News from the Florida Legislature:

State Sen. Michael Bain, a Jacksonville Independent, said he plans to introduce a bill to require teachers who discuss relgion, including Christianity, to also discuss the idea of atheism.

Atheism is the concept that there is no God or other super-intelligent unknowable being in the universe. Atheism differs from agnosticism in that the latter belief says that humans cannot know whether or not God exists, while atheism flatly asserts that God does not and cannot exist.

Bain, the chief sponsor of the bill, expects the Senate to take it up when it meets in March. He said its intent is simple: "If you're going to teach religion, then you have to teach the other side so you can have critical thinking."

Bain said that if the Legislature passes the bill, he wouldn't be surprised if there's a legal challenge.

"You just never know. They use the courts all the time. I guess if they have enough money they can get it in the courts," he said. "Someplace along the line you've got to be able to make a value judgment of what it is you think is the appropriate thing."

…Bain's planned bill isn't a surprise to those who favor teaching evolution.

"We were expecting some sort of effort to blunt evolution education," said Jeremiah Saunders, a theology professor at Florida State University who helped draft the year-old school standards on religion. "What you are describing is one of the tools in the standard anti-Christian toolbox."

It won't be the first time the Legislature has addressed the issue.

After the standards were approved in February 2008, the Senate and House each passed bills that would require public schools to teach "critical analysis" of religion. The majority in both chambers said they wanted to protect teachers from being punished if they questioned Christianity.

That effort died in the Legislature, however, because the two chambers weren't able to reconcile their plans into a single bill.

'A lot of hate mail'

This time around, though, Bain - a co-sponsor of the 2008 bill in the Senate - said he expects the House plan to be extremely similar to the one he will introduce. That should make it easier to pass, he said.

Bain acknowledges it's a controversial subject. "I got a lot of hate mail last year," he said. "You'd think I'd never read the Bible, that I was Satan, that I offered human sacrifices or something."

Those bills were a deliberate effort to "undermine" the new Florida standards on teaching religion, said Greg Blum of Florida Citizens for Religion, a group supportive of teaching Christianity.

"My group is keeping an eye out for this bill to pop up again," he said. "Hopefully legislators are worried about other things."

Oh, no, wait a minute, that's not the actual story. And yet the revised version above changes startlingly few words.

(Names have been changed to protect them from the Google, though honestly I'm not sure the parties involved all deserved such courtesy.)

Here's a very simple test of "freedom," folks: would you want the public schools to be forced to teach a belief (not facts) that go against your beliefs, just because people holding those beliefs have lots of money and power? If you think that would be a bad thing, then you should think that forcing the schools to teach your beliefs is also a bad thing.

Failure to see this is called "lack of self-awareness."