Many years ago, I attended a public high school student’s graduation ceremony out in what I consider the sticks.
I was amazed at the overt Christianity. There was a prayer at the beginning, and again at the end. The commencement speeches were full of references to God.
My own public high school was roughly one-third Jewish, so this wouldn’t have flown. Someone would have sued, and rightfully so. A Jewish student should be able to go to his own public high school graduation without being told he needs to pray to Jesus Christ.
But out in the sticks, I guess, that sort of thing was okay.
Being a lawyer, I approached the father of the graduate, knowing he was not religious, and asked if he would like to bring a lawsuit against the school district. He said he found the ceremony offensive, but that he owns a business in that town, and he was certainly not going to bring a lawsuit just because they turned his son’s graduation ceremony into a revival meeting. Fair enough. I let the matter drop.
3 thoughts on “THE DARK SIDE: Religion has no place in public schools”
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What flotsam!
A complete waste of taxpayer dollars trying to give this nutcase an education.
Merriam Webster has as ones of it’s definitions of religion as, “a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.” In this context, the author is absolutely correct. My sons, 19 and 21 now, were subjected to Al Gore’s religious movie at least 3-4 times each while in High School. I can show you examples in history textbooks where Reagan and Bush are mentioned, only to cite how important government programs to help people were taken away. Business people are portrayed as polluters. Obscure 19th century feminists/socialists are given half and full paged color exposes. Ben Franklin gets a paragraph and the Federalist Papers gets two sentences.
More people than you think are coming to see these things and understand them for what they are. Sadly, too many have now become a part of it, so they either do not see it, or ridicule those who do….and comment on it.
If there is one biggest problem that my generation (baby-boomers) has caused in spades the construction and acceptance of new-age as well as old-age religions. I remember with disbelief that other students at UW Madison were buying into Transcendental Meditation, Crystals, Uri Geller, Bigfoot, Loch Ness monster, Atlantis, …. I’m certain that this phenomena was not isolated to UW Madison.
These above folks were then the liberals, anti-war demonstrators who had a penchant for disbelieving in science because science was, as usual, in the forefront of supporting the Vietnamese war, and was used often by businesses.
What is humorous is that the erstwhile conservatives such as Reed Schneider and David Ziemer have simply taken up the mantle of the “liberals” of my day — that science is just another belief system, no different from Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or any of the Eastern religions or any of the truths that have been “revealed” through drug-induced stupors. Explicitly the “liberals” of my college days rejected Western science for Eastern and new age mysticism.
In my college days, these same “liberals” simply got an education in subjects for which there is no provable truth — it was simply a matter of could you win an argument, and thought that somehow, truth about the world was embedded in us at birth, and just getting in touch with your inner-self was where real truth lay. It was simple, no math required, no formulas required to understand, no possibility that nature just might behave differently than they desired or imagined.
Thus, the crap from the likes of Ziemer and Schneider, and the clowns at Madison Farmers Market who proclaim that science is just another belief system.
So, seeing everything as religion, they smugly deny anything they don’t like, including the results from Western science. So, these new conservatives, though they proclaim that they are standing up for Western values are certainly not, and are simply modeling the same absurd notions promulgated by 60’s liberals.
So, we see both liberals and conservatives buying into vaccines causing autism or retardation (Oprah or Bachmann, choose your poison), for example. Or the silliness of radiation damage from cell towers signals. Smoking and lung cancer deniers in face of overwhelming Western science evidence otherwise. Climate warming? Can’t be possible, because it still gets cold in winter.