How offensive. Michaelangelo, you have made me feel I don't belong here. Please cover this with a tarp, too.
“Our Heavenly Father,” the prayer begins, “grant us each day the desire to do our best, to grow mentally and morally as well as physically, to be kind and helpful.” It goes on for a few more lines before concluding with “Amen.”
For Jessica, who was baptized in the Catholic Church but said she stopped believing in God at age 10, the prayer was an affront. “It seemed like it was saying, every time I saw it, ‘You don’t belong here,’ ” she said the other night during an interview at a Starbucks here.
Since the ruling, the prayer has been covered with a tarp. The school board has indicated it will announce a decision on an appeal next month.
Student Faces Town’s Wrath in Protest Against a Prayer, NY Times, 26 Jan 2012
I have many atheist or agnostic friends. There was a period of my life where that was my thinking, too. But even then, sincere religious expression never offended me. When I drove by the Sikh temple on my apartment complex’s street, I never felt alienated. If I saw a prayer for healing on a friend’s Facebook feed, I may have thought “and see a doctor, of course,” but it never offended me.
I’m the diplomatic sort. Always have been. It actually causes me pain when people fight. I don’t like it.
But this trend, of late, is actually starting to piss me off. I fully recognize that we are not a Christian nation, in the sense that Iran is an Islamic nation. But to act like the faiths of most of the founders of this country, and of almost every major thinker in our nation’s history, is some weird, alien, offensive, freedom-threatening philosophy is beyond silly.
Yes, terrible things have been done in the name of religion. Faith has often been the tool of government. But that does not make religion in general, or Judaism and Christianity in particular, the problem.
Most of our American ancestors were taught to read by the church. The abolitionist movement was a church movement. The civil rights movement was a church movement. Sure, there were people saying the Bible or God told them differently on those issues, and they were what we contemporary Christians call “wrong.” :)
This phoney, pseudo-liberal nonsense that says “every culture and expression is fine except the majority’s” has got to be recognized for the bullshit that it is. Atheism is fine. I have no problem with an ethical atheist. But I do not agree that freedom of religion also means freedom from ever seeing religious sentiments in public. This newer brand of hyper-sensitive, highly intollerant phoney progressivism needs to stop being coddled and start being called out for the nonsense it is. Not by threatening kids who stand up for their ideals, like Jessica, but by teaching them, in exactly the same way we teach kids to tolerate other races and genders and cultures, to do the most liberal thing of all — tolerate the majority culture of their own country.
