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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (26773)	12/9/1998 8:40:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 108807

Bob, Whoa, easy now. Let's try and make sense. Someone posted a few days ago he wanted America to be a tyranny of the majority. Some people do want that. Fortunately, we have a bill of rights, passed precisely to protect the basic rights of minorities from erosion by the majority. If we came to the point where a majority believed that, for example, Jews, or Moslems, should be prohibited from public practice of their faith, the courts would have to tell the majority that this cannot legally be done. Well, the majority of parents want prayer back in schools Please provide the statistics, with attribution. <i<because they believe it will help curb the rapid decline of moral standards in schools. School prayer will have no more effect on morals that the daily recitation of the pledge of allegiance has on patriotism. Most students have no idea what the pledge means, why would prayers be any different? The responsibility for arresting the moral decline in and out of school rests with parents, not schools. It should be noted that religiosity is not an essential precondition to ethical behaviour. As schools have preached secularism in schools (which is the state religion now) Absolutely ridiculous. How many times must I say this: Public schools must be secular because teaching any one religion would violate the religious freedom of students who are not members of that religion. Get it? Schools cannot and do not teach that there is no God. Neither should they teach that there is a God. They are and should be neutral on the subject. There is a real need for instruction in ethics, which cross religious boundaries and therefore violate no freedoms. There is no need to teach people that knifing your fellow students or sniffing crack is bad because God doesn't like it and he will send you to hell after you die. We can teach them that they are bad because our society finds them unacceptable, and we can and will put you in jail - a reasonable approximation of hell - right now. Aside from the fact that indulging in these activities means that you will probably never have a decent job or be president or any of those other good things, all of which are far more immediate - and hence stronger inducements to good behavior - than the prospect of post-mortem punishment. The observation of wildly unethical behaviour among prominent religious and secular leaders probably has more to do with the moral decline than the removal of prayer from schools. BTW, your beliefs do not irritate me, though I do not share them. What does occasionally irritate me is your failure to acknowledge or address most of the better points made by other members of the discussion. If you wish to change this, the item in bold-face type above would be a good place to start. Steve

To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (26773)	12/9/1998 10:06:00 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

When Ammo was in the sixth grade, he was assigned a book for English. A day or two later, a note came home from the teacher saying that because of the objections of some parents, she was not requiring the book and that parents could see her for alternative choices. This did not make the complaining parents happy---they felt the book should be banned completely because it dealt with idol worship and was anti-Christian and violent. Well, I rushed out and bought the book. No way was Ammo going to read such potentially evil and damaging literature without my reading it first and our discussing it! It took an hour to read The Egypt Game. It was a charming story about several children in a mixed neighborhood who read about the Egyptians and form a club. They do build a little altar, but it was hardly devil worship and unless you suffer from severe paranoia and an unhealthy fixation on keeping your child isolated from any thoughts that may differ from your own culture, and are unwilling to grant your offspring the magical games and thinking of childhood, it was completely innocent. Ammo read it with not much reaction. He did not turn Egyptian on us. He did not stop saying blessing at dinner with us (although his older brother has now); he did not begin worshipping jackal-headed gods. Later that year, some Christian parents went ballistic about a book in the middle school that dealt with World War II. It had profanity and violence; it confronted the horrors of war and death graphically, and it was extremely well written. (I read it, too.) The high school had a copy, as did the middle school and the intermediate school. The battle tore our little town apart. The Christian element resorted to the worst kind of attacks on the character of teachers and librarians (who were, incidentally Christians and parents both). I volunteered in the library and knew these people. They were wonderful, educated, caring professionals, and they were terribly hurt by this. The School Board finally voted to remove the book from the intermediate school and leave it in the upper schools. The silly thing is until these parents went crazy, that book had NEVER been checked out at the intermediate school. Of course, as soon as the battle became public, it was the most sought after book in the library. I truly am baffled by your belief that the public school is trying to take away your child's God. The absence of religion is not an attack on the beliefs of your child, but an attempt to protect all children's individual beliefs. If you really feel that the academic teachings of public school are damaging, have you considered home-schooling or private schools? There are reasonably priced schools and there is financial assistance available for many. Madalyn Murray O'Hair was not wrong to protect her child from the enforced indoctrination of Christian prayer in school. Apparently for her, this practice was as repulsive as you would probably find the forced reciting of the Vedas, or the memorization of the Sufi Doctrine. Atheists certainly have no monopoly on hypocrisy, nor Christians on compassion. What about the "Christian" parents who turn their back on a son dying of AIDS? People are not GROUPS. They are separate individuals, capable of moral thought and decision. How destructive to teach one's children to think in terms of US and THEM, judging on some label rather than on the character of the person involved. How narrow their world would be.