Schools Should Be Warned About Noah’s Ark?

Schools Should be Warned About the Freedom From Religion Foundation

An article in yesterday’s (7/13/16) Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer carried this headline:  “Schools warned about taking field trips to Noah’s Ark park.”  The warning came in the form of letters sent to 1,000 school districts in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia.  The co-president of the FFRF warned public schools that a field trip to Noah’s Ark Park would violate the separation of church and state and subject students to “an attempt to proselytize children.  The public school is to educate, not indoctrinate.”

Let’s cut to the chase.  The FFRF is as much into the business of indoctrination as anybody.  Their website (ffrf.org) introduces us to their headquarters, named Freethought Hall, which includes a life-size, life-like mannequin of Charles Darwin, and an area called Friendly Atheist Studio for radio and TV production.  The lowest floor of the building is named the “No Hell Below Us” floor.   Really.  You can look it up.

Working alongside the FFRF is the Council for Secular Humanism.  In a May, 2009 article in the Secular Humanist Bulletin, John Dunphy quoted his own article from 1983 in which he said, “I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level—preschool, daycare, or large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent with its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of “love thy neighbor” will finally be achieved.”

So, is the FFRF really in favor of “free thought?”  Only if it accords with evolutionary secular humanism.  That is not free.   John Dunphy is right that public education is religious.  It simply worships a different god.

What is at stake here is the freedom to be Christian, a freedom we can no longer take for granted.   But we don’t pledge our loyalty to Christ simply because we are free to do so.  We do it because it is right.  We do it because we are utterly lost and hopeless without Him.  We do it because only Jesus can free us from the sin that blinds us and condemns us.  And yes, we tell that to our children.