(2004-06-09) — The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this week upheld a lower court’s ban on a weekly Bible class which has been taught in public schools for the past 51 years in Rhea County, TN, because the morality lessons treated the Bible as “religious truth.”

However, the court ruled that public schools may “teach moral lessons from the Bible as fiction.”

According to the ruling, “As long as the students understand that the Bible is not true, then its moral lessons-honesty, integrity, etc.-are constitutional.”

The Court gave the following example: “The school children could be told that the character ‘Moses’ went up on a mountain and pretended to talk to an imaginary friend who told him that people should not steal from each other. ‘So, boys and girls,’ the teacher could say, ‘it’s important that you also pretend that stealing is wrong.’”