February 16, 2005
Praise the Lord and pass the chalk
Can anyone help me reconcile this
Lawmakers want to amend the state constitution to open schools and other public places to prayer and other religious activities.Delegate Charles W. Carrico Sr. said the amendment is needed because there is a growing effort to silence Christians.
"I'm tired of hearing when you walk into a school you cannot profess your beliefs because you may offend someone else," the Grayson Republican said.
and this:
It is already legal for Virginia schools to allow time for silent prayer and to allow religious student clubs to meet during non-instructional time.
What's left as a barrier between being an obnoxious fundie seeking to convert and harass all the heathens around you at school? Just being an obnoxious fundie seeking to convert and harass all the heathens around you in class, I guess. Should this pass, would it be constitutionally-protected expression to suddenly roll around on the floor of your shop class babbling in tongues like some church-stadium attendee on TBN? Would you be allowed to toss a bucket of holy water on your biology teacher if he or she made mention of evolution?
There are plenty of very devout people out there who don't feel persecuted because they have to behave according to their roles in different situations. These people can function like the students, teachers, lawyers, dentists or whatever else they are without constantly lapsing into missionary work. In a world where everyone is a preacher, everyone starves.
That being said, let's see a show of hands on taking out the 14th Street Bridge to keep the barbarians on their side of the river.
Posted by rj3 at February 16, 2005 11:05 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.smorgasblog.com/cgi-bin/mt/smorgastb.r740.cgi/1241
Comments
I can state from personal experience that Southern Baptist and many other Evangelical and Fundamentalist kids are raised with a persecution complex. I started wondering in high school why the extinction of our faith was imminent, despite all elected officals that I knew of being professing Christians and the funny looks kids who didn't belong to a church got. I didn't know any Jews till I got to college, for instance, and then decided that they were just fine the way they were and I didn't have any obligation to "witness" to them.
This is when I started on the road to being a secularist, pluralistic Episcopalian.
Right-wing Christianity has nothing to do if it doesn't believe that it's under threat.
Posted by: Amanda at February 18, 2005 7:28 AM
i dont see what the big deal is. if kids want to pray in school, let them pray. the other kids who dont want to pray/participate in religious activities dont have to participate. i dont think that christians are being persecuted but i do think that for the most part, americans are religiously active christians so why should we be persecuted by the secular minority? whether people like to admit it or not, essentially we are a christian country and i think that people need to come to terms with that.
Posted by: Nia at February 18, 2005 11:37 AM
Here's what's funny: Germany, and several other western European countries, actually have their governments doing their major churches' bidding for them. Here in Germany, for example, members of the Catholic and Lutheran (Evangelische) churches have to pay church taxes. The German government helps the churches collect it and the only way to opt out is to ask to be excommunicated from your church. Judaism was added to this group in 2003, and there's currently an argument running between the "official" Jewish religious organization that "church" taxes go to and non-Orthodox Jews. But I digress.
German schoolkids are signed up for religious education classes during the school day by their parents. In most German towns, there are Catholic and "Protestant" (Lutheran) classes. In larger cities, there are Muslim and Jewish classes, as needed. Parents can sign their kids up for ethics classes if they don't want them to be in any specific religion class.
The result of all this? Germans, along with other western Europeans, are faaaaar more secular than Americans.
Church-state separation seems to help Christianity.
Posted by: Amanda at February 23, 2005 8:30 AM