<p>To the religo-phobes out there, do you real believe that the real problem with the schools is that there is too much religion about them? That is the great moral dilemma of the schools?</p>
<p>As to this idea:
</p>
<p>In what way would such a scenario be offensive? My family does not practice Christianity, we do not, by tradition, pray publicly and yet somehow none of us has ever been offended by someone praying publicly, wearing a hijab or a crucifix or a yamika or a gold coin hanging from a chain (for those of another sort of faith). What sort of milquetoast society do we wish upon ourselves?</p>
<p>Mini,</p>
<p>It seems disingenuous of you to imply that the reason the word God is not plastered all over the constitution is that god, in the public shere, was persona non grata amongst the framers. </p>
<p>You certainly know the real reason why any appeal to a particular god or religion could neither be agreed upon nor was it desired by a great many overtly religious patriots in America and yet you remain coy and act otherwise care to share the real reason for the debates and controversies with the rest of the class?
Or will you stick with your tried and true charade that the framers were religious bigots and closet atheists?</p>
<p>Do you really think that the constitutional framers would have been opposed to a prayer preceding a sporting event–or any other–at a school?</p>
<p>I write a comment on the <strong>pledge of allegiance</strong> case currently working its way through the court system, and I get this response from Driver. Football players? Prayer? I guess the principle is, if you can’t think of anything rational to say in support of your position, be insulting and change the subject…</p>
<p>" to making it “illegal” for football players to say a prayer before a game?"</p>
<p>What decision makes this illegal? I do know of decisions that make it illegal for the institution of the school to facilitate such activity. There is a big difference.</p>
<p>I should also add that the courts are not so stupid that they cannot see through efforts to circumvent decisions banning school led prayer at pep rallies with student led prayers at the same thing. After all, who lets the students do so? (not to mention suspicious timing etc.)</p>
<p>Woodwork, the fact that you, personally, would not be offended by my example does not strike me as a particularly pursuasive argument!</p>
True. I am just one of the people you spoke for in your post. It would also be true to say that one cannot know whether anyone else SHOULD be offended as your post would direct us to believe:
<p>Driver:
“We’re now equating religious belief/practice with slavery and murder?”</p>
<p>I’m trying to stay polite in this discussion, but you’re not making it any easier. Please don’t try and put words in my mouth. I’d stated that
“the fact that a community happens to think a particular way doesn’t make it legal.” I then gave slavery, segregation and lynching as examples. SEPARATE examples. I did not equate religious belief/practice to any of these actions.</p>
<p>You don’t have to agree with my opinions, and I don’t have to agree with yours. But we can keep the disagreement civil.</p>
<p>Oh Kluge, stop with the self-righteous indignation. I was insulting to you? Come on. The football reference was to the posts by Teach2005. Policies making it illegal for coaches to lead prayers before games are of a piece with with the pledge of allegiance phobia you seem to grapple with. Perhaps you were insulted by the fact that I responded to your rather nitpicky post regarding the establishment clause by pointing out that you, in “correcting” me with the supposedly verbatim clause somehow neglected to include the full cite…the part that mentions that
I don’t recall anyone limiting this discussion of the alleged “death of secularism” to the Pledge of Allegience.</p>
<p>Since when if someone finds something offensive that the “offending party” must have the obligation to cease and desist? Woodwork is quite right that we seem to have devolved into an intolerant society where everyone must conform to the least common denominator of “offense”. That is, unless the person taking offense to something happens to be a Christian. If an atheist has the right to be offended and have prayers be restricted, should a conservative Christian have the right to dictate the dress codes at schools? Or the type of dancing that occurs at school dances?</p>
<p>OD, there were several things wrong with your inflammatory analogy, and I put no words in your mouth. You said them. First problem: poor logic. Slavery and segregation were immoral and wrong. But they were legal. Completely, perfectly legal. Lynching was never legal. Condoned in places, but never legal.</p>
<p>Second problem with your analogy: the gratuitous comparison of evil, vicious acts with those of people who simply wish to say a prayer, or publicly acknowledge God in their lives. That’s way over the top. Don’t talk to me about “trying to stay polite” when you put out stuff like that. A better analogy would have been women who don’t think they should have to wear bathing suit tops at the beach, or people who don’t think they should have to obey traffic regulations. You picked the nasty ones.</p>
<p>Driver, I’m not indignant - I’m just noting your rhetorical tactics. You consistently post deliberately insulting comments directed at anyone who disagrees with you (does smug, latte sipping Birkenstock wearers ring a bell?) This is a form of ad hominem argument - a standard logical fallacy - which is used by those who don’t have a good rational argument to present and choose to belittle those who disagree with them. It doesn’t matter to me - I don’t even know you.</p>
<p>So let’s address actual points: The free exercise portion of the amendment wasn’t mentioned because it is inapposite. No one is arguing that any individual be prevented from exercising his or her religion. We’ve been addressing government action. (That’s why you didn’t mention the “free exercise” part in your initial post, either.) This is a “red herring” - an issue which has proximity of some sort to the issue in question, but which in fact has no bearing on the debate. Its sole purpose is to distract. Another tactic used by those who don’t have a good argument that actually is on point.</p>
<p>No one “limited the scope of the discussion” to the Pledge - but the pledge was within the scope of discussion and it was the point I raised. Your response did not address that one point, acting as if I had been arguing something entirely different (after the ad hominem part.)</p>
<p>And you still haven’t addressed that point.</p>
<p>Well…while we’re noting rhetorical tactics, I would just point out your tendency to bring in comments from unrelated threads. Yes, yes, Smug latte-sipping Birkenstock wearers is my standard humorous cliche, used many times, and seems to profoundly affect you. But that didn’t come up in this thread. You introduced it. As to your “point”–I believe I did address it, pointing out that there was no federal law, as you claimed, that requires students recite the pledge. It’s there, you can look it up.</p>
<p>While I ponder a further reply to all this, what was the “ad hominem” part? In this thread, I mean.</p>
<p>Driver:
“Lynching was never legal. Condoned in places, but never legal.”
I thought that <em>was</em> my point. An example of an illegal action, that happened to be condoned by certain communities at one time.</p>
<p>“Slavery and segregation were immoral and wrong. But they were legal.”
They were legal at one time, true. But even after they were declared illegal, parts of our society didn’t see anything wrong in them.</p>
<p>“…the gratuitous comparison of evil, vicious acts with those of people who simply wish to say a prayer…”
You seem to keep thinking that my intention was to find examples that I considered equally ‘offensive’, and I assure you in all honesty that it was not. I was looking for other examples of illegal actions condoned by society, and the ones I stated came to mind. It’s like stating like jaywalking is a crime, and murder is a crime. Both true statements, but that does not equate jaywalking to murder.</p>
<p>I agree with you, however, that I could have used better examples; if I’d thought of them at the time, I would have. </p>
<p>In many ways, Teach2005 hits at the heart of the matter. </p>
<p>Perhaps the south has been just more religiously homogenous than other parts of our country. Those of us who live in areas with many other religions perhaps have a greater sensitivity to the public displays of religion. In my town I think the football coach would have to wonder what sort of a prayer he was going to concoct that would “satisfy” everyone. Given that, many people just feel it is coercion.</p>
<p>I just think it is all about making everyone feel welcome here. Good people are good people. They come in various religions, agnostic, atheist. Bad people come in all of the above too.</p>
<p>It certainly feels to many of us that the religious right in this country wants us to all be like them. We cringe that gay people we love will be denied rights, not to mention dignity. We worry that our dying wishes will be met with planeloads of lunatic congressmen. We worry that women will go back to dying of back alley abortions. We worry that even birth control will become illegal or unavailable. We worry that illnesses will never be cured because of an inability to really talk about the ethics of stem cell research. We worry that our neighbors who are atheists will be alienated (like Teach2005’s town). I could go on and on.</p>
<p>I love people who take the moral high ground. Oppose abortion, and any tax that would help reduce poverty or any education program that would explain how to use birth control. The Church that fights the hardest is of course the same church that hid its dirty secrets moving childmolesters from one parish to another.</p>
<p>I love the moral highground - people offended by abortion but happy to have mentally ill and incompetent people given a death penalty, against all evidence that it is an effective deterent from crime.</p>
<p>I love the moral highground - people who defended slavery the longest, attacking gays because somehow if a gay couple gets rights, other rights must be diminished in some mysterious way.</p>
<p>With the Pledge, I don’t think the question is whether people can pray in school, it is whether you can make people pray in school.</p>
<p>Getting back to the original post, I don’t think the main asset is that she is evangelical, I think the main asset is that she will side with the Bush administration when the future indictments come down.</p>
<p>My mother migrated to the US from a foreign country in the 50’s, and moved to the South. She once described southern Christians as people who shoot negroes out the back of their cars, on the way to Church.</p>
<p>Believing in God is a lot different than being religious. Jimmy Swaggert was very religious when he was visiting prostitutes. And part of the problem with having religion play a big part in the political life of the country is that we cannot judge whether we’re listening to people who believe in God, or people who are just borrowing the robes of religion at the same time as they use religion as a political prop. As far as I’m concerned, claiming to be a Christian and going to church for political advanatage is a violation of the commandment not to take God’s name in vain.</p>
Sounds to me like your mother was an uninformed bigot with a hyperbole problem. People say all kinds of things. Doesn’t make them true, even if it’s your mother saying them. What an incredibly hateful thing to say. Both of you.</p>
<p>As usual, I’m late to this party. But I will say that I have never said the Pledge of Allegiance without falling silent at “under God.” I refuse to place the United States “under God” just because the McCarthy-era Congress thought it was a good idea to indicate to the Communists that we weren’t atheists.</p>
<p>I find school prayer offensive. I find any instruction as to the kind of praying any one individual should do offensive. It’s all very nice to say we shouldn’t prohibit football players from praying before a game, but what if someone wants to say a different prayer from the “official” prayer? Do we allow everyone’s prayers? If not, whose do we allow? If the school is allowing a student to give a prayer, can my son offer his prayer to the flying spaghetti monster? </p>
<p>This ties in with my objections to the teaching of religious alternatives to evolutionary theory. Whose creation myths do we teach? Do we touch on all of them? If not, whose creation myth do we leave out? Isn’t it simpler to say that science is science, school is school–and leave the religions to churches and private beliefs? And isn’t that what the Constitution says, too?</p>
<p>If we must have Harriet Miers, let us hope she is such a strict constructionist that she leaves religion out of it.</p>
<p>driver, perhaps you are not familiar with the south of the 1950’s. At that time, it was quite true of a unfortunate percentage of people. It is not a “hateful” thing to say that people were like that - it was very, very true that many people were like that. Have you had a cross burned on your lawn? Did you have the FBI escort your children to school because the KKK threatened to kill them because the parents were against segregation? My family did. Have you seen the postcards of lynchings that people made money selling like hotcakes? </p>
<p>My mother was not an uninformed bigot. You may not be a bigot, but you are clearly uninformed. We lived there, on a rural farm. And that’s exactly what it was like. I remember very clearly, as a child, visiting one of the society leaders, and listening to her say that she just felt that these ■■■■■■■ (she said it with a very refined accent) should just all be shot because they were worse than animals. Uninformed? Think again. In fact, I’m a little shocked that you had the nerve to call both of us hateful. We’re talking pure history here. I’m quite shocked that you don’t know this.</p>
<p>By the way - in case anybody thought she was criticizing Christianity - she wasn’t. She was criticizing religious people who hated and hid behind religion. Our family was and is chock full of ordained ministers. I am ordained, myself. We try to love God, not the whitewashed wall.</p>
<p>driver, I am finding your comments entirely offensive in refusing to read plain english. I was commenting on people who violate the commandments at the same time as they claim religious virtue. The Bible is filled with pharasees. The south was filled with them in the 1950’s. I can’t speak to other places, since I was not in other places in the 50’s. </p>
<p>What are you saying - that the south wasn’t like that, or that no one should criticize people who murdered blacks because they were black? Which of these “entire groups of people” are you upset about me commenting on - from 50 years ago, I might add. I fail to understand why you would would want to protect either group. If I said Nazi’s were horrible, would you say that was hateful to an entire group of people? The point is I quite clearly said that an unfortunate percentage of the southerners were like that back then. I didn’t say they are like that now, and I did not say even a majority were lilke that. But of course, you would have to read my post to actually see that. </p>
<p>If you say I’m criticizing southerners, I think you may have not been able to read at all, since I think it is quite apparent from my posting that I am a southerner. My family has lived in the south since 1673.</p>