Book: Reagan Tried to Make Gorbachev 'See the Light'

From the Wall Street Journal
The question of whether Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a religious believer preoccupied Ronald Reagan during their summits in the mid-1980s, the Wall Street Journal reports on the details of a new book.

The world leaders held a series of summits from 1985 to 1988, at which time the American president speculated to his aides that his Soviet counterpart, an avowed atheist, might be expressing religious faith through phrases like “God bless.”

Although discussing issues such as arms control and regional conflicts when in large groups of American and Russian officials, Reagan sometimes ventured off on more divine topics when outside the presence of senior advisors, James Mann’s “The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War” reveals.

Mann writes that Reagan was convinced Gorbachev was capable of changing the Soviet system, and religion could be a catalyst, the Journal reported on its Web site Saturday.

According to a memo of their first one-on-one session in Moscow, which was based on notes taken by two Reagan aides now declassified and available at the Reagan Library in California, the U.S. president secretly tried to convince Gorbachev of the existence of God.
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The book reveals that Reagan told Gorbachev that his son, Ron, did not believe in God either and said he had long yearned to serve his son the perfect dinner, have him enjoy the meal and then ask him if he believed there was a cook.
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Authors Warn That Many Textbooks Distort Religion
By Lauren Green
Jesus was a Palestinian? That's what one public school textbook says.

Although Jesus lived in a region known in his time as Palestine, the use of the term "Palestinian," with its modern connotations, is among the hundreds of textbook flaws cited in a recent five-year study of educational anti-Semitism detailed in the book "The Trouble with Textbooks: Distorting History and Religion."

Authors Gary Tobin and Dennis Ybarra of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research found some 500 imperfections and distortions concerning religion in 28 of the most widely used social studies and history textbooks in the United States.

Ybarra, a research associate at the institute, called the above example "shocking."

A "true or false" question on the origins of Christianity asserted that "Christianity was started by a young Palestinian named Jesus." The teacher's edition says this is "true."

But even though Jesus is the founder of Christianity, the question ignores the fact that he was Jewish. And Ybarra said, "The Christian scriptures say that he preached in Judea and Galilee, not Palestine," a term that was used at the time as a less specific description of the broader region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.