first of all if you are not of the faith that the people praying are then what do you care unless you are interested and they say no. which if a christian group does that then you should slap them. so i think you are talking about things like praying before a football game or an assembly. i would say that if you don't believe it don't listen or don't care. just like how now a days you don't have to say Under God when you say the pledge of alegence. which i do find to be retarded. listen if you get so offended so easaly then you are going to have one really horible life.

Isn't it interesting how the people who are in favor of prayer in schools are Christians, while the ones who oppose it aren't?:rolleyes:

That's because the Christians know that chances of a Jewish, Muslim or Wiccan prayer being said at an assembly is low. Yet children are in public schools to learn and shouldn't be subjected to Christian theology in the form of prayer if that isn't what they believe.

It is more than a matter of being personally offended in many cases. There have been cases where Jewish children have been persecuted and shamed by teachers and students in their schools. A net search will bring them up. Here is one of several that I found:

A Growing Scandal of Religious Intolerance

Tony Soltero

"It can't happen here." That's what we always tell ourselves here in the land of the free, whenever we hear about some outrageous incident in another country, particularly one that involves the persecution of a designated group of people. We're America. We have our Constitution. We're the freest, the most welcoming, and the most tolerant country on the planet. That's what all our troops out there are fighting for.

But sometimes it does happen here, as a Jewish family in rural Delaware recently found out.

A couple of years ago, Samantha Dobrich, the lone Jewish student in the Indian River School District high school, attended her graduation ceremony with her classmates. What should have been a pleasant, memorable, life-enriching experience for her was ruined by a local pastor using the invocation to publicly single her out as "one specific student" who needed special attention from God, "in Jesus' name."

This gratuitous public mention was difficult enough, but it was just one of many incidents of harassment that the Dobrich children, as well as another unnamed non-Christian family, were forced to endure at Indian River.

According to the families, school officials openly promoted fundamentalist Christianity, to the point of conferring special privileges to students who attended designated Bible study groups - such as express access to lunch.

Teachers openly discussed Christianity with no mention of other religions. Non-Christian students were pressured into attending district board meetings, where they were subjected to officially-sanctioned sectarian public prayer. One particular teacher plugged Christianity as the "one true religion" and handed out proselytizing pamphlets to the students.

Mind you, this was at a public, taxpayer-supported high school; a high school that belonged to the Dobriches every bit as much as it did to the other families in the district.

Bothered by this blatant lack of respect for their faith, the Dobriches filed a complaint with the local school board, which tried to ignore them at first, but eventually granted them a hearing.

The Dobriches presented a mild, reasonable request - that organized prayers be held in God's name, rather than in Jesus' name, out of consideration for non-Christian families.

The school board not only refused to compromise (ignoring that all officially sanctioned school prayer is unconstitutional), but publicly mocked the Dobriches by loudly breaking into Christian prayers on the spot. The school board decided to formulate a religion policy.

Local talk radio got into the act, as did national theocratic organizations like the Rutherford Institute. Fanned by the radio hosts, a mob scene formed at the meeting where the new policy was to be unveiled.

The Dobriches' son Alex, then in the sixth grade, rose up to make a simple statement - "I feel bad when kids in class call me Jewboy" - but the local vultures hooted at him, with one attendee screaming at the young boy to "take your yarmulke off."

Local politicians rose and further blasted away at the Dobriches, with one former school board member even hinting that they might "disappear." References to the Ku Klux Klan began to emerge in the threats.

The talk-radio crowd got louder, shriller, and bolder. Young Alex was routinely called a "Christ-killer" and began hiding his yarmulke for fear of his personal safety. The family began facing more and more threats.

A well-trafficked right-wing website published the Dobriches' names, home address, and telephone number, instigating even more smothering harassment of the Jewish family.

The Dobriches purchased a second home in Wilmington to protect their children, but eventually the financial drain forced the family to sell the Indian River home. Samantha dropped out of college and lapsed into depression. The Dobriches (along with the other family) filed their complaint describing the above incidents and others. The lawsuit is pending.

Nice work, Delaware fundamentalists! Pogrom accomplished! Maybe certain Taliban officials will be sending a congratulatory video, live from the cave!

These kinds of things happened not long ago in another "civilized" Western country, which I will be kind enough not to mention by name. They're par for the course in Muslim dictatorships like Iran and Saudi Arabia. But they're not supposed to happen here. Except when they do. And they're escalating nationwide, abetted by local (and sometimes state and national) governments turning a blind eye to, if not outright encouraging, these persecutions.

How has so much of America degenerated to this level, promoting this kind of hatred, harassment and exclusion in the name of "Christianity?" How insecure must a fundamentalist Christian be in his faith that he feels he must persecute those who don't worship the same way he does? Why can't some fundamentalists function without explicit government validation of their beliefs?

The alleged actions of the Indian River school board, as well as those of the harassers, constitute a profound betrayal of American ideals as envisioned by our Founding Fathers.

Given that this country was partly settled by religious people escaping persecution for their faith, and mindful of the disastrous consequences that the commingling of church and state had generated in Europe, the framers of the Constitution stated in the very first clause of the very first amendment (among the Bill of Rights), "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The Dobriches' rights were grotesquely violated on both counts.

America's original settlers could draw two possible lessons from their ordeals back in the old country. The first lesson is that religious persecution is bad, and that one should not engage in it; that is the lesson the Founding Fathers applied to our Constitution.

The alternative lesson is that it's better to be the oppressor than the oppressed; as demonstrated by the reprehensible behavior of the so-called "Christians" in Indian River, there are some factions in America that seem to have adopted that model.

It is up to the rest of us Americans, those of us who respect the Constitution, to put a stop to these loathsome practices. Because if we don't, it will happen here.

__________________


Walter Mondale: "George Bush doesn't have the manhood to apologize." George Bush: "Well, on the manhood thing, I'll put mine up against his any time."

hey you know it someone wants to pray there way in a school i am not going to stand in there way when was the last time you heard about someone other then a christian that actually wanted to pray at a school function. they cry about it but when they can they don't. And you find one artical about a very horible thing and that makes everyone horible. if you find three more like this one i will consent to you. i am sure you will but it is to prove the point that it doesn't happen everywhere. you are trying to apease the minority by hurting the majority. it doesn't work that way. or at least the majority that actually does pray in school and guess what that is christians. i can't help that only the Jew, muslims and any other faith you can think of that has to do that.

Hmmm..... Agreement again. My kids can pray anytime anywhere they choose too. In silence. Just because you do it in an organized moment of silence does not get it any further up into God's line.

Don't put words in my mouth; I never said everyone was horrible. :rolleyes: The point I was trying to make is that having prayer in schools opens the door to such persecution and therefore shouldn't take place in public schools. Otherwise, there will always be some creeps like the ones in the article who take it too far.

That's ridiculous. How is the majority being harmed?

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Walter Mondale: "George Bush doesn't have the manhood to apologize." George Bush: "Well, on the manhood thing, I'll put mine up against his any time."

"That's ridiculous. How is the majority being harmed?"

i should have said that you are trying to apease the rights of the minority by takeing the rights of the majority.

"Don't put words in my mouth; I never said everyone was horrible."

i am sorry i didn't mean to put words in your mouth but you are saying that becuase it happens once we should get rid of all of it. thats like saying that if one person robs a store we should get rid of all the stores so as to take away the posibility of it ever happening again.

"Hmmm..... Agreement again. My kids can pray anytime anywhere they choose too. In silence. Just because you do it in an organized moment of silence does not get it any further up into God's line"

why can't they pray out loud. becuase someone is going to say they can't or because they shouldn't. do you know who the most persecuted religion on earth is. Christianity. we are told in more places in this world then any other that we can't not only pray but even believe what we do. And just so you know. God doesn't have a line he is GOD.

This has happened time and time again for several decades but I only posted one of many examples since I didn't want that post to run on too long...

:rolleyes:See my statement above.:rolleyes:

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Walter Mondale: "George Bush doesn't have the manhood to apologize." George Bush: "Well, on the manhood thing, I'll put mine up against his any time."

what statement are you refering to the top bold.

The statement right above that one in my previous post:"This has happened time and time again for several decades but I only posted one of many examples since I didn't want that post to run on too long..."

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Walter Mondale: "George Bush doesn't have the manhood to apologize." George Bush: "Well, on the manhood thing, I'll put mine up against his any time."

The state may make no law that may be interpreted as an establishment of religion.

State sanctioned prayer in public-schools is, by definition, establishment of religion. Ergo, it is quite properly banned.

I cannot imagine any issue in US politics more important (or more scary) than this one.