Christians in Colorado are trying to get the Moffat County High School to adopt a new Bible course that would treat the Bible as history, not religion. This assumes, however, that there is a lot of accurate history in the Bible — and if that's true, then it would seem to follow that the supernatural claims in the Bible might be true as well. Treating the Bible simply as history can thus have the effect of promoting particular religious positions as well.

The 300-page curriculum for the year-long class comes from the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, a North Carolina-based group that lists Norris on its board of directors and a number of North Carolina legislators as advisers. ...

Bob Grubb, a retired soil scientist from Craig, said he was on the fence about the Bible class until backers assured him that such a class would be literature- and history-oriented. "I don't want a Bible course to come in and be a way to argue creationism," Grubb said. "I don't want it to be a theology class. I feel the discussion of that belongs in church."

Source: The Denver Post

The agenda of the National council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools is suspect, to say the least. Americans United notes:

The North Carolina-based group, headed by Elizabeth Ridenour, uses the Bible as the course’s sole text and teaches the Bible as actual history. Ridenour’s work is supported by Religious Right organizations and her board includes the actor-turned-evangelical Christian activist Chuck Norris. NCBC’s Web site also inaccurately claims that the Bible "was the foundation and blueprint for our Constitution…."

The idea of having courses in public schools about the Bible makes some sense. There is a lot of literature, art, philosophy, and history which requires some basic familiarity with the Bible — not just the stories in the Bible, but the ways the Bible has been used. Many, though, want to introduce Bible course in order to promote a theological agenda rather than to simply educate.

I don't think that there is a single Biblical scholar on either the Board of Directors or the Advisory Committee of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools — but that may be because scholarship isn’t the goal. Instead, it appears that the goal is to promote a particular, sectarian view of the Bible. There isn’t, for example, anything in the course about the Jewish arrangement and contents of what Christians call the Old Testament, nothing about the process by which certain books were included in the Christian canon an others excluded, or differences between the Catholic and Protestant Bibles.

The entire course is presented from a Protestant point of view where the King James Version is treated as authoritative. The course doesn’t simply describe what Christians believe (and a decent course would have to go farther, describing what Jews believe as well); instead, it acts as though what certain Protestant Christians believe about the Bible is Truth. The Bible is referred to as the “Word of God,” for example, biblical inerrancy is argued for, and the idea that America is a “Christian Nation” with laws based upon the Bible receives prominent attention.

A serious, objective, and scholarly course would treat many basic beliefs of fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity as dubious at best. Such a course would, for example, have to present information about the transmission and creation of the texts which would contradict teachings about the Bible being infallible and inerrant. This is why real courses on the Bible, Christianity, and religion generally do not appear in most schools and never will appear in most schools — despite the fact that students would probably benefit from them.

Knowledge, information, and research are essentially being suppressed in order to avoid offending certain Christians — exactly what some would like to see happen with evolution and, eventually, significant swaths of the rest of science.