Did you know public schools “promote a culture of immorality and death”? That public school students are more likely “to engage in sex and perversions,” “get an STD” and “commit suicide”? Or more to the point, did you realize that putting your children in public schools means they are “more likely to go to HELL”?
That’s what we learned today from an e-mail screed sent out by the Christian Newswire from the people at www.asleepknowmore.com, a religious-right website that attacks public education and abortion and promotes gun rights under the Second Amendment. (Yeah, we know. Weird mix, but it’s common for the increasingly violence-obsessed religious right.) But as we researched that website, we came up with another question: why does David Barton of WallBuilders in Texas associate with the extremists who run it?
There’s more on the Barton connection below. But today’s e-mail, written by Dr. Gregory Thompsom, is titled: “Are You Going to HELL and Taking Someone with You?” An excerpt:
“The government schools are anti-Christian, atheistic and pagan, and they are against God, family, and country. Do not call yourself ‘Christian’ saying you love the children, yet have children in a government school, k-12 through college. Christian priests, pastors, and bishops hate their congregations if they do not warn their people to get out of the government schools. Pastor, you must help the parents with this issue of education. Jesus said ‘love your neighbor as yourself’. If you do not tell your neighbors to get their children out of the government schools, you hate them instead of love them. To know this truth, and not do anything about it in your area of influence is sin. James 4:17 – ‘Therefore to him that knows to do good and does it not, to him it is sin.’ If Church or Government leaders say otherwise, it is a lie from hell.”
That’s followed by a list of “facts” about why public education apparently is a threat to America and our children. (A full version of the e-mail is after the jump.) But who is Thompson? Hard to say. The website isn’t clear on who he is or what he does. We did, however, find an interesting photo of Thompson (right) with Barton (left) on the site:
As you know, the State Board of Education appointed Barton last year to help revise social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools. But does Barton agree with Thompson about the evils of public education and other extremism found on Thompson’s website? Let’s not forget that this isn’t the first time Barton has associated with political extremists. In 1991 Barton spoke at two events sponsored by groups with ties to white supremacists. He later claimed that he had not known the groups were “part a Nazi movement.”
Barton sure gets around, doesn’t he? But is he someone most parents would really want helping write curriculum standards for their children’s public schools?
Here’s the rest of Thompson’s e-mail today:
Are You Going to HELL and Taking Someone with You
OPINION, April 20 /Christian Newswire/ — The following opinion is submitted by Dr. Gregory Thompson:
The government schools are anti-Christian, atheistic and pagan, and they are against God, family, and country. Do not call yourself “Christian” saying you love the children, yet have children in a government school, k-12 through college. Christian priests, pastors, and bishops hate their congregations if they do not warn their people to get out of the government schools. Pastor, you must help the parents with this issue of education. Jesus said “love your neighbor as yourself”. If you do not tell your neighbors to get their children out of the government schools, you hate them instead of love them. To know this truth, and not do anything about it in your area of influence is sin. James 4:17 – “Therefore to him that knows to do good and does it not, to him it is sin.” If Church or Government leaders say otherwise, it is a lie from hell.
My name is Dr. Gregory Thompson, I have been a teacher, coach, Athletic Director, Principal, Superintendent, School Board member, on state committees, and am warning you that the “Sacred Cow of Government Education” is harming the children now and for eternity. Many are trusting and ignorant, some are willfully ignorant, and many just don’t know what to do.
Facts:
· Government Education helps promote a culture of immorality and death.
· We could not give your child an aspirin without calling you, yet your grandchildren could be murdered without you knowing it.
· your children will receive a much poorer education than is possible
· your children will be more likely to engage in sex and perversions.
· your children will be more likely to be indoctrinated in Sodomy/homosexuality and encouraged to experience it in Government schools
· your children will be more likely to be raped & molested
· your children will be more likely to be bullied
· your children will be more likely to be taught lies
· your children will be more likely to get an STD
· your daughters will be more likely to become pregnant.
· your children will be more likely to become selfish
· your children will be more likely to become rebellious
· your children will be more likely to kill their pre-born child, your grandchild.
· Because of some of these things your children will be more likely to commit suicide
· Worst of all, your children will be more likely to go to HELL!
Do you love the children? I will give you my book free. Please do not be willfully ignorant! “Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy”. I ask only that you help with the cost of S&H. This book bears witness to the truth and can cause strong reactions. Email: [email protected]. God bless.
Jesus says “Not every one that says unto Me, ‘Lord, Lord’, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that does the will of My Father which is in heaven” Matt. 7:21
www.asleepknowmore.com
Are you going to Hell and taking someone with you???
He obviously gots himself a gooder edducation than what them Government Education schools can be doing.
Dr. Gregory Thompson on radio and television | Independent Political Report – http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2008/08/dr-gregory-thompson-on-radio-and-television/
“Gregory Thompson [was] the Constitution Party of Missouri candidate for governor.”
Obviously, he doesn’t know “fact” versus “opinion”.
I’m concerned for his children. Send them to my house, they’ll get themselves educated.
Jesus wept over Jerusalem, and probably over followers like this guy.
Of course, the good people at Christian Newswire would no doubt tell us that Jesus would never weep – that it’s some kind of mistranslation and liberal lie, because their Jesus is a godly manly-man, not some homo-loving, long-haired sissy with a public school education.
I think that was the Constipation pooty of Mo.
He didn’t say anything about “precious bodily fluids”. He ain’t ol’timey enough for me.
“Did you know public schools “promote a culture of immorality and death”?
Yes, it’s called a math quiz.
Just when I thought the religious Right couldn’t get any freakin’ weirder….
David, what kind of donations are accepted by the Constipation Pooty?
Nonono, nevermind. I doubt they’d let you post that kind of stuff here.
I wonder where he found these “facts.” A survey a couple of years ago found the “religious” right about the same as the general population on pre-marital sex. The right did view more a bit more porn and get divorced more often. The so-called religious right were found to be more racist and about the same for spousal abuse as the general population. A look at the book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World? would make you think that that sending your kids to a so-called religious school would be child abuse. I would like to see statistics from a reliable source comparing rape, STDs, suicides and other behaviors between public and religious schools properly adjusted for income and other factors.
Why don’t these people take on the real culprit? Advertising. All the mixed, warped messages are generated by the business class looking to sell. To combat such a nebulous foe that is seemingly everywhere, kids would have to be able to analyze how messages are constructed and what they really mean. And, yes, that puts it squarely back into an educational framework. Schools are the primary way kids are socialized in preparation for the larger world arena. They will be held in magical la la land if they don’t learn to decipher advertising. I suspect public schools are decried as the number one enemy because they are institutions; they attempt to teach independent thought; and they are secular. Thompson’s harangue above makes it obvious that public schools are viewed as their largest competitor for access to a child’s moral character.
The schools are not the secular arena that is the most erosive; it’s the sublimated and manipulative messages designed by ad execs and psychologists that have adults and kids, Christians and non-Christians, dazed and confused. Advertising seeps into everything (look for military recruiting magnets in the high school counselor’s office). It’s a suggestion that will not be acted upon because it takes a great deal of thinking and analysis to combat the harmful and myriad forms of magical thinking. Easier to look for an institutional enemy.
Trog, I wondered if they’d allow what I wrote. But I couldn’t control myself. Sometimes I go on these punning binges. Especially when confronted with manifest absurdity and folly.
There used to be a rule about using the Lord’s name in vain. Like misusing it for Orwellian political ends.
What we should all be concerned with is television. The national attention span has declined as electronic media has flourished, and the manipulation of masses of people based on instinctive, animal stimulation has eroded the country’s humanity.
We are becoming a country of illiterates , and the bad effect of tv et al outweighs the good.
Liberal Hollywood is as much to blame as the NRA crowd for the rampant and senseless gun-worship.
A nation of illiterate, emotionally manipulated drones with a microbial level of knee-jerk stimulus-response is definitely Hell on Earth.
But the Puppetmasters that pull this guy’s and other evangelicals strings are determined to distract us from the truth of the situation, and toward a solution of the problem that doesn’t involve forced adherence to backward pseudo-Christian doctrine.
It’s really a shame that someone this stupid is so dangerous. We ought to be better than that.
Yossarian, in other words, I agree completely.
IMHO, Dr. Thompson is just another fear-mongering Theocracy Thug. Whatever happened to the loving message of Jesus Christ?
David…and Rocket Mike, “Oh Thank Heaven for 7-11”
$50 liter of milk, lottery tickets, day old Krispy Kremes.
Yossarian:
There is a good reason they do not take them on. Most of these two-bit advertising, business, Wall Street banker bas*&%$s are sitting in the church pews, serving on the church board, and paying the pastor’s salary. In a Southern Baptist or fundamentalist church where congregations decide by vote on who their pastors will be—not some distant and detached bishop like in my church—the pastors know to tow the line or lose his job. Do a sermon on abortion or gay marriage and be safe because these business weasels in the pews care not a twit about those issues. Do a sermon on corporate greed or being kind and fair with your employees down at the plant—and the preacher is as good as a dead man. Most know that.
That’s my thought on it. Dr. Bruce Prescott has called me too cynical when have made such statements in the past. I am sure a few preachers would be brave enough–like Bruce—but I would bet my last nickel that most would shy away from it, and that is really sad.
Charles, I don’t have too much experience with Baptist sermonizing, not to be confused with Simonizing, though both have had accusations of fraud directed at them. I do have memories of Catholic schools and Masses, and I was a bit confused when I first learned that the church hierarchy was much more conservative and intolerant than the priests and nuns I’d grown up with. ( Dour old Sister Mary Agnes notwithstanding. I wasn’t even in her class and she made me clean the chalkboard and erasers. Sheesh. )
The ever-consuming chase after the almighty dollar seems to be one reason for the divergence. I’m sure there are other, more controlling concerns as well, but, just as our representative government is going off the rails due to the magnetic pull of cash, those more interested in securing power decide who is worthy in our pay-to-play brave old/new world.
What’s interesting about this is that just about every expert agrees that communism failed because it was ideologically inflexible.
State your reasoning for being so anti-religious? Are you a Christian, Atheist, Agnostic, Deist? Where do you stand?
We’re not anti-religious, Charley. We’re anti-extremist.
I’ll repeat. This is all about politics. Doesn’t really have to do with religion at all, except for the fact that some people have hijacked a religion for political purposes and have distorted it’s message completely.