Prayer has never been taken out of US public schools. My ex-wife was a teacher so she knew what the law was on that. Individual personal private prayer has always been allowed; the only problem would be when that student is being disruptive. What is
not allowed is government-run prayer in the public schools.
Besides, Jesus was against school prayer in that it is a public display of prayer:
quote:
Matthew 6:
6:5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites [are]: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
6:6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
So what kind of Christian opposes Jesus' teachings? Oh yeah, a "true Christian."
Here is a letter to the editor that I wrote and which got published. It followed an almost steady stream of letters demanding school prayer. After my letter was published, the school prayer crowd went silent for at least two years:
quote:
CLEARINGHOUSE
Orange County Register
1985 August 02
The nation's better off without school-prayer laws
It is ironic that people like the Rev. Randy Adler ("Fighting back against liberals," July 11 letter) should be fighting so hard to obtain something they have always had. He was responding to the Rev. Robert Tanksley's June 16 letter, "Religion can do quite well without government help."
Tanksley had asked, " .. why mandate prayer only in the schools? Why not in theaters and restaurants?" Adler said, "The reason is that only in public schools is prayer forbidden. Prayer is already permitted in theaters and restaurants." Adler's statement is wrong for two important reasons.
- Prayer is not forbidden in the public schools. Whereas organized, vocal prayer in the classroom has been ruled unconstitutional, students have always had the right to silent prayer.
- Public schools differ greatly from theaters and restaurants in that the public schools are run by the government. The owner of a theater or restaurant may advocate whatever religion he wishes, but the government is restricted from doing so by the First Amendment. The teaching of religious beliefs and practices is the duty of the parents and the churches, not the government.
So why should so much effort go into lobbying for unnecessary laws for silent prayer? Since the experiences of other states show that once a silent- prayer law is passed, it sets the precedent for a vocal-prayer law which soon follows, we should look at the effects of a vocal-prayer law.
The enactment of a vocal-prayer law means that the government must compose and/or endorse a particular prayer. In a monolithic society, this would be no problem, but in our pluralistic society, serious problems arise.
Less than 57 percent of our population is Christian, so no religion enoys a clear majority. We have the Jewish faith, Muslims, Buddhists, Krishnas and even Rajneesh followers. By choosing a particular religion's prayer, the government would be sponsoring that religion.
A generalized prayer that doesn't offend any particular faith would be so watered-down and meaningless that the whole exercise becomes ludicrous.
What effect would school-prayer laws have on children? They would benefit little and could be harmed.
A child learns most of its moral, religious and social values between the ages of 3 and 10. The single most powerful force in shaping the child's values is the family.
Since moral values are independent of religious values, and are largely learned before the child enters school, the recital of prayer would have little, if any, effect on the child's moral values.
Adler claims that the public schools are now being used to strip our children of faith and morals, yet if government were to promote a particular religion in the public then the effect would be to strip the children of other religions of their faith.
Even if the prayer were non-sectarian Christian, then the 43 percent of non-Christian students would have another religion forced on them.
Like Adler, I am concerned with the preservation of traditional values. We have traditionally been a pluralistic society ruled by a secular government. In Washington's time, we were not a Christian nation. With the Constitution intact and with less than 57 percent of our population being Christian, we are still not a Christian nation.
Despite the acts of Congress in 1954 and 1956 to change our national motto from "E Pluribus Unum" ("Out of many parts, one") to "In God we trust" and to insert the words "under God" into our Pledge of Allegiance, we must continue to not be a Christian nation
Only by avoiding the state sponsorship of a particular religion can we guarantee everyone's right to freedom of religion.
School-prayer laws are unnecessary and highly undesirable. Our children already enjoy the right to pray silently, of their own volition, and should continue to do so without the interference of Adler's conservative clergy.
David C. Wise
Tustin
If anything, the decline of morality is far more likely to have been caused by those unconscionable sectarian religious intrusions of the mid-1950's (ie, in the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 splitting "one nation indivisible" with sectarian wording, on our currency in 1955 with "In God We Trust" being added, and in 1956 replacing our National Motto since 1776, "E Pluribus Unum" ("Out of Many, One", a statement of national unity), with a sectarian religious statement which only serves to divide society).
Why are you incapable of understanding that we must not allow the
government to establish religion? When the
government requires school children to recite a
government mandated prayer, then the government will have established a religion over all others,
including the religions of most of the students. Different religions (namely Protestants, Catholics, Jews) have
different versions of the Ten Commandments, so when the
government posts the Ten Commandments in the schools then it is the
government which chooses which religion to support and promote and impose upon the students. Against the wishes of the parents!
Having observed your messages, I feel it safe to assume that you are a fundie (referred to euphemistically as "Evangelicals" and "Conservative Christian"). Most fundies I have known hate the Catholics and Mormons and consider their religions to be false.
You keep pushing the position that the
government must be put in charge of our children's religious indoctrination. So then, if you had children in the public schools, you must be whole-heartedly in favor of your children being indoctrinated in Roman Catholicism. Or even
Mormonism! Or some other Christian sect that your religion deems to be false. Or Islam. And whichever religion the
government chooses is perfectly fine with you regardless of how much it opposes what you want your children to believe.
How very odd and extremely atypical. Most parents would oppose such government actions very strongly. That is why we have the parochial school system because Catholic parents were outraged that their children were being forced to recite Protestant prayers and read the Protestant Bible (when the Bishop or Archbishop of Philadelphia tried to suggest that Catholic students be allowed read the Catholic Bible and recite Catholic prayers, which triggered days of violent anti-Catholic rioting). One of the school-prayer cases involved Engel, a Jew who objected to his children being forced to recite Christian prayers -- to appreciate why a Jew might object, please recall their experience of nearly 2000 years of Christian persecution of the Jews, including the multitude of pogroms seeking to kill them (not even including the Holocaust). And yet you would not only gladly welcome subjecting your children to a foreign religion, but you also campaign actively for the government to commit such an atrocity.
You haven't stated your political affiliation, but given the rapid decline of "Evangelicals" into Q-Anon and MAGAt worship of The Beast (ie, Trump), I would assume that you would side with the mobs screaming for the primacy parents' rights to determine what is taught and done in the schools, even to the point of threatening horrific and tortuous murder against teachers, school boards, public health officials, and their families.
If you are affiliated with any form of such "parents' rights" causes, then why are you so adamantly in favor of violating parents' rights to deciding what religious instruction their children receive? Your flagrant and gross hypocrisy is showing.
Think of the owner of a half million dollar super performance sports car that enjoys his machine that drives like a dream. His respect and appreciation not only goes toward the assemblage of materials, but toward the builder who envisioned and lovingly built it with much precision, care, skill and ingenuity for it to serve the driver at its very best. ...
The driver that cares for the car only as an assemblage of materials is most likely to abuse it.
The owner you describe does not care about nor appreciate the car itself (indeed, to use such a "super performance" car to drive in the city (especially on the Los Angeles parking lot which is the 405 Freeway) demonstrates how little he thinks of that car). Rather, the only reason why he bought that car is
because of the name of its builder. He just bought it as a status symbol, as a "steel penis" to compensate for just one of his many shortcomings. He doesn't care anything about the car's designer outside of the hollow prestige he might get from the name. He would just drive it into the ground and then get a new one -- especially since always having a new car would be another status symbol to fluff up his flaccid ego. By your own analogy, that would be a "believer" whose only goal is to be able to flash the "God" logo in everybody's face.
But then there is the owner of a car, of any car, who has learned how the car works, appreciates that car for how it works, and who uses that knowledge to take proper care of it. This would be the scientist in your analogy. Unlike the "true Christian" status symbol seeker, he would take care of that car and not abuse it.
The evolutionist that only sees the material side of humanity that's made in the image of God likewise is most likely to abuse it as well as himself.
The fundie believes in the End Times (when I was a Jesus Freak fellow traveler c. 1970, they were absolutely obsessed with two things: End Times and demons.
Christianity Today's description of the fundies' premillennialist view of politics was that the world was literally about to go to Hell, so any attempt to preserve or save the environment or anything else, such as getting involved in politics, would be like "polishing the brass on a sinking ship". Add that to "true Christians'" drive to persecute "non-believers" (eg, Catholics, etc) and we can clearly see that it is they who would be the most likely to abuse the Creation.
SIDENOTE: The Christian Reconstructionist movement was
postmillennialist, such that they believed that the Second Coming would be
after the "Thousand Years of Christian Rule", as opposed the fundies'
premillennialist belief that the Second Coming would come before and hence usher in the Millennium. Therefore, the Christian Reconstructionists were intent on turning the US into an Old Testament theocracy while the fundies thought that getting involved was pointless. That changed around 1980 with the Radical Religious Right (RRR) merging fundie theology with Christian Reconstructionist politics to create what's now (or at least last I checked) called "Dominionism" or "Dominion Theology", turning the US into a theocracy. Something that we see you, EWolf, advocating.
In contrast, the "evolutionist" will have studied the real world and so would having an understanding of how it works and of what effects we have on it. He would also know that this is the only planet we've got so we have to preserve it. He would also tend to have the same attitude towards other people since, unlike "true Christians", he has no reason nor motivation to persecute anyone.
To gain an idea of how normals think and how that differs from right-wing authoritarians (RWA) such as yourself, I strongly recommend
The Authoritarians (2006) by now-retired psychology professor Bob Altemeyer. It is a readable summary of his decades of research into right-wing authoritarianism -- his other papers contain huge amounts of math and so would be nearly unreadable for us. You can get it through
this link, where it's available for free as a PDF or some eBook format or in one of two other formats (including audio) at small cost.
John Dean based one of his books on this book and the two of them have recently cowritten a book,
Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers, about Trump and the MAGAts.
HINT: in his self-deprecating humor (he's Canadian, so closer to British than we are) he warns the reader to avoid the masochistic exercise of reading the footnotes.
Do read those footnotes, because they contain the most interesting information in the book.
Rather a propos to your misunderstanding (as expressed in your failed car analogy) is an experiment that he describes. His son was involved in a simulation game in which the participants are assigned to the nations of the worlds, each nation elects its leader, and they then run their countries and interact with other countries. At one point, they are presented with a global environmental emergency that requires international cooperation to address.
A note on terminology. Altemeyer arrived at a scoring spectrum which he called the right-wing authoritarian (RWA) index and he produced questionnaires to give each participant a RWA score. If a person had strong authoritarian tendencies, that would be reflected in a high RWA score and he would be a "high RWA". Similarly, a person with lesser authoritarian tendencies would have a lower score and could even be a "low RWA". Read the book for a more complete explanation.
So Altemeyer added a twist to his son's simulation by loading one game with all non-authoritarians (low RWAs) and a second game with all authoritarians (high RWAs), all without the participants' or facilitators' knowledge (hence making it a double-blind experiment). The two games couldn't have been any more different.
I quoted that entire section last July in
Message 191 which was a reply to Phat, so you can read it there in its entirety.
Basically, the low RWAs were able to work together towards common goals and to resolve their differences peacefully. When the ecological emergency hit, they were able to work together to resolve it. The facilitators running it described that game as having the best outcome that they had ever seen.
The game with the high RWAs was completely different. Every country was in it for itself and treated the minor countries with aggression. At one point, Russia invaded North America, which led North America to retaliate with nuclear weapons. At that point, all the lights were turned off and the participants were informed that now everybody was dead. The facilitators turned the clock back two years and let the game restart from that point. And of course, when the ecological emergency arose, everybody just ignored it. When the game ended:
quote:
By the time forty years had passed the world was divided into armed camps threatening each other with another nuclear destruction. One billion, seven hundred thousand people had died of starvation and disease. Throw in the 400 million who died in the Soviet-China war and casualties reached 2.1 billion. Throw in the 7.4 billion who died in the nuclear holocaust, and the high RWAs managed to kill 9.5 billion people in their world--although we, like some battlefield news releases, are counting some of the corpses twice.
The authoritarian world ended in disaster for many reasons. One was likely the character of their Elites, who put more than twice as much money in their own pockets as the low RWA Elites had. (The Middle East Elite ended up the World’s Richest Man; part of his wealth came from money he had conned from Third World Elites as payment for joining his alliance.) But more importantly, the high RWAs proved incredibly ethnocentric. There they were, in a big room full of people just like themselves, and they all turned their backs on each other and paid attention only to their own group. They too were all reading from the same page, but writ large on their page was, “Care About Your Own; We Are NOT All In This Together.”
The high RWAs also suffered because, while they say on surveys that they care about the environment, when push comes to shove they usually push and shove for the bucks. That is, they didn’t care much about the long-term environmental consequences of their economic acts. For example a facilitator told Latin America that converting much of the region’s forests to a single species of tree would make the ecosystem vulnerable. But the players decided to do it anyway because the tree’s lumber was very profitable just then. And the highs proved quite inflexible when it came to birth control. Advised that “just letting things go” would cause the populations in underdeveloped areas to explode, the authoritarians just let things go.
Obviously, you are of the high RWA camp. That your assessment of your sports car analogy is very gravely mistaken should now be obvious even to you.
In that reply to Phat, I ended quoting that section of Altemeyer's book with:
DWise1 writes:
So based on that, who would you rather have running your world? The "liberals" who try to work together for our mutual survival? Or your "conservatives" who would destroy the entire world and kill everybody off if it got them a few percentage points greater profit?
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