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St. John's College reading list is an extremely comprehensive list of Western literature.

http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/academic/readlist.shtml

No grade system? How about St John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland?

They do assign grades, but apparently noone pays any attention to them.

Yeah, I'm just a stupid athiest and stuff, but doesn't this make Jesus' sacrifice, well, worthless? I mean, if he were truly 'God,' as is claimed, then his sacrifice was really nothing. 'Sacrifice' means giving something up; what did Jesus give up, if all He did was go up to heaven to stand bside His Father, casting judgement and hell upon all who do not believe in Him?

Re: 'Sacrifice' means giving something up; what did Jesus give up...? The claim is that what he gave up was unity with his father. That is, the father and the son are one in spirit, but the Son suffers disunity with his father (that's the idea behind that whole "Why have you forsaken me?" (Psalm 22:1) (Matthew 27) quotation that Jesus recites while being crucified). Since the father is the source of all life (and good, and such), the son is made to suffer the pain of death in the form of disunity with the source of his life.

Re: "...if all He did was go up to heaven to stand bside His Father..." The idea behind this is that if his death had been just, then it would have been the final word on the matter, but since his death was by his own choice as an act of mercy (a death by proxy for people who had sinned), it wasn't un-just to overturn the sentence (as it would be for someone who justly deserved death). Note that that doesn't un-do the sentence, it just ends it -- as if you pardoned someone who was on death row that you found out wasn't guilty of the crime... they still served the time, they just didn't have to serve it "forever."

Re: "...casting judgement and hell upon all who do not believe in Him..." Hell isn't actually related to the judgement (I know that's an odd sounding claim, but the bit that describes the whole hell thing is pretty unambiguous (Rev. 20:12-15):

(12)And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. (13)The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what he had done. (14)Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. (15)If anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

Notice that everyone is judged -- people who do believe in him and people who don't. Also notice (in 15) that the criterion for "the lake of fire" is whether one's name is written in "the book of life" which is a way of saying something like "Jesus's little black book." The one set of books is what you've done, the other book is whether you believed in him. So you can be a rat-bastardly Christian or a most excellent non-Christian and that's not relevant to the whole life/death bit. (Though the claim is you won't find a single person besides Jesus who hasn't ever given in to any temptation ... some people will ask about babies and retarded kids and such at this point. I don't know how that works, but I would generally respond that the picture that we tend to see (Old Testament and New Testament) is that God prefers mercy to just

This is BS. There are plenty of one dimensional people in the world and many have a primary and fairly exclusive interest in the sciences - or more accurately, one fairly small area of the sciences.

I think there are two problems here: One, social sciences tend to use scientific techniques at higher levels. So, if all you ever have taken is Political Science 101, then you probably do not realize that the statistical and more scientific techniques required at graduate levels very much requires an interest in science. Don't judge a field based on your limited experience with it.

Two, science is hampered by its focus on technique. The concepts of most sciences could be taught without requiring all the background such as a degree of proficiency in calculus, preliminary courses, and so forth. Humanities structures their undergraduate courses for exposure. Most of the science curriculum is not set-up that way; it is set-up as a trade school.

These days, you almost have to go somewhere like St. John's to get a science curriculum that is integrated and approached as part of the liberal education. The problem lies more with the way that curriculum is structured and the unnecessary elitism of the sciences.

As a side note, ever notice who has the nicer facilities? Where I went to graduate school, the science/engineering part of campus was beautiful. The facilities for social science less so. Pure humanities? The facilities are a dump.

Ever think that the reason the science curriculum is set-up the way it is might be because industry is footing the bills? They want people graduating and filling science jobs. Industry does not care about a liberally educated populace. They care about getting a labor pool to draw from.

If industry is footing the bills, where do you think the university adminstration is going to come down when an question comes up (such as the structure of a science curriculum) where the needs of a liberal education run counter to the needs of creating science specialists? Who wins that battle do you think? Might this be the reason for the lack of exposure of educated people to the sciences?

BEGIN aside

I'm glad you got the Air Force story from CSPAN instead of CNN. I listen to a lot of CSPAN radio because it's a lot of raw data instead of opinion.

Dude the messenger doesn't change the facts and the fact is on the outskirts of Washington, there is a new College founded in 2000 that its exclusively for home schooled Christians being groomed for leadership positions in the New Washington.

Sources matter; that's why I jumped on the New Yorker article. The New Yorker is not, and does not pretend to be, a magazine of record. It is an opinion mag. As such, any article in it is going to present only those facts that bolster the case of the op-ed writer.

Fact: Patrick Henry College is outside of Washington D.C.

Context: About 100 colleges are in or outside of Washington D.C.

Fact: Patrick Henry College accepts mostly home-schoolers.

Context: Patrick Henry College uses a model of education called "Classical Education", similar to St. John's College. The largest group of "classically" trained students happens to be home-schoolers.

Fact: PHC states that its mission is to train "Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding."

Context: there are all sorts of public policy schools out there. The Woodrow Wilson school at Princeton comes to mind. Googling for "public policy school" gives another 20 examples.

When you put those facts in context, it turns out that PHC (of which I'm no particular fan) is simply one more of the multitude of voices in America. It is by no means some kind of "Dumbledore's Army" (if you happen to have read Harry Potter).

END aside

Your post brings us back to the main point: Is the "Christian Right" parallel to the Taliban?

You say Yes, and argue that the Christian Right wants to force others to accept their point of view, which is a religious one; so do the Taliban; therefore, the two are parallel.

I say No. Wanting to implement one's point of view is inherent and legitimate within a democratic society.

Consider: The environmental lobby has an agenda. They want cars and power plants to stop polluting the atmosphere. They want to stop or slow urban sprawl so that habitats will be preserved. That agenda affects the rest of us. It lowers our property values; it restricts our freedom to use our own property the way that we want. It can even make us liable, after the fact, for industrial waste cleanup on chemicals that were government-approved at the time of release. All manner of seeming injustices are proposed by environmentalists.

But wait ... it's worse. Some environmentalists are "eco-terrorists", who maliciously harm others and wreck equipment in order to save spotted owls. AND, environmentalists EVEN HAVE THEIR OWN AGENCY IN THE GOVERNMENT -- the EPA. Furthermore, some environmentalists go so far as to worship "Gaia", Mother Earth.

So are the environmentalists just like the Taliban?

Nonsense. They are people with an agenda who operate, by-and-large, within the framework of a democratic society. They are a legitimate voice in our society.

So it is with the Christian Right. They have an agenda, absolutely. Much of that agenda is fueled by their religious beliefs. But, they pursue that agenda within the context of a democratic society. When American Christians lose elections, they do the same thing all other Americans do: they wait for the next election and plan to win. They use the legislative and judicial processes, as convoluted as those are, to accomplish their agenda. When ruled against by the Supreme Court, they abide by the Court's decision, by-and-large, and try to do what all other Americans do: bring the Court around to their own point of view. That's not some "co

There is at least one place that approximates teaching Western mathematics as it was developed, St. John's College. The students read, discuss, and work through the original texts, including the Principia. Four years of mathematics is part of the compulsory program. Here is a brief description of that part:
The Mathematics Tutorial

If our schoolchildren were forced to read some of the classics, I wonder how different things might be in America today.

I'm not so sure. I'm a student at St. John's College, where the sophmores just got done reading Plutarch's Cato the Younger, Caesar, Antony, and Brutus.

In the Seminar discussions that followed, I was amazed by how many students, who claim to hate tyranny, given their fairly extreme views on Bush, but were quite the fans of both Caesar and Antony, and against Cato and Brutus. It was mind-boggling. I and one other of my classmates were basically the only ones defending the defenders of the Roman Republic.