As we've mentioned now and then, our 10th-grade homeschooling textbook, World History and Cultures In Christian Perspective, is very much a product of the Reagan era; even though its most recent version was published in 2010, it maintains the aggrieved tone of the Moral Majority types who helped Reagan come to power.
Then your friends got suckered. The 90s case was an April fools joke; see <a href="http:\/\/www.snopes.com\/religion\/pi.asp" target="_blank">snopes</a>. There are persistent claims that Christianists somewhere got, or almost got, a law passed fixing pi as 3, but it&#039;s never happened. The closest was the <a href="http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Indiana_Pi_Bill" target="_blank">Indiana Pi Bill</a>, which wasn&#039;t religiously inspired, and didn&#039;t actually specify a value for pi. It was so incoherent that it implied several different wrong values for pi, none of which was 3.
Incidentally, &quot;the bible says pi is 3&quot; is a really lousy anti-biblical argument. The thing being described in 1 Kings 7:23 and 2 Chronicles 4:2 was &quot;a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other ... a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.&quot; They should have written &quot;a line of thirty-one and a bit cubits&quot;? Thirty is good enough for government work. Oddly, believers have expended a fair amount of effort trying to prove the bible is exactly right without claiming pi is 3. The most popular argument goes back to <a href="http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rabbi_Nehemiah" target="_blank">Rabbi Nehemiah</a>.
I &quot;contributed&quot; to Conservapedia for a few months, until I was spotted, banned, and had all my edits reverted. I was quite proud of my article on Gabriel&#039;s Horn, which I claimed had a volume of 3 cubic cubits. They&#039;re very fond of the banhammer over there, but given the known parodists who&#039;ve infested the site, they probably still have a few.
Yeah, my somewhat deranged uncle tried explaining that to me once, but he prefaced the explanation with &quot;Reagan was a genius&quot; so I kind of tuned him out after that.
Out of curiosity, I got hold of one (Bob Jones U, rather than A Beka; &quot;Precalculus for Christian Schools&quot;). The main text is rather boringly straightforward, but the sections on Math and Scripture have some nice snippets of wackiness. Here are a couple of exercises (both with the heading &quot;Maximizing&quot;, for some reason).
Quote the words of Christ to show that it is impossible to do mathematics without Him.
Give a Bible verse to prove that no field of knowledge can have another foundation for truth other than Christ.
Here&#039;s another fun exercise:
How does Romans 1 describe the describe the ungodly approach to math?
I have no idea how the poor student is supposed to answer that. I&#039;ve just read through Romans 1 (it&#039;s only 32 verses). There is a lot of fulminating against the ungodly, particularly gay men and women who &quot;did change the natural use into that which is against nature&quot;, but not a single thing I can connect to mathematics. Maybe the KJV left out the bit about unnaturally trisecting angles.
I wonder if the authors of these books know that the words &quot;Communism&quot; and &quot;Community&quot; have the same origin. I think they suspect &quot;compassion&quot; of guilt by association.
It was one of those socialist, European Airbuses, so a valid target.
Dobbs help me I did.
Then your friends got suckered. The 90s case was an April fools joke; see <a href="http:\/\/www.snopes.com\/religion\/pi.asp" target="_blank">snopes</a>. There are persistent claims that Christianists somewhere got, or almost got, a law passed fixing pi as 3, but it&#039;s never happened. The closest was the <a href="http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Indiana_Pi_Bill" target="_blank">Indiana Pi Bill</a>, which wasn&#039;t religiously inspired, and didn&#039;t actually specify a value for pi. It was so incoherent that it implied several different wrong values for pi, none of which was 3.
Incidentally, &quot;the bible says pi is 3&quot; is a really lousy anti-biblical argument. The thing being described in 1 Kings 7:23 and 2 Chronicles 4:2 was &quot;a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other ... a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.&quot; They should have written &quot;a line of thirty-one and a bit cubits&quot;? Thirty is good enough for government work. Oddly, believers have expended a fair amount of effort trying to prove the bible is exactly right without claiming pi is 3. The most popular argument goes back to <a href="http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rabbi_Nehemiah" target="_blank">Rabbi Nehemiah</a>.
I&#039;m not comfortable talking about King Solomon&#039;s unit.
Alternation of generations!
Hands off, King Solomon&#039;s mine!
OMG! My worries are over with!!!
I &quot;contributed&quot; to Conservapedia for a few months, until I was spotted, banned, and had all my edits reverted. I was quite proud of my article on Gabriel&#039;s Horn, which I claimed had a volume of 3 cubic cubits. They&#039;re very fond of the banhammer over there, but given the known parodists who&#039;ve infested the site, they probably still have a few.
Yeah, my somewhat deranged uncle tried explaining that to me once, but he prefaced the explanation with &quot;Reagan was a genius&quot; so I kind of tuned him out after that.
Of course, they could just call it Math for Dummies.
No mention of that Polish guy - SAINT POPE?
Missing from this fine story: and animated GIF of Reagan smacking Angie Dickenson. Here&#039;s a clip from &quot;The Killers.&quot; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/wat..." target="_blank">" rel="nofollow noopener" title="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af0Yei2sAbE">https://www.youtube.com/wat...
Out of curiosity, I got hold of one (Bob Jones U, rather than A Beka; &quot;Precalculus for Christian Schools&quot;). The main text is rather boringly straightforward, but the sections on Math and Scripture have some nice snippets of wackiness. Here are a couple of exercises (both with the heading &quot;Maximizing&quot;, for some reason).
Quote the words of Christ to show that it is impossible to do mathematics without Him.
Give a Bible verse to prove that no field of knowledge can have another foundation for truth other than Christ.
Here&#039;s another fun exercise:
How does Romans 1 describe the describe the ungodly approach to math?
I have no idea how the poor student is supposed to answer that. I&#039;ve just read through Romans 1 (it&#039;s only 32 verses). There is a lot of fulminating against the ungodly, particularly gay men and women who &quot;did change the natural use into that which is against nature&quot;, but not a single thing I can connect to mathematics. Maybe the KJV left out the bit about unnaturally trisecting angles.
I wonder if the authors of these books know that the words &quot;Communism&quot; and &quot;Community&quot; have the same origin. I think they suspect &quot;compassion&quot; of guilt by association.
To keep to their biblical principles, they should use abacuses (abaci?) rather than calculators.
I dunno...so far it seems pretty obscene.