The bible's place in classrooms

It is a welcome development that Georgia has passed a law that would allow its schools to teach elective classes on the Old and New Testament from a literary and historical perspective (via Volokh).

While it is obviously worrisome how the Bible would be taught in Georgia, it is a text unrivaled cultural and intellectual significance. Any intellectual history of the Western world ought to give ample time to it. But for some reason it tends to get pushed aside and this is not just a problem in our public schools; but also in colleges. I have spent seven quarters learning a ridiculous amount of "social and political thought" over the past two years in college, but outside of a once readinga passage on David and Golliath (in order to better understand my favorite, Machiavelli) I have no contact with the Bible. And even if I wanted to go out of my way to have some interaction with the Bible, I believe there is only one class offered, and it is only on the New Testament!

Of course, if I went to a school where it was easy to find a class on the Bible, I would probably suffer elsewhere (like the host of daily restrictions people have that go to religious schools or the lack of skepticism neccesary for proper academic inquiry), but it is unfortunate that right now the two seem to be mutually exclusive, and given the growing contention between church and state lately, I doubt this is a tradeoff that is going to go away.

Oh well.

-Mr. Alec