Proposal to solve a problem

November 14, 2008

The title of the essay that I read was The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong.  The author is Bill McKibben. In the essay, McKibben talks about how most our supposedly “christian nation” knows nothing of the religion and beliefs within that religion. He gives examples and statistics to support this.

I came up with the problem that I wish to address because of how McKibben talks about america not being into christianity as a bad thing. While I believe that people should have a general knowledge (at least) of all religions, just to not be ignorant, I do not necessarily believe that a deep knowledge of Christianity should be expected of americans. People should not be expected to know about Christianity just because that was the belief of our forefathers. I understand and agree that it was important in the development of our country and I believe that we should observe these beliefs. America, though, is all about freedom. People should be free to believe what they want and should not be expected to know everything about a religion that they do not care about or believe in. We must be careful not to be ignorant about these things. 

My solution is not completely developed as of yet. In a perfect world, my solution would be to require a religions class in high school. Part of that solution would be that it is taught in a purely informational way, not in a persuasive or biased way. I think the information and history of the religions should just be laid out and students would be able to take from it what they wanted. In the world we live in today, some teacher or some student would ruin it by being biased.

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One Response to “Proposal to solve a problem”

  1. Jeff Paschke-Johannes said

    The problem McKibben addresses is that the American public doesn’t know enough about Christianity. What problem will you address, that the American public is instead ignorant of religion in general? How does this ignorance negatively affect us? How will your solution benefit us?

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