We Can’t Agree What Religious Words Mean, Either

Dana at Principled Discovery has been hosting a discussion about defining home education, and how we humans pollute our own most important meanings. Crimson Wife made the point that as a Catholic Christian, she knows what it feels like to be defined out of her own group by “Christians” who aren’t Catholic. And y’all know my own concern is for clarity in the difference between “education” and “schooling.”

Time to review what we’ve learned together, class! And see if we can start to apply it for good instead of evil.

From last year’s “Awe and the Environment”:
Is there something else you call yourselves besides dominionists?
I’d call myself a steward although christian seems to work as well. ‘Dominionist’ holds darker political tones, linked to christian reconstructionism or bringing christian control to the US.

Hi Dawn - the term Christian itself (like homeschooler?) seems to have been redefined by the wacko contingent, though. And the Imus thing teaches the power of language for evil as well as good — the language we use to frame our humanity seems to be under assault in all directions, so that even when we manage to THINK a clear thought, its sworn enemies are lying in wait to choke it off in the crib or lose it in the wilderness, as soon as we try to EXPRESS it.

Not just Christians. And not just homeschoolers. It all ties together into even darker and more menacing problems of meaning IN LAW, not just in our private speech. As prominent educator Deborah Meier pointed out last fall, the root problem may be that we can’t legally define “educated person” without legal dominionism stemming from religious dominionism (which I would define as fascism but maybe that’s just wacko JJ off on a tangent again) :

“…Deborah Meier , in one sentence, tells us the basic problem.
The very definition of what constitutes an “educated person” is now dictated by federal legislation. (p.67)”

– From Many Children Left Behind : How the No Child Left Behind Act is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools
Book review By Michael F. Shaughnessy, Senior Columnist
Published 10/16/2006

Then in November we saw a St. Pete Times editorial about redefining political words for religious unreasoning, manipulated by the same people who (as I wrote at the time) “define stem cells as babies, late-term abortions as birth, but now deem real live infant citizens born and born HERE, not to be Americans and in fact not to be newborns at all!
They just disappear them with a stroke of the pen, like FL Ed Commissioner John Winn does with school failures”:

As the Bush administration moves immigration reform into the pediatric ward, babies now get to pay the price. Though the Constitution considers anyone born in the United States to be a citizen, the Department of Health and Human Services has added an astonishing bureaucratic postscript.

“A child born in the U.S. to an illegal alien mother,” HHS writes, “… is not a deemed newborn.”

“Deemed newborn” is regulator-speak for deciding which babies get tossed out of hospitals, and it is thoroughly indecent. . .
The change defies common sense. Under a 22-year-old Medicaid law, illegal immigrants are covered for emergency hospital treatment that includes childbirth.
The resulting newborns, “deemed” or not, were then immediately eligible for follow-up care for at least a year - care that can range from treatment for illness at birth to routine checkups and immunizations. . .

[I heard] Bill O’Reilly on talk radio, with some woman whose name I didn’t catch representing “unbelievers” in any deity — a state of mind which he claims to have fostered all the worst dictators in history (he named Hitler, Pol Pot, Mussolini, Stalin and a few others.) It was a discouraging un-debate, because she would say something like “but Hitler was raised Catholic!” or “Stalin attended seminary” and he would say it doesn’t matter, they obviously did not believe in God because they wanted to be god themselves. So they were atheists. By his light any murderous dictator would have to be atheist, apparently.

So his religious definitions were the only reality, quite literally. Everything else was just “wrong” or “lies and spin” or irrelevant, whatever he had at hand to dismiss it with. Talk about power of story . . .

But I do know better than to think all believers in a higher power — including Catholics like him — are wacko. And some of the best environmentalists I know are liberal protestants.. . .O’Reilly read off a list of nations with their percent of unbelievers in a deity. Even (the formerly) Catholic western European nations like France and Spain, not just Sweden or Denmark, were surprising; France is now actually majority atheist-agnostic, 53% I think he said.

And then he gets to us, sitting here looking like idiots at only eight to twelve percent of the most powerful nation on EARTH trying to figure things out without Biblical prophecy.

He was saying it as a cautionary tale, that Christians needed to gird up their loins lest they become decadent like these other developed nations. He says five of the nine SCOTUS justices are Catholic like him, is that right?? – an unhealthy disproportion if so.

So I was thinking, no wonder we aren’t leading the global stewardship of the environment. The rest of the world does think we are religiously wacko about it.