Salon, CK Smith, today: Texas mandates Bible readings and Christian-infused curriculum in public schools, subtitled “Education board decision fuels debate over where teaching about religion ends and religious instruction begins”
Texas has become the first state in the nation to require Bible passages as part of its statewide public school reading curriculum after the Republican-controlled State Board of Education approved sweeping new social studies standards Friday.
Proposed years ago, the vote on Friday affirmed the shift in Texas education standards statewide. The changes, approved on a 9-5 vote, will be phased into classrooms beginning with the 2030-31 school year and make biblical texts part of required reading for elementary and middle school students. Supporters say the curriculum recognizes the Bible’s historical, literary and cultural influence on the United States, while opponents argue the state is crossing a constitutional line by bringing religious instruction into public education.
The vote marks the latest in a series of Republican-backed efforts to expand the role of Christianity in Texas public schools, following measures requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms and allowing schools to employ chaplains.
and
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, today: Texas just made Bible reading mandatory in public schools, subtitled “From Noah’s Ark to the Book of Job, the State Board of Education approved a required reading list packed with Christian scripture”
On Friday, the Texas State Board of Education officially mandated Bible readings in public schools as part of a revised curriculum. The Republican-dominated board voted 9-5 to include Christian stories in a longer required reading list—while excluding stories from any other major religion that teach similar lessons.
It’s not a surprise that it happened, but it’s still disappointing.
While conservatives claim this isn’t about indoctrination, the message is clear: Texas thinks Christianity is the only religion that matters.
The article includes a list of which chapters or passages are to be taught at each grade level, from Noah’s Ark in the 1st grade, to the Beatitudes in the 7th grade, to Job in the 10th grade, and so on. Nothing about the Ten Commandments, since those are presumably up on the walls of Texas classrooms already.
As the articles note, there’s a case to be made for teaching stories from the Bible as literature, in the same way it would be appropriate to teach Aesop’s Fables and the Greek Myths. (In fact I did get the Greek myths in English class, the ODYSSEY and Edith Hamilton’s MYTHOLOGY, in the 8th or 9th grade.) And Shakespeare. And Gilgamesh. But cultural literacy is clearly not the aim here. It’s about Christian indoctrination.
(Also, which version of the Bible? I’m betting the lawmakers here have a preferred version.)
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Let’s look at this take on Disclosure Day by science fiction novelist and historian Adam Robert, on his Substack.
Substack-ships On Fire, Off The Shoulder Of Orion, Adam Roberts, today: ‘Disclosure Day’ (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2026), subtitled “Spiel, Bug-Eyed-Monster”
From the first paragraph:
There are moments in the film that are striking, beautiful and moving, and sequences that work well. But the whole is a mess, it’s too long and slow and the story makes no sense. The mystery with which the first forty-five minutes tries to hook the audience is a bust—we already know it’s aliens, so withholding the reveal that it’s aliens just drags the story (Spielberg could have cut 20 minutes from the film’s first half)—and the localised moments and emotionally piercing highlights are put in service of an overarching story that is bonkers, and that undermines itself with its final turns.
Next para. Cliches and a true believer.
In saying this I am not, actually, objecting to the way Disclosure Day embraces every single naff conspiracy-theory cliché of the Little Green Men discourse—Roswell was real! Crop circles are alien artefacts! Miniature grey skinned aliens with giant almond-shaped coalblack eyes take people, lie them on neon surgical beds in high-tech spaceships and experiment upon them! The government knows all this but is keeping it secret for nefarious reasons!—although of course this entails the danger that all cliché does, of sapping the representation of vividness and memorability. Spielberg cleaves to these clichés because he believes in them: believes, that is, that they speak to actual truth, in the world.
He echoes the criticism from others about how mass media would react to this “disclosure.” And how there a lot of car-crashes and “other gubbins” (A British term meaning bits and pieces, or odds and ends.)
Roberts then traces the plot in some detail. “A good deal of chasery.” He is irked that more is not made of the faith angle. His plot summary is filled with all its improbable notes. He refers to that weird alien device as a “Toblerone.” And so on. All the film’s presumptions do not bear close examination.
I am struck about what this movie indicates about the sloppiness of Spielberg’s thinking, and accepted sloppiness of Hollywood movies, and how those compare to rigorous literary SF. Such as what Adam Roberts write.
Almost last para:
I’m nitpicking to some degree, but in another sense these picks are much bigger than nits (giganits perhaps). Part of the problem is that the story needs the aliens to be two mutually-incompatible things. One of those things is that nasty, violent humanity has been torturing and suppressing mild, Christlike, empathetic alienkind (as per the footage of Colin Firth torturing one), which is to say the aliens are vulnerable, victims (like E.T.) The other load-bearing wall of the movie is that the aliens are godlike superpowers, so superior to us that we will worship them as gods,6 gifted with extraordinary, quasi-magical powers of mind-control, hyper-advanced tech, shapeshifters7 and wise sages. They can hardly be both of these things.
The problem with basing a story on UFO lore is that that lore is not consistent, or cohesive. True believers don’t care, or don’t notice.
There’s a nice anecdote from Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations at footnote 5.
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More gubbins.
- Media Matters, 25 Jun 2026: Dismal turnout for Trump’s “massive rally” mars Fox’s America 250 smear campaign
- JMG, today: Trump: Dems Will Kill You And Close Your Churches
- No they won’t. Trump is a paranoid, scare-mongering lunatic.
- JMG, today: Ralph Reed: Democrats “Tried To Kill” Trump But He Was Anointed By God To “Save Our Nation”
- No he wasn’t. This just tells me what a tribal dimwit you are. Once again: the support by evangelicals for Donald Trump, surely one of the most despicable persons on the planet, undermines any pretense they have as sources of morality.
