(BTW, I seriously doubt a preschooler is going to be indoctrinated with anything more than Veggie-Tales).

Be very careful with a statement like that. I’m being very serious when I ask…do you know who is behind and runs the Veggie-Tales franchise? If you don’t know, you better look into it real quick.

Hint: He’s a very well-known Televangelist and probably not too popular among regular readers of this site or of free-thinking individuals. (initials JF)

Nobody who has done even basic research on Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin (to name two key founding fathers) could reasonably call either of them Christian.

I don’t recall any references to Christian principles in the Constitution. It’s been a while since I went through ti, so I could be forgetting something key here, but the constitution is a framework of government and doesn’t really address principle values at all. It dictates how the government is to be formed, how it is to be operated, and the roles of its various parts. The Bill of Rights was added on later to make explicit what rights are not granted to the government, and what rights are guaranteed to the people- still no Christian principles.

There are no provisions against theft, murder, or bearing false wittiness in the Constitution or Bill of Rights, which are all principles that predate Christianity and even Judaism by thousands of years anyway.

You can say merry christmas to atheists, wiccans, naturists, or anyone, it’s not offensive or bothersome. It’s a secular holiday based upon religious and cultural history.

Saying this country was founded on christian principles is a little bit of a misnomer, it sounds like you are implying that these rights and morals we have didn’t exist before christianity. There is more on this, but you can look that up fro yourself if you really want to know what our founding principles are, if you don’t , you wouldn’t listen to me anyway.

Also, “…endowed by their creator”. Yes, it’s in there, but creator is never defined. I assume you are assuming it means the christian god, but it could mean Allah, Jehovah, any god or pantheon out of the many mythologies that people believe, fsm, primordial ooze, or just nature itself.

USA. not a christian nation.

At least in this instance, more like “Uptight Uninformed Mom . . .”

I send my kid to a religious school and they teach him religion. How dare they. Next we’ll see, I sent my kids to Vacation Bible School and they talked about the Bible and not vacations.

Here was the perfect opportunity to tell your kids why you accept the big bang for the origin of the universe and you complain about the teacher.

Bottom Line: If you have kids and can even be bothered to check out the curriculum, whether a private or public school, you have no business having kids.

P.S. I checked out online my local Lutheran church that offers Pre-K classes and guess what, they clearly state that religion is part of the curriculum. I never would have guessed that.

If you are going to send your child to a preschool run by a religious organization, you need to find out up front what type of dogma you can expect to be presented to your child. The preschool isn’t at fault here unless they are violating an explicit policy against religious indoctrination. They have a right to run their preschool how they want to unless they receive public funds to support their preschool activities.

I wouldn’t worry about pulling the kid out of the school, though. That’s an age where many children still believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, and most of us manage to put that indoctrination behind us. Besides, his reaction shows his parents got him off on a good foot anyway. (I suppose it would be too much to ask for a preschooler to grill the teacher on what kind of scientific support she has for her position, but wouldn’t it be funny if he had?)

I went to a Christian run preschool, and attended Lutheran schools from Kindergarten trough my senior year of high school, and I still managed to end up an atheist, so there’s always hope.

OTOH, I went to parochial kindergarten and a few years of grade school and the experience taught me a lot about irrationality, superstition, abuse of authority, and misogeny along with penmanship, phonics, math, and art appreciation. It doesn’t take much parental intervention to encourage a child to develop a rational perspective.

one of the highest-rated preschools in the area, that just happens to be at a Lutheran church in the bible belt

which makes me think it may be the latter. Several preschools in this area are run at churches, including the one my older kids went to, and the one my youngest still attends, yet they simply rent the building during the day when the church is otherwise unoccupied.
So, if it’s run _by_ the church, I’d have to side with the “you knew it was a religious-affiliated school when you signed him up”. But, if it’s simply run _at_ the church, I’d start asking about the school’s policy on this before taking any further steps.

This is why there needs to be entrance exams for parenting.

God for you, Phil, that you withdrew your comment. It was flawed in its logic to begin with.

As to a “Young Earth” philosophy, other posters are 100% correct that this should be an issue of a different sort if it’s being taught in a Lutheran school. While all of the Lutheran synods are creationist (not unlike pretty much all of the mainline and evangelical churches in America), neither the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, or Evangelical Lutheran Church in America subscribes to “Young Earth” doctrine, and they should be concerned if one of their teachers was teaching it.

To give you a flavor, there is a rather famous incident with a reporter and a former leader of what is now the ELCA, which is considered the most liberal of the three. When asked by the reporter if Lutherans believed they followed the one true faith, he responded by saying, “Of course! We also believe we’re not the only ones who do.” Granted, among other things, the WELS and LCMS follow a “closed table” doctrine in their communion service (the ELCA practices open communion), so there are some notable differences between them.

The only time a faith based private school would run into trouble teaching religious doctrine is if the school also receives (IIRC) a certain threshold of US federal funding. That combination is a definite no-no.

By the way, this nation may not be explicitly Christian, but it was most certainly founded upon Christian principles. The evidence supporting this is plentiful in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The primary arguments for independence were based on a combination of unfair taxation and religious freedom – as in the freedom to practice your faith, or lack thereof, without persecution by the government. The basis that man has certain rights which can not legally be taken away by government are explicitly justified through the notion that these rights were given by “our Creator” (aka that “fantasy myth” God many skeptics and atheists talk about so viciously, and to which any faith in it they attack as brain washing).

Indeed, not everything about religion is bad.

You can find specific Lutheran statements of faith and doctrine at the websites of all three:
http://www.lcms.org
http://www.wels.net
http://www.elca.org

By the way: Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to these believers! And Merry …um… whatever “warm, fuzzy, Winter Solstice oriented reason to shop, spread cheer, etc.” to everyone else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutheran_Church_-_Missouri_Synod#Creation

>>The LCMS is officially creationist. According to the recent
>>2004 LCMS synodical resolution 2-08A “To Commend
>>Preaching and Teaching Creation,” all LCMS churches and
>>educational institutions—including preschool through 12th
>>grade, universities, and seminaries—are “to teach creation
>>from the Biblical perspective.”

Where I live, the ONLY (yes ONLY) decent preschools are theistic — the secular ones are crap. I’d have done the same thing she did.

I think the best option here is to just gut it out for the rest of the school year, and within a year of starting public school in the fall, with proper guidance from the parents, it will all be forgotten. Having a conversation with the teacher (even if it weren’t any of the humorous examples presented by the author) probably won’t get anywhere except “outing” the kid as a child of an atheist… and perhaps subjecting him to EXTRA proselytizing from the minister’s wife.

“I’m shocked, shocked to find that there is religion going on here!”

As far as the religious indoctrination at a religious preschool, what did she expect? If that was going to be a problem, it should have been a selection criterion that ruled that school out initially.

“There may be a limited choice of schools”

Do parents not think of this before having the child? I would and a whole lot more.

* Actually, I’m posting from that household right now. Home for the holidays!

“I’m with Thomas on this one–why is a “rationalist” sending her child to a religious-based school, and then shocked when the child comes home with some religious based ideas?

Best thing is to talk w/teacher and head of school about it. But it may be a great way for the child to be exposed to other viewpoints. If it is truly a problem, go somewhere else.”

Couldn’t agree more. I went to an Australian public school (that was awful) and ended up in a private Methodist school by the age of 10. I’m Jewish. As part of the school curriculum, I had to sit in chapel services once a fortnight. Religious ed. classes was mainly about Christianity, but the school had enough sense to discuss other religions too. The experience didn’t hurt me, and I had a great number of interesting and open discussions with the RE teachers; the school also had a diverse background. One of my best friends was a practicing Sikh, many others were Christians of differing beliefs, some were Jewish, etc etc. We were there because the school had a good track record of high marks and discipline; not because of the religious doctrine.

If you put your kid in a religious school, then why be upset when they teach religion? Better to take the kid to another school that better suits your belief system. But then, in Australia, we have less ‘craziness’ about this stuff than in the US.

Oh, and I’ve made this point before and I’ll make it again. Exposing kids to a little bit of religion, faith, and values in the context of a school never hurt anyone. Maybe the mom should relax a little. The kid’s not going to come home and start speaking in tongues (any more than a toddler already does).

For Pete’s sake. I thought the religious fundamentalists were uptight.

I’m forced to wonder why a rationalist would choose to send their child to a church preschool in the first place but I’m not a parent so I’m sure that there are issues here that I am not prepared to address.

Like slang, my wife and I chose to send our son to a religious preschool because it was far superior to the other options. It went up through Kindergarten and we most likely would’ve kept him there if they offered 1st grade. (Our son is currently in 2nd grade.) Just because something is religious doesn’t means it’s bad.