The late Michael Crichton wrote "Airframe" to warn people that one of the dangers of a free press is that uninformed opinion can get the same air time as informed opinion, making foolishness seem credible.While neither he nor I would advocate a censured press, this weakness of a free press needs to be admitted and watched for. A recent example of uninformed opinion masquerading as solid information was Andrew Bergland's front page coverage of the decision by the board of School District 59 to allow the Gideons International to distribute Bibles to Grade 5 students (March 25, 2010).Bergland's article belonged in the editorial section, not the front page. He was not giving an objective report of the school board's nearly unanimous decision, but presented a derisive lampooning of the decision using sarcasm and selective coverage. The only person who was given space to comment on the decision was the one dissenting voice.There is an attempt in Canada by many politicians, academics and the media to deny the Christian foundation and consensus of Canada. This has been done without any mandate from the people and in violation of the principles of Confederation. The founding fathers declared their allegiance to the Christian faith by giving their new country the name, The Dominion of Canada, a title derived from the Psalms acknowledging God's reign:"He shall have dominion also from sea to sea." (Psalm 72:8)The inconsistency in our modern culture is seen by the fact that we try to ban the Bible, but take mandatory Christian school holidays Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving.But the question remains: What does the Holy Bible have to do with B.C.'s educational mandate? The last time I checked, there were precious few guiding principles left for B.C. curricula, but the ones that did remain were to inculcate the highest morality in the students and to teach them critical thinking. The Bible has been the historic foundation for both of those guidelines in our western civilization for nearly two millennia. It is the foundation of British Common Law, which protected such rights as "innocent until proven guilty" and most other underpinnings of a just and free society that I do not have time to go into here. These rights were guaranteed because God revealed them in the Holy Bible. They benefit all peoples Jew, Gentile, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, etc. That is why Christian countries are so attractive to immigrate to. What does the Bible have to do with education? Winston Churchill, while acknowledging the Jewish origin of the Bible, said it best:"We owe to the Jews in the Christian revelation a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith, there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization"This wandering tribe, in many respects indistinguishable from numberless nomadic communities, grasped and proclaimed an idea of which all the genius of Greece and all the power of Rome were incapable." (Source: Winston Churchill and the Jews).The declining influence of the Bible does not then bode well for our educational system or our country. The Daily News included an obviously fabricated picture of a student hiding a Bible behind his geometry textbook. May God have mercy on our country if the Bible has to be hidden in our schools like a pornographic magazine.
Editor's Note: The photo in reference was a photo illustration, as credited in the byline, created as a common device ued in print media.
