With the U.S. being a separate church and state type country, people get a little testy about the idea of teaching the Bible in public school. How could you possibly think of doing such a thing? Don’t you know there’s no proselytizing in schools?

But we do teach literature. A lot of it. How can we even begin to understand the great works of American literature without a basic knowledge of the Bible? And ignorance is what we’re sentencing our children to by not exposing them to this great book, or, er “Good Book.” Let’s put religion aside – let’s talk history, culture and literature. From a purely academic perspective, why not teach the backbone of Western thought?

For one thing, the Supreme Court. In the 1963 ruling of Abington Township School District v. Schempp, the Court declared school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools to be unconstitutional. In the case, Edward Schempp’s children were forced to hear at least 10 verses from the Bible, without comment, at the beginning of each day, under Pennsylvania law. There are good arguments on either side of the case. Reading the Bible without comment could be construed as compulsory school prayer, but that’s not exactly what I’m talking about here.

If you say you oppose religion in public schools, consider how your run-of-the-mill monotheist might be offended by one cornerstone of elementary school education.

Starting in about fourth grade, we learned all about Ancient Greece and Rome, and about their gods – from Zeus and Athena to Jupiter and Juno. In short, polytheism unleashed.  Was it taught in an indoctrinating way? Were we pressured to turn pagan? Was I offended? Hardly. I felt enriched and challenged, learning how other cultures lived, why they rose to power and why great empires fell. So why censor another great historical document that surveys civilizations, depicts the rise and fall of kings and empires and even imparts a few moral lessons along the way?

Why is it so inconceivable that the Bible can be taught in a non-threatening, non-proselytizing way that will satisfy the most hard-core atheist (or pagan for that matter)?

Stephen Prothero, chair of the Boston University religion department, and author of
Religious Literacy (2007) diagnoses Americans with “religious illiteracy” and supports Bible-literacy education. His amusing anecdotes reveal the sad truth about our public’s ignorance of the Bible’s contents: only half of American adults can name one of the four Gospels, 10 percent of Americans believe that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife, and “many high school seniors think that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife.” He suggests American high schools include courses on the Bible and other world religions.

A 2007 article in Time magazine called “The Case for Teaching the Bible” stated: “The ‘new consensus’ for secular Bible study argues that knowledge of it is essential to being a full-fledged, well-rounded citizen.”

The Bible is taught in some schools in Texas and Georgia. In Israel, it’s taught alongside other subjects like math, Hebrew and science, from elementary school through 12th grade to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. There is even a matriculation exam in the subject.

So what exactly do we not know if we never cracked open a Bible? That’s impossible to answer in a short blog post. But for starters, we probably wouldn’t understand the central themes of some of the books that are taught in public school. Many of the great works of American literature were filled with Biblical inspirations and motifs. Some examples:

Moby Dick: How can we even begin to understand Herman Melville’s classic saga starting with the first sentence: “Call me Ishmael”? The main characters are: Ishmael (Abraham’s first-born son), Ahab (King of Israel married to the evil Jezebel in 1 Kings), Elijah (prophet, 1 Kings).

John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath: The title is from the Book of Revelation.

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom. Absalom was King David’s son who rebelled against his father (2 Samuel). Even so, when he dies, David is distraught and cries out “Absalom, Absalom!” Absalom is also referenced in Cry the Beloved Country by South African Alan Paton and The Manticore by Canadian Robertson Davies. Absalom in Hebrew means “Father of Peace.”

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. The title is a literal translation of Beelzebub, the Canaanite pagan god, the epitome of evil, which in Hebrew means “Lord (Baal) of the Flies (Zebub).” In the beginning of the book, the beast takes on a snake-like shape, alluding to the creature in the Garden of Eden that persuaded Eve to reject God’s rules. Also note Simon’s character (disciple of Jesus).

A non-fiction book: The title of Adam Smith’s treatise promoting free market economics, The Wealth of Nations, is from a quote in the Book of Isaiah.

These are just a few examples of the Bible’s use in literature. Sadly, by skipping this Book of riches in our public education, we as individuals, as society and as students of literature and history are all the poorer for it.

GeekWire reports about an ex-Google engineer’s vision to merge the Bible with social media in his website ooBible.

“We wanted a clean, simple interface, something that people can come in, and really just focus on the words,” Wong tells GeekWire. “We wanted to create an experience that mimics physical books, so you can highlight, annotate on it … and bridge the gap between physical books and the e-book world.” Wong isn’t limiting his scope to the Bible, with plans to create what he calls “e-books on steroids” for other popular titles. He also sees opportunity around textbooks. But the Bible makes sense from a market perspective in part because people routinely pick-up a copy throughout their lives.

“It is really perfect for collaboration and sharing,” said Wong. “You can imagine a pastor sharing notes with their congregation or doing a Bible study with a group of friends.”

But his competition is great. The article said a search of the Bible at the Kindle store comes up with 14,030 titles. His greatest competition comes from BibleGateway. The GeekWire article has a video demo of the interface.

An interesting intersection of science and faith. The Associated Press reports on a new Israeli software which is “giving intriguing new hints about what researchers believe to be the multiple hands that wrote the Bible.”

The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book. The program, part of a sub-field of artificial intelligence studies known as authorship attribution, has a range of potential applications — from helping law enforcement to developing new computer programs for writers. But the Bible provided a tempting test case for the algorithm’s creators.

The article explains that in modern times, Bible scholars have believed the Torah “was written by a number of different authors whose work could be identified by seemingly different ideological agendas and linguistic styles and the different names they used for God.”

Today, scholars generally split the text into two main strands. One is believed to have been written by a figure or group known as the “priestly” author, because of apparent connections to the temple priests in Jerusalem. The rest is “non-priestly.” Scholars have meticulously gone over the text to ascertain which parts belong to which strand.

When the new software was run on the Pentateuch, it found the same division, separating the “priestly” and “non-priestly.” It matched up with the traditional academic division at a rate of 90 percent — effectively recreating years of work by multiple scholars in minutes, said Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, the computer science professor who headed the research team.

Plans are in the works to film a major Hollywood epic on the biblical story of Noah. Deadline New York reports Paramount is nearing signing onto the big ticket picture Noah written and to be directed by Darren Aronofsky, director of Black Swan.

The film will cost well more than the ark cost Noah to build:

Noah might only have gotten got a few pages in the Bible, but Aronofsky has turned it into a sprawling fantasy epic that will cost north of $100 million.

If any of you make it to South Africa this summer (or should I say “winter”), the National Library is hosting an exhibition marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible - which is this year. Not only is the KJB the most printed book in history, it was also the first book read in space by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968. The National Library’s first copy of the Bible was given to it by Prince Albert, son of Queen Victoria when the library opened in the mid-1800s.

Among the curiosities, a tiny Bible, the size of a pinky fingernail and a shorthand Bible.

On the heels of the San Francisco debate over banning the circumcision of baby boys (a key Jewish ritual), the threat to Jews practicing their faith exists Down Under as well.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reports that a combination of “animal welfare groups, Greens, independent lawmakers and some Labor backbenchers” are spearheading a ban on Jewish ritual slaughter, and Australian Jewish leaders are angry at the growing support for the ban.

Rabbi Moshe Gutnick, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on kashrut, chastised proponents of a ban on shechitah, which was triggered by a May 30 investigative documentary into animal slaughter.

“When there is an attempt to ban kosher slaughter, it is for either one of two reasons,” Gutnick told The Australian newspaper. “The first reason is out of ignorance, or the second reason is simply anti-Semitism.”

If implemented, the ban will sentence religious Jews to vegetarianism or importing kosher meat. If not slaughtered in the traditional manner referenced in Deuteronomy and codified in Halakha, meat is considered unkosher.

Outrageously, a Melbourne paper compared kosher slaughter to genital mutilation.

On Sunday, Melbourne’s The Sunday Age newspaper carried a front-page article titled “Outrage grows on ritual killing” as well as an editorial, which concluded that “There are any number of religious and cultural practices, ranging from sharia law to genital mutilation, that are rejected in Australia. Slaughter without stunning should be one of them.”

In response, Danny Lamm, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, issued a detailed rebuttal Monday, dismissing 10 myths about shechitah.

“Jewish law does not permit pre-stunning and requires that the animal must not be injured or mistreated in any way before it is slaughtered,” he wrote.

Last year, New Zealand tried to follow Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden in banning shechitah, but the government backed down after the Jewish community launched legal action.

Why should you care? “One of the first enactments of the Nazis in 1933 was to outlaw the Jewish method of slaughter,” said Rabbi Yehuda Brodie, registrar of the Manchester Beth Din, in a Wikipedia article on ritual slaughter.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports what happened when a church rector challenged his congregation to read the Bible cover to cover in one year.

It may be the best-selling book of all time, but its battles, bloodletting, and “begats,” its many laws, rituals, and tribes, and those chewy names like Oholiab and Eliphelehu and “Joshbekashah son of Heman” don’t make for easy reading.

Yet when Rev. Marek Zabriskie, the rector of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Whitemarsh, PA asked his congregation to join together to read the Bible in its entirety, “the response surprised him,” writes the paper.

“It’s taken on a life of its own,” he said last week. More than 150 of his 1,300 congregants, and 85 others, have turned his “Bible Challenge” into a far-flung community of readers, Zabriskie said. The project has also taught him new ways to conceive of “church” in the electronic age.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Zabriskie, a self-described “theological centrist,” had cautioned prospective readers last winter. Like most mainline Protestants, few had ever sat down with the parts he calls “boring and gruesome and strange” that almost never make it into liturgies or homilies.

An archaeological dig revealing the work of the Bible’s King Solomon has been opened to the public for the first time in Jerusalem, reports WorldNetDaily.

“…visitors will actually be able to walk through First Temple remains, touch the stones, enjoy and study about yet another period of the archeology of the city of Jerusalem,” said Jacob Fisch, executive director of the Friends of the Israel Antiquities Authority, about the new Ophel City Walls Site in the Walls Around Jerusalem National Park.

The highlight of the excavations is the complete exposure of a gate house characteristic of the First Temple period and believed by the excavator, Dr. Eilat Mazar of Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to be the “Water Gate” mentioned in the Bible.

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, attended the inauguration, saying they aim to “expose every piece of Jewish history.”

“It shows that the Bible is real,” Barkat continued. “It shows that 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, Jerusalem was the center of the world. And we love to share that with the world.”

The Israel Antiquities Authority spearheaded the project.

For all you control freaks: it’s time to learn to delegate, not micromanage.

In Exodus 18:13-26, Jethro meets up again with Moses and sees his son-in-law working morning to night listening to everyone’s problems as judge. Jethro asks Moses why he’s doing it all alone. Moses says the people who need God come to him. When they have a dispute, they come to him to judge and hear God’s laws.

But Jethro worried Moses would wither away, as would the people, because this job was too much for one man. One interpretation notes that the Hebrew word for “wither” “navol tibol” includes the same letters as “confused” “bilbul” – remember the Tower of Babel? Jethro was concerned not only with Moses and the people withering away, but also that God’s teachings could become confused – with only one person, Moses, passing judgment from morning to night, wearing himself down. He needed help.

Jethro set up a system to convert Moses from micro-manager to delegator. Moses would represent the people before God and impart to the Israelites the laws and teachings.

Moses needed to find capable, trustworthy men who fear God and who hate ill-gotten wealth. These men would be ministers over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. They would be able to judge the people, reserving the major disputes for Moses. In this way, Moses’ burden would be shared with others, thus allowing Moses a breather, and shift his job from a sprint to a marathon.

So next time you have that project you think nobody but you can handle, remember Moses and the important job he had: teaching God’s laws to the children of Israel.

Continuing our debate, Baptist Press reports on a meeting of Southern Baptist leaders last month to discuss the Bible’s response to wealth and poverty. One of the items on the agenda: does the Bible support capitalism?

Jay Richards, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and author of “Money, Greed and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and not the Problem” took on common economic myths. BP reports:

“I am convinced that the free economy, rightly understood, is compatible with Christian theology,” Richards said. “I am also convinced that Christian theology illuminates certain economic mysteries and economic realities.”

The “greed myth” portrays capitalism as fundamentally selfish and greedy, which is not the case Richards said. According to the “Zero-Sum Game Myth,” people only gain when others lose. On the contrary, Richards argued, “free trade is by definition win-win,” since both parties in the trade gain something that they consider valuable. According to the related “materialist myth,” wealth is redistributed rather than created. According to Richards, however, “human beings,” who are made in the image of God, “transform matter into resources, creating wealth.”