Once again, the 9th Circus demonstrates why it's the most overturned court ever. Just wait. You can't insist on separation of Church and State and do this.

Hey, it's better than when they tried "Be Andrew Sullivan for a week". Self-flagelation, severe mood swings, and choking back seven inches of britches bologna was hell on the tonsils.

I guess I don't really see the problem with this--it could be a fun way to learn about another culture, and it importantly seems to have been optional if one child were unable to participate due to religious or personal obligations.

I'm trying to come up with but can't really conceive of an analogous situation in which a child would be asked to practice Christianity--the assignment seems to have been intended to give the kids a sort of sense of what it was like to live in a Muslim culture, not what it was like to actually have faith in the Muslim religion. And since the kids already live in a Christian culture, more or less, it would be redundant to ask them to see what it would be like to live in one.

But actually--I could similarly see, say, a class studying the Medieval period asking the children to take on some of the practices of Christianity in the Medieval period--putting on a morality play, say, or learning some Gregorian chants--maybe also fasting and praying in connection with learning about the Medieval mystics and monks; calling themselves 'Brother Francis' or 'Sister Hildegard' for a week, maybe. I wouldn't see a problem with this, either--and I think in this case as well as in the Muslim case that the interest is clearly enough in the experience of a different culture, not the faith itself, to be inoffensive.

Of course, I can't speak for delicate flowers like Michael Newdow, who think their dollar bills are subliminally trying to convert them. But on the whole, society needs to realize that 'separation of church and state' does not mean, 'I get to live in a cocoon in which I will never encounter beliefs other than my own.'

As a life long crack addict, I truly missed my calling by not becoming a judge in the ninth circuit. God Damn, they smoke a lot of crack. I'm fiending right now thinking about that ruling. So let me get this straight, Its constitutional to ask 1st graders about anal sex and to have kids read the koran for 3 weeks but its unconstitutional to have a statue of the ten commandments in a park.

I need a couple of minutes to hit the rock.

Ok I'm back. It all makes sense now.

I guess if we could convince the 9th that the G-d in the pledge is really just referring to Allah then they would reverse their earlier ruling.

The 9th is a joke, time to split that circus.

There's only one problem, alex. To Muslims, there is no such thing as playacting as a Muslim. As soon as you say the magic words, you are considered a Muslim and at that point you risk death by renouncing Islam.

Ummmm...okay. Atheist here. But isn't this more than a separation of church and state issue? I mean, wouldn't most religious persons of whatever flavor be a tad bit uncomfortable letting their kids even pretend to worship somebody else's God for a while? Even for the educational experience? Like I said, it's not my gig, but I think if you're going to profess it, you might as well actually believe it. And aren't most deities guys on the record as pretty possessive?

and when do the muslims act like christians for 3 weeks-would that make them automatic infidels marked for death. Send the 9th circuit to Iran.

And aren't most deities guys on the record as pretty possessive?

Allah more than most. Most Christians believe that God will throw you in his big eternal fireplace after you die if you don't believe in Him or his son.

Most Jews believe you might see some retribution from God during your lifetime if you don't follow His laws, and the ones who believe in an afterlife say that the punishment will be that you don't get to participate.

Almost all devout Muslims believe that Allah not only will punish you in the afterlife for dissing Him, but that He gave orders to his followers to send as many unbelievers to Him as possible.

And unbelievers in this case refers to those Muslims who renounced their faith and converted to another religion. Talk about possessive.

Oops, substitute "includes" for "refers to" in last post.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the role-playing game was not a religious exercise that violated anybody’s constitutional rights.

So if pretending to be a Muslim is not a religious exercise, why is a Christmas parade or a Christmas pageant considered a violation of consititutional rights?

If my kid were in that class, I'd encourage him to play 'Saudi Morality Cop,' and demand that all girls not wearing a hijab be whipped in the public square.

And he would totally do it, too.

If the black robes feel that strongly that schools should be able to let their charges "experience" what it would be like to live in such a culture, maybe they should "experience" what it would be like to live in such a culture.

That would entail them avoiding being bombed to the muslim Hell because they've just pissed off a majority of "true believers", so then the true believers wouldn't have to put up with their crap any more. I wonder, are they sure they want the children to really learn about that culture?

I thought not.

V the K, that was my reaction, too. I can just imagine how the school would react if, in the course of forcing children to pretend to be Muslims, a student called for the public beheading of the principal.

"Most Christians believe that God will throw you in his big eternal fireplace after you die if you don't believe in Him or his son."

They do?

The Catholic Church (officially, anyway) doesn't teach that. Anymore. That's a majority of Christians right there.

That's the doctrine, anyway. Individual results may vary.

That's true, Knemon, but the point is that the vast majority of Christians believe the worst the will happen if you don't follow our religion is you'll go to hell. It's not required to smite the unbelievers or that it is required for us to assassinate apostates.

And in the Catholic Church, the worst we do to people (now) is excommunicate them, which means they can't partake of Eucharist (and only a bishop can excommunicate somebody). We don't have torch parties going after Baptists, etc.

"There's only one problem, alex. To Muslims, there is no such thing as playacting as a Muslim. As soon as you say the magic words, you are considered a Muslim and at that point you risk death by renouncing Islam."

I'm honestly unfamiliar with Islamic theology, so I don't know what a devout Muslim would think of an unbeliever aping Muslim prayers and rituals. But my point simply was, I see no reason for the non-Muslim schoolchildren and their parents to be offended, or for the Supreme Court to be brought to bear on the case, given that the obvious intent is simply to allow the children to experience a culture other than their own, not to proselytize, and that the exercise was optional. As for the other negative comments in the thread, they simply object to the whitewashing of Islamic extremism in academia, which has nothing to do with this specific didactic exercise--if the children weren't playacting at being Muslims sans veils for the girls and, well, murder or torment for the gays, then they would be learning about Islam in books which define 'jihad' as merely striving for personal excellence, and try to argue that there is really some subtle form of feminism in the forced segregation and subjugation of women.

"Most Christians believe that God will throw you in his big eternal fireplace after you die if you don't believe in Him or his son."

They do?

The Catholic Church (officially, anyway) doesn't teach that. Anymore. That's a majority of Christians right there.

Forgive my ignorance, I'm Jewish and learned what I know about Christianity from proselytizers who told me (in as nice a way as possible) I was going to Hell if I didn't believe Jesus was the son of God. I thought from other things I read that Catholics believed pretty much the same thing, considering the abbhorence towards ex-communication and the reasons behind all of its confession and absolution rituals.

Meh, I don't do this for a living. Getting dark, got to go.

Color me puzzled, too, Knemon. The Catholic Church doesn't believe in hell anymore? Or doesn't believe it's for unbelievers? Or...what?

And, alex? Any anticipation when "pretend Jew" week will be instituted in California schools, and whether Muslims and Christians would be permitted to decline?

"...so I don't know what a devout Muslim would think of an unbeliever aping Muslim prayers and rituals."

It's not just a case of aping rituals. The prescribed method for converting to Islam is to recite the shahada, "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet." That's it. Some say that whether you mean it or not, you've just converted, and are a Muslim, subject to penalties for apostasy.

As a practical matter, I suspect the majority of Muslims, certainly in America, would not be so formulaic and literalistic as to really start calling these kids Muslims, but I suppose the danger exists.

I've mentioned it before Sue, but I am a Frisbyterian. We believe that when you die your soul goes up on the roof and you can't get it down.

Many Christians believe that non-Christians go to heaven if they're good. It's just that it's a lot harder to be good if you're not Christian, because your confusion about the nature of things will easily lead you astray. I'm not sure, but I think this might be what the Catholic church believes.

Also, some Christians don't believe in hell, per se. They believe that good people get eternal life, and bad people just die. The wages of sin are death.

You see, Alex, that's the problem: the texts the kids would be studying and taking as the Absolute Truth WOULD define "jihad" as striving for personal excellence.

The only way it can be defined that way is if you define "striving for personal excellence" as 1) giving an infidel the chance to convert, 2) demanding and getting the non-believer tax, or 3) killing the infidel. Not whipping them into submission. Not talking things out with them. Not even living in uneasy co-existence. It means, flat-out, killing the infidel after the first two options.

Try as the "moderates" do and will, that's what their own book says, has said for centuries, and won't change because WE think it should.

Yeah, anonymous, but people who call themselves Christians believe all sorts of stuff that doesn't correlate with what is actually written in the sacred texts of Christendom. That was the first thing that made me uneasy: if there are parts of it you don't believe, what reason do you have to believe any of it?

Alex: The problem with your thinking is that public education is compulsory and we each have to pay taxes to support their social engineering. This is tyranny not education. If a course on Muslim theology and one for each other religion was provided as as elective, I would have no problem. It is the compulsory nature of public schools that leads me to the belief that the main societal problems this nation has begin with public education. I believe that the reason 35% of all black males end up in prison is directly related to the gender biased public education system(black females graduate form college at a higher rate-36% than white males-32%- and at more than twice the rate of black males-15%). And the reason for this disparity is that the vast majority of teachers are liberal fanatics like you. It comes as no surprise that public schools would promote the Muslem religion even as its adherants cut off heads of their kidnap victims and murder school children. It is exactly what one should expect from most Public school educators.

Gawd, what dumb fucking cocksuckers.

the obvious intent is simply to allow the children to experience a culture other than their own

If that were true, the assignment would be to ape an ethnicity or nationality. Islam is a religion.

There was a parental opt out and I really don't think kids are endangered by the experience anymore than they are harmed by the words "under God" in the pledge. It just points to an inconsistent official view of how people are "harmed" by state acknowledgements of faith. "Anti-Judeo-Christian" pretty much sums it up.

So, do the little 'uns, get on the floor and stick their litttle asses in the air 5 times a day, too? Sounds like a pedophile's dream!

"If a course on Muslim theology and one for each other religion was provided as as elective, I would have no problem."

This sort of thinking would require public schools to offer far more courses than they could possibly afford to teach, or than any children would be willing to attend--it's frankly born of a sort of weird ahistoricizing extremism about the separation of church and state which would make learning about any religion, even in the context of history, even when history excised of the religious elements MAKES NO SENSE, anathema. This is the sort of thinking which won't allow choirs in public schools to sing the Messiah, even though it's a major piece of choral repertoire, presumably because it might 'offend' people or subliminally work as a proselytizing tool.

"If that were true, the assignment would be to ape an ethnicity or nationality. Islam is a religion."

And religion is a integral part of the culture of most Middle-Eastern nations--you cannot hope to understand any of them without some knowledge of Islam. And the school is using play-acting games to learn about Islam rather than Christianity simply because the children are far less likely to know anything about Islam. There is no reason why the mere fact of the play-acting or the idea that learning about Islam is important in a world in which so large a number of people ARE Muslim should cause outrage--indeed, as Emerson said, it is hardly intelligent to remain willfully ignorant of something potentially dangerous; one should 'look into the face of the lion'. Again, the problem everyone has here is, simply, that ANY method used to teach about Islam is still bound to ignore its less attractive attributes or treat them as not essentially part of the Muslim religion--and to gloss over Islamic extremism in a way that Christian 'extremism' would never be ignored in a similar context. I don't dispute that this is a problem--but it's a problem regardless of didactic method. The problem here is not the fact that Islam is being taught--it is the version of Islam that is being taught.

And, P.S. (seeing how there's been some confusion on this point)--no, I am NOT a left-liberal in any sense of the word.

religion is a integral part of the culture of most Middle-Eastern nations--you cannot hope to understand any of them without some knowledge of Islam.

Perhaps so, but from what I've read tribalism is much more important to self-identification in that region. There is no authority for laying down orthodoxy so Islam is a pretty factionalized affair. It gets its present importance as a competitor to PanArabism for forging a broader regional identity. The key word is "forging."

The analogy would be to teach American Indian culture by having the children pretend to be animists for a few weeks.

The problem here is not the fact that Islam is being taught--it is the version of Islam that is being taught.

It's certainly a fair point that one should reasonably assume the version of Islam being presented is sanitized and offers little for understanding Middle Eastern culture, whatever that recent theoretical invention is supposed to be. My objection is a bit less technical, though.

Judeo-Christianity is on the outs in our publisc institutions on the grounds that acknowledgment might improperly influence young minds and offend thise of different faiths. This has been carried to such an extreme that a unit in which students were to pretend to be persecuted early Christians would be unthinkable even though those beliefs are a foundation for Western culture. I happen to disagree with the premise and I don't think students are being harmed by a unit on Islam, but the official justification for driving out Judeo-Christianty has it so.

Obviously, a different sensibility is being used where non-Judeo-Christian faith is involved.

I can't wait till Muslim parents are asked to have their kids pretend to be Jews for three weeks.

The results should be, ahem, explosive.

And we can't even say Merry Christmas. . . .

Once again the infamous 9th circus court make another irresponsible ruling frankly its time to shut down this house of shame and evil and repace them with more common sense persons not the jerks that run it today