Roger Ireson Quotes

Conflicts over the public-school curriculum are commonplace, clamorous and unproductive. The two sides talk (more frequently, shout) past each other. Protesters often suggest that anyone who disagrees must be un-Christian, immoral, racist or sexist.

I’m very worried about the religious right. I don’t believe in mixing religion and politics. They do a disservice to religion and to politics.

The fundamentalists are increasing. People, afraid to oppose those fundamentalists, shut their mouths. It is really very difficult to make people move against a sensitive issue like religion, which is the source of fundamentalism.

But instead of standing up for reason, our government is handing education over to the world of faith.

The goal of the fundamentalists is to switch off the light and make us see by the flame of one candle.

The religious right is turning the Republican party into a revival tent.

As a concerned person of faith, … I have watched with increasing alarm as Religious Right groups manipulate religion to further their intolerant political agenda.

The politics of religion pursued in a large number of societies called Muslim make too many concessions to the forces of traditionalism, while favoring the adoption of all the benefits of material civilization. This results in dangerous mental cleavages, increasing backwardness in the systems of education, fruitless self-censorship, and the impoverishment of creativity in various domains of intellectual and cultural life.

The unions no longer control the education agenda of the Democratic Party.

I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion.

In America our public schools are intended to be religiously neutral. Our teachers and schools are neither to endorse nor to inhibit religion. I believe this is a very good thing.

I say further that our system of education should be unsectarian.

Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage.

I confess that for fifteen years my efforts in education, and my hopes of success in establishing a system of national education, have always been associated with the idea of coupling the education of this country with the religious communities which exist.

That both Muslim fundamentalists and the Christian right are today focusing their attempts to regain control in a rapidly changing world on frantic efforts to maintain control over women, particularly over women's sexuality. Moreover, given their mythologies about "holy wars," it is also understandable that they should use "divinely approved" violence to do so…

Islam has been used in some countries, for instance Sudan, as a means for suppression and the installation of autocratic regimes. This, coupled with the censorship of moderate Muslim voices and increasing state patronage of religious scholars, has led to the propagation of a dogmatic form of divisive Islamic extremism, a form that rejects democracy, human rights, and good governance as devices of Western imperialism.

But I firmly believe that evolution be taught in the schools has the best witness of what modern science has taught us. To read the Bible literalistically about such issues disinvites us from using the best of recent scholarships

Neo-Islam's attempt at destroying individual freedoms is as much a threat to Islam as the Inquisition was to Christianity.

Defending freedom of expression against fundamentalist threats is a cause. It is a matter of principle, whether it involves Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses', a film about veils and the oppression of women or some clumsy drawings in a Danish newspaper

Ignorant and illiterate people cannot understand democracy. They are prey to religious extremists.

As a matter of principle, science teachers are professionally bound to limit their teaching to science and should resist pressure [from religious fundamentalists] to do otherwise.

It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.

A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.

The danger of the Shiite heretics to the region, is not less than the danger of the Jews and the Christians.

A University with sectarian professorships becomes, of course, a sectarian monopoly: with professorships of rival sects, it would be an arena of Theological Gladiators. Without any such professorships, it may incur, for a time at least, the imputation of irreligious tendencies, if not designs. The last difficulty was thought more manageable than either of the others….there seems to be no alternative but between a public University without a theological professorship, and sectarian seminaries without a University