Prayer in School

St. Brian has a good post over at his blog that I want to elaborate on.

It's about Prayer in public schools. How would Christians feel if Islam somehow was forced in all schools and Christianity was put on the back burner? He makes this point because many christianists want their version of Christianity put back in public schools and be forced upon all students in those schools despite their religious or non religious affiliations. He's trying to point out their hypocrisy and does a good job doing so.

I had a debate with several members of the church I go to several weeks ago on this exact subject. They said that taking out prayer in schools has been it's downfall. My argument was that they didn't take out prayer. They took out forced prayer. Any kid of whatever faith they are can pray in any public school during their free time and nothing or no one can get in the way of that.

My question to them, is what 'version' of teachings to you want back into school? What institutional religion would be the premise of these policies? They couldn't answer these questions. My last point to them was me pointing out that because our Country is a free country, parents have the choice to send their kids to Christian private schools. Just as Muslim parents can send their kids to Muslim private schools and so on. "Public" means all faiths. You cannot force one faith onto the other.

And speaking from a Christian point of view, forcing our faith into the public domain would be counter to what we believe. But when you hear all these arguments from all over the place in this Country particularly, you see the infection that christianist teachings has on the population and it's members. It makes me nuts.

They also use as an argument that our founding fathers were Christians and our principle documents are based off of Christian principles. This is absurd. Most of our founding fathers were deists. And our beginning documents were stated in such a way to show us that in this Country they didn't want Religious Institutional Control. That's what they ran from. They wanted a truly "free" Country. They also wanted politics and religion separate. They would be pissed right now if they could see how things have gotten here. The Republican party is dominated with christianists and everything they talk about is hypocritical to everything that is taught to us by Christ.