The school’s understanding of a biblical lifestyle
Things that students at Trinity Academy, a private Christian high school in Wichita, Kansas, are not allowed to do:
- have sex before marriage
- drink alcohol
- have a gay relative
Blah blah blah Bible blah Jesus blah body is the temple of god blah no likker smokes or drugs or any other illegal or inappropriate activity…
That’s elegant, isn’t it – first no alcohol, no tobacco, no illegal drugs, no abuse of prescription drugs – and then everything else. Don’t do drugs, and don’t do ANYTHING WRONG. Nailed it.
Blah blah blah church blah marriage blah and then, for a rousing finish, a long tangled fret about all these confusing newfangled things like not being HeterOSexual.
What always strikes me about these things is the shocking ethical poverty. All the rules are so narrow, so petty, so self-regarding, so indifferent to everything that really matters. Not a word about kindness or generosity or collaboration, nothing about poverty or war or violence or suffering – just nasty prurient domestic shit. Don’t fuck boys if you’re a boy, don’t drink gin, don’t read anything that’s not the bible.
Who would want to stay at a school like that?
They always seem to start with “The Bible” but it makes no sense to do so because at this point in time the diversity in Bible translations very nearly permits everything. Srsly! “The Bible” no longer agrees with itself on things as basic as the ten commandments and priests administering abortifacients kinda like the morning after pill to women.
So everything they say after that is simply a bunch of authoritarian control freaks giving themselves permission to take your money and then not give you what you paid for. Someday we may learn to recognize the grifters and a predators wearing holy robes.
I know, the “bible” thing is just handwaving. It’s a gang signal.
It is indeed just handwaving.
Forget that the Bible is an inconsistent mess or that interpretations change over time. There’s also the plain fact that the Bible doesn’t say what so many of its adherents think (or say they think) it says.
They talk of “Biblical” marriage, although marriage in the Bible is multifarious and often takes forms we (or certainly THE BIBLE THUMPERS) would object to.
They talk of the pro-life, human-life-begins-at-conception idea as uniquely Biblical, but the Bible has very different things to say on the nature of fetal life.
priests administering abortifacients kinda like the morning after pill to women
The “morning after pill” (ECP) is a contraceptive, it cannot terminate a pregnancy.
Aarron Hartzler
Rapture Practice: A True Story About Growing Up Gay in an Evangelical Family
http://www.amazon.com/Rapture-Practice-Growing-Evangelical-Family/dp/0316094641
Story of going to a school like Trinity, told from the inside.
A good read.
They forgot their ancient, divinely-inspired certainties about bathroom usage. And how about the biblical view of concealed handgun carry?
They aren’t just cherry-picking, they’re making it up as they go along.
This comes in under Jesus telling his disciples to sell their cloaks to buy swords – sword, gun, it’s allegorical, don’t you see? And if he wanted his disciples armed, then who are we to argue?
The biblical understanding expressed by this school matches pretty much letter for letter with my parents’ understanding of the Bible.
Ben#3:
Indeed. I wonder if the people saying things like that have made a very thorough study of what the bible has to say, or if they simply accept the dogma that their church leaders say to them. That was a rhetorical question, because the answer is obviously the latter. The bible says little about the topic, just that god “breathes life” into people. Hence life begins, biblically, with the first breath, at birth. There is even a recipe for what may well be legal abortion in the bible, the “ordeal of bitter water”, and there are explicit rules that one must follow when a man strikes a woman and causes a miscarriage (namely, he must pay money to the husband in recompense, i.e. it’s not a sin to induce abortion, it’s just a civil infraction). Of course, one cannot help but note that these rules ignore the autonomy and agency of the woman altogether, but, ya know, Bible.
“Life begins at conception” wasn’t even a thing in decades past. Jerry Falwell and his cronies started it as a way to rally the socially conservative political Right, in the USA at least. The traditional church dogma, based on the rantings of Augustine, was that the fetus was “animated” on the 40th day after conception, and before him, Aristotle mused in his typically ignorant fashion that it was 40 days for a male child and 90 for a female child. Why the difference? Beats me. More arbitrary sea-lawyering. Even as late as 1971, evangelicals issued a resolution calling for legal abortion rights that made clear the fact that they didn’t believe the at-conception hooey. Not full rights, of course, but enough to demonstrate that they had not yet bought into the at-conception myth.
Of course, medically speaking, “life” has no starting point because it’s a continuous chain of living cells; we didn’t emerge spontaneously from dead things. So the only real question is whether a woman should be forced against her will to be an incubator, which is just another way of asking whether women have the rights of self-determination, agency, and autonomy over their bodies in the same way that men do. Honestly, though, if a person has to seriously ask that, then they’ve got much bigger issues at play than being unable to read a bronze-age book.