http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php?p=916476&postcount=3http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php?p=1546497&postcount=1http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php?p=2289735&postcount=2Here's my own reply to a variant of that email, written long ago and saved into a text document for some reason
>Let's see, I think it started when Madeline Murray O'Hare complained she
>didn't want any prayer in our schools, and we said OK
First of all, it did not start with Madalyn Murray-O'Hair -- she was actually a soft of a 'Johnny-come-lately' to the school prayer debate. The first movements to remove teacher-led prayer from schools began several decades earlier.
It was the Engel v. Vitale case in 1962 in which the Supreme Court banned state composed prayer from public schools. The principle invovled came from a 1943 Supreme Court decision, in which it was written that no school official "high or petty" could "prescribe what shall be orthodox in . . . relgion."
O'Hair had nothing to do with that decision. Her case (Murray v. Curlett) came up a year later, and was one of two cases responsible for the banning of organized Bible-reading in schools. The companion case, Abington School District v. Schempp, was actually the deciding case; it struck down laws and practices allowing or requiring Bible readings, prayers, and other religious exercises during the school day, holding that "as the state cannot forbid, neither can it perform or aid in performing the religious function."
What you folks keep forgetting are the first five words in the above quote: "AS THE STATE CANNOT FORBID, neither can it perform or aid in performing the religious function."
Bibles and prayers have never, ever been forbidden from schools. Any school which denies any child the right to pray or read a Bible in private has violated the civil rights of that child. All the atheists have asked for is that the prohibitions receive equal attention to the permissions, nothing more.
>Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school.... the Bible that
>says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as
>yourself. And we said, OK.
Society did not say OK to this or anything like it. What we said NO to was the idea that the government could pick a particular version of the Bible to read to its students. That was the issue for Abington School District v. Schempp (1963). It is wrong to read this decision as a prohibition against having a Bible in school.
>Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave
>because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their
>self-esteem. And we said, an expert should know what he's talking about so we
>said OK, we won't spank them anymore.
The problem isn't spanking; the problem is beating. The law says that you cannot beat your children, not that you cannot spank your children. The only people who need to avoid spanking are those who can't tell the difference between spanking and beating, and there such avoidance is good for everyone, since parents locked in prison for beating their kids to death don't do good for anyone.
I certainly hope you're not advocating beating kids to death as an acceptable punishment, as it was in the Old Testament. I hope we're beyond that.
>Then someone said teachers and principals better not discipline our children
>when they misbehave. And the school administrators said no faculty member in
>this school better touch a student when they misbehave because we don't want
>any bad publicity, and we surely don't want to be sued. And we accepted their
>reasoning.
Certainly it is not true that teachers and principals are forbidden from disciplining our children when they misbehave. If anything discipline has gotten stricter over the years, what with so-called "zero tolerance" policies.
Are you saying that beating and humiliating should be acceptable conduct for our teachers and principals? Again, I certainly hope not!
>Then someone said, let's let our daughters have abortions if they want, and
>they won't even have to tell their parents. And we said, that's a grand idea.
>Then some wise school board member said, since boys will be boys and they're
>going to do it anyway, let's give our sons all the condoms they want, so they
>can have all the fun they desire, and we won't have to tell their parents they
>got them at school. And we said, that's another great idea.
First of all, this is factually erroneous. In most states either the parents of minor females must consent to an abortion or there must be a court order permitting it.
Condoms are dispensed at some schools because "they're going to do it anyway" is a fact, and that leaves us with a choice of making disease prevention available or allowing STDs to spread like wildfire through the sexually active population of our schools. Teaching abstinence has NEVER worked in schools, never in all of history. If it did, we wouldn't need condoms in schools.
A century ago young girls "came of age" around the age of 17, and got married about the same time, so it was no big deal to have them wait until marriage to think about sex. (But then, a century or two ago, women weren't supposed to enjoy sex anyway.) Today, however, doctors have noted that girls (particularly black girls) as young as 7 and 8 years old are developing breasts and pubic hair.
THAT is why sexual activity has picked up in children under 15. Overactive hormones and abstinence simply don't mix. The solution is to open up communications about pregnancy, AIDS and other STDs, and to help our children be responsible for their actions.
>Then some of our top elected officials said it doesn't matter what we do in
>private as long as we do our jobs. And agreeing with them, we said it doesn't
>matter to me what anyone, including the President, does in private as long as
>I have a job and the economy is good.
Are you suggesting that our government should indeed spy on us in the privacy of our own bedroom, just to make sure that nobody does anything which society would consider immoral? Should my wife and I be prosecuted for having oral sex, since many Christians feel that it's immoral? Would YOU want a TV camera mounted in your bedroom, like in the book "1984?"
>And then someone said let's print magazines with pictures of nude women and
>call it wholesome, down-to-earth appreciation for the beauty of the female
>body. And we said we have no problem with that.
Actually, photography is a fairly recent invention. What about the art museum, and works such as Boticelli's "The Birth of Venus," or Salvador Dali's version of Leda with the swan? The ancient greeks used nude for the bulk of their art, and they don't seem to have suffered much from that sort of "exposure!"
>And someone else took that appreciation a step further and published pictures
>of nude children and then stepped further still by making them available on
>the internet. And we said everyone's entitled to free speech.
We said no such thing. In fact, few things will get you into jail faster than distributing pictures of naked children over the Internet. You may have heard about the woman who was recently arrested and prosecuted because she took pictures of her baby daughter in the bathtub for her private album . . .
>And the entertainment industry said, let's make TV shows and movies that
>promote profanity, violence, and illicit sex. And let's record music that
>encourages rape, drugs, murder, suicide, and satanic themes. And we said it's
>just entertainment, it has no adverse effect, and nobody takes it seriously
>anyway, so go right ahead.
The very worst example of that kind of thing is rap music -- and if more people actually listened to rap, it would be banned.
There are well-defined limits to free speech. A few examples: you don't have a right to spout out false facts; you don't have the right to falsely shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater; you don't have the right to libel or slander someone.
If a certain theme (rap, drugs, suicide) has not been brought into court, it's because there is no causal connection between it and wrongful activity. And law enforcement officers -- who tend to be conservative -- realize this.
>Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't
>know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their
>classmates, and themselves. Probably, if we think about it long and hard
>enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with... "WE
>REAP WHAT WE SOW."
Frankly, the sowing was the rise of Christian fundamentalism in our nation.
Perhaps you heard of the suicide note left by a woman recently who drove herself and her three kids into the Missouri river to their deaths. She did it to settle a bitter divorce action and to deprive her husband of any further contact with her kids. She was so certain that her innocent little kids would go with her immediately to Heaven, that she was willing to commit suicide and their murder to get away from her husband, who was apparently winning in the court action between them.
The media is overly friendly towards Christian fundamentalism, and tends to play down the religious connections of people who commit atrocities such as that suicidal woman. And the media is all too ready to accuse kids who commit atrocities of being "Satanists" or "devil worshipers" when it is highly likely that none of these kids ever thought once about worshiping Satan in their whole lives.
Children have a natural feeling of immortality. Christian fundamentalism feeds that feeling of immortality, and also fails to instill moral behavior because it does not teach moral nuances.
To an atheist, a murder is the most unforgiveable of actions, since it ends a life forever. As Clint Eastwood put it, "It's a terrible thing to kill a man. You take away all he has, and all he's ever going to have."
But when a Christian goes on a shooting spree in school, he does so under the belief that he won't really die; that God will take care of anybody who is killed; and that a High School shooting spree is no worse of a transgression than taking the Lord's name in vain (both are equal sins according to the Ten Commandments).
It isn't that we don't teach right from wrong, it's that we don't teach the difference between an error of manners and an unforgivable breach of society's rules.
It isn't that atheists have expelled God from schools; it's that the kind of drivel that appears on your website has expelled truth and reason from public discourse.
Case in point:
>Dear God,
>
>Why didn't you save the little girl in Michigan?
>
>Sincerely,
>Concerned Student
>
>AND THE REPLY:
>
>Dear Concerned Student,
>
>I am not allowed in schools.
>
>Sincerely,
>God
Believe it or not, it's pieces of disingenuity like that that have driven countless people AWAY from Christianity. What kind of human being would take someone's very real questions and doubts about the universe and the meaning of life, and turn them into political leverage?
Shame on you.
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