Sunday Go To Meeting Post

This is the day which the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice, and be glad in it. Be thankful today that at least one Congressman is not afraid to say that our public education system is a failure, that almost all American kids are left behind, and that the best way to revivify the schools is to model them after religious schools.


The Congressman is not bothered by the constant drumbeat of separation of church and state. He just wants kids to get a disciplined, intelligent education.

You probably haven't read about this in the mainstream press, and your first thought is likely to be that the anti-Christian, anti-Jewish forces of militant secularism are at it again. Well, not quite. The reason you probably haven't heard about it is that the religious schooling that the Congressman is talking about is Islam, and the model schools are madrassas. Rep. Andre Carson (D-Indiana) said in a recent speech: “America will never tap into educational innovation and ingenuity without looking at the model that we have in our madrassas, in our schools, where innovation is encouraged and where the foundation is the Koran.”

In order to criticize the Congressman for his desire to mix mosque and state, the mainstream media would have to quote him and identify the specific religion he is espousing. That won't do. Islam (the “religion of peace”) is the only religion whose real tenets are off-limits to the mainstream. This, by the way, is the same Congressman who said that the Tea Party would love “to see black Americans hanging on a tree.”

II Timothy 2:15 says “study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. (citation corrected, thanks to tryanmax)” But poor old Tim was a Christian, so we can't use him or the thousands of Catholic and other parochial schools as the examples. The Bible must be kept out of the schools, but maybe the Koran is all right. After all, according to Carson, Islamic madrassas use all the modern teaching techniques encouraged by the Koran. “We need an educational model that is current, that meets the need of our students. America must understand that she needs Muslims.”

Would that be the madrassas that don't allow females in at all, or just the ones that segregate them and teach them how to be obedient wives as young as possible? Is that the Koran which is utterly meaningless without the hadiths which explain what the garbled words actually mean? Would that be the innovative educational practices which still cling to Ptolemaic astronomical theory (the universe revolves around the earth)? Or perhaps it's the cutting-edge science that says that substances are formed by the will of Allah, not by Jewish chemical principles.

Still, you must admit that the madrassas are heavy on moral principle. You could search all day to find a Catholic or other church school teaching that heaven awaits with sexual and earth-like rewards if only you have the fortitude and education to strap on explosives and blow yourself up in a crowd of other (preferably non-Islamic) people.

For once, I have to agree with the Congressman that religious schools are better-organized and better-staffed than our current public schools. But then, a gathering of prairie dogs is more coherent and educational than most of our present public schools. I simply don't agree with him that we should jump out of the frying pan and into the fire by replacing non-educational public schools with non-educational Islamic schools. There are plenty of solid non-Islamic religious schools to draw inspiration from, and the teaching methods work with or without the religious instruction.

With Islamic chemistry, Islamic physics and Islamic math, there is no division between the religious and the empirical. Islam the political/social/educational cannot be separated from Islam the religious. Secular indoctrination in the public schools and religious indoctrination in the madrassas are just two sides of the same coin.