Separation of church and state

My understanding is that

"state" refers to a distinct and generally autonomous/independent region which is capable of determining its own laws, leadership and direction,

"country" refers to an area which is also a state, but which has no higher organisational grouping (you can't bunch countries into one group and still have that grouping called a state), but

"nation" refers to a distinct people and the boundaries between nations do not necessarily coincide with those of states/countries; nations like the British, the Californian or the Indonesian do match up with states/countries, nations like the Jewish, the Amish and the Roma don't.

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So while states can be part of a larger state or country, countries can't.

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This means that both usages -- referring to a country and to a part of the US -- involve the same meaning. Using it to refer to the US (and also places like Australia, although less so) confuses the matter though, because one may be referring to an individual state within the country, or to the entire state of the US, Australia, etc. I get problems like Marc's misunderstanding often, but this is due to a rather idiosyncratic use of terms, where words are given a further specific or new definition, in the US as compared to the rest of the world.

Hahaha, which is funny, because atheism is not promoted in the classroom any more than Christianity is, and likely a lot less since a majority of teachers in the US (and the western world in general) are Christians themselves.You may have confused atheism (the lack of belief in a god) with secularism (the idea that government should act without undue influence from a single religion), a standard mistake of people who understand neither.And this causes problems for your desire to promote Christianity without even discussing the establishment clause: no religion may be promoted above any other by the government.
That means if you want Christianity promoted to "balance atheism", you must also desire promotion of Islam, of Hinduism, of T/Daoism, etc. Then and only then have you actually balanced anything. Otherwise all you do is tilt the balance in a new direction. One which, by the way, would be entirely opposed by substantial numbers of people because, you know, other religions do actually exist.Maybe you want to think your idea through once more?

Kind of part of the definition, actually.
Science follows the principle -- by the way subbie, you used the wrong homonym there -- of methodological naturalism (i.e. the scientific method). Which means it can only deal with things in the natural world. This one takes a little more than simply knowing what science is, but hey, why not:
If you can't perceive it, you can't test it.
If you can't test it, it can't be falsified.
If it can't be falsified, science can't deal with it.
Leaving us transitively with:
If you can't perceive it, science can't deal with it. See part 1 above: science deals only with the natural world.
See part 2 above: if we cannot perceive it, science does not deal with it.Either of these would probably be enough to support subbie's statement. Together they're basically a juggernaut on coke. I'll simply repeat what I said to another paranoid antiscience theist. Ignore the language and personal stuff, just get the gist of it:
"Hey fucktard, maybe if you actually knew something about science, you'd know that it does not and can not say anything about God, because God is supernatural and science does not deal with any of that shit".I'll make a pass at the last point you make, to try and salvage entertainment from doing this:
"Apparently first of its kind" just means the reporter who wrote the story couldn't find any similar or related cases after their brief perusal of an internet site providing SCOTUS opinion records and/or a Google search. You seriously thought a journalist would have known about every case ever decided?

Benefit of the doubt, I guess.So, WND is just another kind of Conservapedia? Oh great.