not the religion of truth until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low.  And the Jews say: ‘Ezra is the son of Allah, and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah…They imitate the saying of those who disbelieved of old.  Allah (Himself) fighteth against them.  How perverse are they!”  However, the more liberal influences in education in America are very much ready to take the stand that Islam is not a religion of war, but is one of peace, as the vast majority of Muslims declare they want peace. But the message of the Koran is peace only in the context of subjection to the Islamic law.

All that the name “Allah” means is “God,” but the name of God does not necessarily refer to the same understanding of God.  The Islamic focus is that, “There is no God, but Allah and Mohammad is his prophet.”

Concerning the threat to terrorism it has been noted that: ”The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic memo, entered into evidence at the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial in 2007 was: “The Ikhwan [Muslim brothers] must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and `sabotaging’ their miserable house…”  (Becky Yeh –OneNewsNow California correspondent—12/1/2010).  The liberal secular humanist forces wish to mask and cover up the threat of the Muslims infiltrating our civilization through our classrooms!

Without question we are witnessing The Masks of Pluralism in Public Education, shielding the true picture. There are many other instances of the use of this mask, such as allowing places in public school restrooms for Muslim students to wash their feet or to allow time outs for their prayer times, while Christians have all types of restrictions.

The publishers of Across the Centuries, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is a 558-page textbook used in middle schools contains 55 pages on Islam.  Less than ten pages are on Christianity.  It is shocking that:  “The chapter on Islam accounts for ten percent of the text, while Christianity and Judaism are almost entirely absent.”  It was pointed out that, “This book is taught in every single public school across the United States, in every state and city…that everything Islamic is praised and every problems is swept under the rug.” (Becky Yeh – OneNewsNow California correspondent – 12/1/2010)  Here’s a mask!

We need to look behind the masks and see what really is.  I believe that the secular humanists are behind a mask that really knows the Islamic faith as a perfect example of religious superstition.  But by paralleling it with the Judeo-Christian world views they hope to discount in time any religious influence.  There is a straw man behind the mask, a backdoor method to attack the Judeo-Christian values basic to the formation of our nation, ultimately to found one nation without God.

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by Joe Renfro, Ed.D., Educational Columnist, Radio Evangelist, Retired Teacher and Pastor, Box 751, Lavonia, Georgia 30553, 706-356-4173, joerenfro@windstream.net