Texas school district bans the Bible because of its sexual content | Hacker News Reader

Texas school district bans the Bible because of its sexual content

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Anyone else find the reporting of the location unnecessarily obfuscated?

> in the Texas panhandle > in the sprawling rural district > in the west Texas district

Only several paragraphs in do we find in a quote the actual location: Canyon ISD.

Then I have to go to maps to find that Canyon is a tiny town (pop ~15k) outside of Amarillo, TX.

I'm FROM Texas and couldn't figure out where they were talking about until halfway through the article.

Interesting, I always felt if they want to ban sex in books, the bible should be the first on the list.

I wonder if any other religious texts meet that standard ?

The bible is a slaveowner’s manual. Jesus didn’t teach not to own slaves; he taught how own slaves. For that reason alone, reading it should be discouraged.

And of course... http://www.twainquotes.com/19351102.html

I mean sure, why not? It’s clearly a book for adults. There are plenty of kids bibles that contain the key stories and messages. Let kids read the rapey murdery bits when they’re older.

Murder it fine, only sex is not apparently.

There’s a principled argument that can be made about why learning about sex and learning about murder become age-appropriate at different ages, but I don’t think the people involved in this circus are interested in discourse.

I would be interested in hearing this principled argument.

Death is much, much easier to understand than sex. It’s like an on-off switch. Someone can be alive, then they can be dead. The notion of permanence is not something that, say, under 5s, are good at understanding, but above that age it’s pretty clear what it means for something to die and not come back.

Meanwhile, sex has layers upon layers of complexity. The basic notion of “it’s where babies come from” is the first layer that becomes intelligible, but the mechanics, motivations, and risks have increasingly sophisticated answers. It’s difficult to explain sexual desire to pre-pubescent kids with no personal reference point for that feeling. It’s difficult to explain the social dynamics of sexual relationships to tweens who are still rank amateurs at any kind of relationship.

It’s no different really to math, where we don’t generally teach algebra to 5 year olds, and we don’t generally teach calculus to 10 year olds.

The wider political debate happens because people disagree over where specific things lie on the scale of sexual complexity. There are extremists who think pre-teens can’t handle seeing a nipple, and there are extremists who think pre-teens should be reading books about blowjobs. Most people find a middle ground, then argue about it anyway.

I'm surprised Texas schools weren't already using the American Bible, where Jesus is white, loves guns and money, and is obsessed with gay people.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/republican-jesus/photos

Wait until they hear about LLMs, since they just found out about the Bible.

Wait until they find out about the Internet.

Crap, what happens if they find out about people? There's people on Earth I believe.

The revolution eats its own children(?). Or perhaps this is evidence of the pendulum swing where the book-banner-busybodies no longer fully overlap with christian fundies?

I think it's less that the pendulum is swinging, and more that the processes created by the "book-banner-busybodies" are being turned back upon some books which those busybodies would probably rather keep.

That would have been very cool and historicaly interesting. Unfortunately these are just run of the mill hypocrits:

After receiving clarification from Representative Patterson regarding library content, we reevaluated the guidelines and are pleased to have the Bible available in each of our Canyon ISD libraries.”

I can't be the only one here who sees what the Bible-banners were really trying to demonstrate, right?

Would you elaborate for those of us slower on the uptake?

I find this to be hilarious! 8-)

The bible certainly contains copious sex including incest and rape and extensive murderous violence.

But the believers in the big invisible swinging dick in outer space don't really care about chopping up the babies, or murdering one's children or parents, the reason the book needs to be banned is because of sex.

This same mentality is reflected in (puritanical christian based) regulatory restrictions of sex in media. It's OK to chop of people's heads, shoot them, stab them, chop off arms and legs, but NEVER EVER allow a woman's nipple to be visible! (A man's nipple is totally OK)

It's all for the children!!! We wouldn't want their impressionable little minds to think a nipple is OK, when they need to be understanding that the OK thing is dismembering people!

Ask people on the street what the worst crime is and a lot of them will mention pedophilia. This didn't even register to the old men who wrote the Bible 2k years ago.

If someone wrote a Bible today it would probably get mentioned in one of the sins.

  If you suck on a tit the movie gets an R rating. If you hack the tit off with an axe it will be PG.
  Jack Nicholson

Edited because some people don’t believe God has a sense of humor.

Don't try reading about Lot...

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