MAILBAG:

Your commentator Jerry Parks questions the trustworthiness of the God of various faith traditions (“Religious sayings OK in schools?” Nov. 10).

Odd, when Jerry Parks himself is demonstrably not trustworthy. He wrote: “In Luke 19:27 Jesus says to bring his enemies and slaughter them in his presence.”

That is a blatant misrepresentation of the passage. That passage is the end of a story told by Jesus about a nobleman who returns from abroad to discover that some of his subjects did not want him as their ruler. The nobleman says: “Now as for those enemies of mine, who did not want me as their king, bring them here and slay them before me.”

Stories, whether in sacred Scripture or elsewhere, live long lives because they provoke thought and stimulate interpretation. Parks could have said that he interprets this passage to mean that Jesus said that. While such an interpretation would not align with Christianity’s traditional reading of the text, at least it would have been a true statement. But stating that “Jesus says” is just plain false.

Parks is entitled to his own interpretation of the Scriptures.

But he is not entitled to misrepresent the facts.

STEVEN J. DZIDA

Costa Mesa

Atheism does not mean having no beliefs at all

It is incorrect for our government to teach atheism equates “no beliefs,” as stated on the Bakersfield school poster.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” for example, is a compendium of atheist beliefs, including the belief that we must respect the free agency of other people.

For a less technical summation Google his “Existentialism Is a Humanism” take on the web.

LANCE JENCKS

Costa Mesa

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