For the last ten years I have been going to my kids concerts around the holidays. The selections of songs did not include anything that even pertains to religion, angels or God.
It's ok to sing about Santa, but not God.
This last year, somehow the kids sang Hallelujah, for the last song. The prinicipal was sweating bullets. But to his surprise, the crowd roared at the end, like no other time before in the last ten years.
It was just awesome, there was a unified feeling of, dare I say, fuck the fact that they took prayer out of school.
I don't know where you live, but I grew up in Palm Beach County, Florida and was in the school choir. We sang songs like "Ave Maria" and "God Bless America" and no one batted an eyelash. Everyone understood that the choir director was not trying to preach but presenting beautiful songs. I was raised without religion (but not raised to be against it, my parents just wanted me to figure it all out for myself without being indoctrinated before I was able to ask the right questions) and neither my parents nor I had any problem singing these songs. I highly doubt that your experience in your school district is representative of the whole nation.
It's an underground cult, you know that. I am not sure on what you can say, but I know what you can't say. Anyone who looks to take God out of nation is part of that cult. I am not saying that all atheists are this way. But most are, and they are forcing their Godless view on the rest of the nation. They fight for separation of church and state for all the wrong reasons, but make it appear they are fighting for the right reasons. The Godless liberal judges grant them their wishes.
Oooh goodie!!! I always wanted to be in an underground cult and now you're telling me that I'm already in one. Wow! Thanks!
Listen everyone, stop all your jumping up and down. I live out here in the real world, and I can see clearly what the effect of taking prayer out of school has done. dare to mention God, in a positive way, in school now, and you will see. I am not going to get into a back and forth bullshit conversation about it. IT is what it is.
Well, the rest of us also live in the real world and do not see what you are seeing. What exactly has the alleged removal of God from schools done? How exactly was God removed? Was s/he carted away in handcuffs?
Like I said before, I grew up in a fairly liberal area (a blue county if you will) and attended a large urban high school and a large suburban junior high with a very diverse student body at both and I never once witnessed any kind of discrimination against the Christian kids. I did, however, see kids holding hands around the flagpole in prayer before the first bell, praying over their lunches, discussing religion and God in history and government classes, opting out of sex-ed and given alternate assignments (similar to when someone objects to dissection in biology), wearing religious t-shirts, reading their bibles during the required reading time we had IIRC once a month, being accomodated after school for their christian clubs and so on. Remember, this is a diverse, majority liberal area with sizeable populations of non-Christian religions. I attended school through 1995 and I have a little sister and a niece and nephew still in school there right now and the atmosphere is the same. Kids are allowed to pray and "dare to mention God" often in the right setting and time. So many school even have a "Moment of Silence" in which the student can think about whatever s/he pleases including prayer. The announcer doesn't specify prayer, but it isn't disallowed. Granted, some schools may go overboard in their paranoia, but those few instances should not be used to gauge the climate over the whole country and that is exactly what all the fundamentalists are doing.
The governement or this nation was never intended to be Godless. That surely wasn't a goal of our founding fathers, period. The Declaration is a clear indication of that.
The consititution is the second indication that they never intended for us to be Godless. If they wanted us to be Godless, then they would have never mentioned a separation of church and state.
????? No one is saying you or anyone should be "Godless." The founding fathers knew the power of religion and knew that it was best to keep the state from interfering in the church and vice versa. No one then or now is trying to force everyone to be an atheist. That's just absurd. If you believe in your God then no one can take that away from you. No one is stopping anyone from praying or believing. However, like any other right we have in this country, the line is drawn when you try to impose your will on others. When I was in first grade (in Virginia Beach, not S.Fla, we moved the next year) my teacher had us recite a prayer of thanks before we left the classroom for lunch. Our parents were told by us and she was fired. I was too young to remember if there was any sort of controversy, but I'm sure that raised the ire of some Christians and represented to them the "Godlessness" of the schools, but she crossed that line. She made us learn the prayer and recite it and she punished anyone who didn't (or at least didn't mouth the words). That is what we mean by "forced prayer" and that is what the Supreme Court ruled against. Not private prayer. Stop trying to pretend that there isn't a difference.
The only thing a separation of church and state means, is that our governement would not run any particular religion, and religion would not run our government. It was meant so that we could escape the "tyranny" of British Kings who forced you to believe a certain way.
Exactly! So what is the argument?
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