This Won't End Well for the Christians

Now this is freaking ridiculous. Last week the Ohio House of Representatives passed a bill that prevents students from being penalized for wrong answers in their work so long as those answers are based on their religious beliefs. It's one more salvo in the war by evangelicals on everyone who is not a Biblical literalist, and one more attempt to enshrine their idiotic take on empirical science into law. But for Thelemites, there's a silver lining to all that.

On Wednesday the Ohio House of Representatives passed the “Student Religious Liberties Act,” a law prohibiting students from being penalized when their work is scientifically incorrect so long as they attribute it to their religious beliefs, a local news outlet reported. Rather than using silly metrics based on logic and demonstrable facts, teachers should instead grade students on “ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance” in these cases according to the bill. It doesn’t elaborate on how to parse that brazenly doublespeak decree.

The bill now moves on to the state’s Republican-controlled Senate for the final OK.
With this legislation, any religious content a student includes in their homework or other assignments can’t be considered incorrect regardless of whatever that content may contradict. So, for instance, if a test asks what started World War II, and a student claims it was the flying spaghetti monster—as, after all, this invisible cosmic being has used its noodly appendages to orchestrate mankind’s history behind the scenes since it created the life, the universe, and everything—then they legally can’t be marked wrong.

Or if, say, you were part of a religion I just founded after hearing this news that believes all written numbers are demonic iconography that summons tiny gremlins who will stop at nothing to burrow into your eyeholes, countermand your brain, and force you to reenact viral TikToks in perpetuity, then I guess sorry Miss Sanders but Timmy can’t do his math homework. Ever.

I'm sure the evangelical Christians who wrote this thing were sitting there thinking that there's nothing in their religion that could be construed as a "religious belief" surrounding numbers and math, and that a religion founded after the passage of this bill could easily be attacked as insincere. Sure, none of the major world religions have anything in their holy texts that can be construed as a belief surrounding the idea that numbers and mathematics don't matter. But Thelemites do.


I present to you Liber AL, Chapter I, Verse 4: "Every number is infinite; there is no difference." Penned in 1904, so there's no possible way it could be construed as a statement insincerely designed to exploit this law. That's right, their law gives us special privileges.

So here you go, Ohio Thelemites. If this bill becomes law, you are hereby empowered by the State of Ohio to insist that every answer on every piece of math homework assigned to your children and every answer written on every test they take is correct, regardless of the actual "answer." Because every number is infinite. There is no difference. It says so in our Holy Book. Every number is the equivalent of every other number. So if the "answer" is supposed to be 15 and your child writes 17, 15 = infinity and 17 = infinity. Since infinity = infinity, your child is still right. But only if they're a Thelemite.

If this bill becomes law, I really hope somebody does this. I hope they try to use the law to give their Thelemite children all A's in every math class, are challenged by the school, and argue it all the way to the Supreme Court. Because then, either this stupid law gets shut down, or Thelemite kids in Ohio are granted a permanent exemption from low grades in math. It's a win-win, and would finally get Thelema some of that good press that the Satanic Temple has been getting for striking down dumb religious laws.