Moses was not a historic character and did not influence the formation of American government. The United States is not a Christian country, and our Constitution is not in any sense founded on the Ten Commandments. Yet all these lies are on the books being spread throughout our public schools.
McGraw-Hill was called out by the family of a Texas high school student because their new geography textbook referred to African slaves as ‘workers’. That was one of the changes made at the behest of the Texas State Board of Education, and it was one of the many changes that were protested by witnesses before the board. My wife and I testified too on that day. Lilandra’s complaint mirrored that of the family criticizing McGraw-Hill. The mother of that high school student complained, as my wife did too, about how even well-respected publishers bowed to Texas’ demands to insert false or misleading information, to minimize, or downplay issues of civil rights and ethnicity -despite all their degreed consultants, advisers, and reviewers. My wife and I are both disappointed that major publishers had no more integrity than that.
I complained about a couple references to Biblical stories as if they were historical events that really happened. For example, one textbook referred to North Africans as being descended from Ham, son of Noah. There was never any Hamitic race! Noah never existed. We know for certain and can prove that the legend of a global flood is an exaggeration of elder legends coming from the ancestors of the Biblical authors dating to the 3rd millennia BCE.
I also complained that Moses was depicted as a real person, supposedly born in the 13th century BCE, even though those who believed in him cannot agree when he should have lived. There is also now an archaeological consensus that the stories about Moses are just that, stories, a compilation of adapted fables originally attributed to Sargon, Snefru, and Hammurabi among others. There is no indication that Moses was ever a real person. More importantly there is no determinable connection between the mythology associated with Moses and the formation of the American legal system of governance.
I agree that it was inappropriate to refer to African slaves as ‘workers’ -even though the cited paragraph said they were talking about the Atlantic Slave trade, and it was clear that the workers were slaves. I think it is also inappropriate to refer to Moses as if he actually existed, especially when they assert that he lived in a particular century as if that had any scholarly support, which it doesn’t. It is also wholly erroneous to assert that the roots of Democracy could be traced to Moses or Solomon, the way our textbooks now say. There is no hint of Democracy in any of the fables of the Old Testament, quite the opposite in fact. We owe more to the vikings for our system of trial by jury than anything in the Bible.
Each of the laws listed in the collection commonly and erroneously referred to as ‘The Ten Commandments’ were either already universal ordinances everywhere, adapted from Hammurabi’s stele of law from centuries earlier, or have no parallel in American jurisprudence. The laws of Moses are NOT our laws! The founding fathers made clear who their influences really were, and that their goal was a system of government directly opposed to everything Mosaic law or governance represented. To say that the Constitution was in any way inspired by any covenant between God and Moses is no less a lie than to say that America was founded on Biblical principles -which our textbooks also say. There is no truth in either of these statements. They were inserted to revise our history according to an overt agenda to instill and perpetuate conservative Christian authority. This is a major front of the fundamentalist Christian “culture wars” against honest, factual reality. There is no defense of these errors and no justification for imposing them as part of ‘education’. Our textbooks are demonstrably false and deliberately misleading, and they must be corrected.[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZUiV1MfZcI[/youtube]
