School Removes God From First-Grader's Poem

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Originally Posted by Odysseus

You are assuming that all persons, looking at the same situation, would come to the same conclusions based on the same logical thought process. This is one of the fallacies of those who assume that logic must dictate values and conduct. One can logically decide that a baby has no immediate value, and can therefore be disposed of. Logic, unhinged from any values, breeds more than its share of atrocities

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And logic hinged can see value to life and still dispose of it. Individual rights do not supersede each other irrespective of value assigned to life otherwise there would be no question whether I would receive your kidney. And I don't believe there ever was...

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Originally Posted by Odysseus

You are creating a straw man argument. To state that logic, by itself, does not necessary lead to a moral outcome, does not automatically mean that we must abandon it to a completely irrational faith.

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This is gibberish. Clean it up if you want a reply...

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Originally Posted by Odysseus

Faith, is not, by itself, irrational, since believers can express logical reasons for their belief. But, when it is irrational, it becomes fanaticism, and is just as destructive as secular logic without values

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In a very clumsy way you are making my argument...irrationalism absent rationalism does degenerate into fanaticism, (and I would add) examples are the dark ages, or today’s reactionary Islam and Christianity. Further, since irrationalism does not allow us to question religious edicts there exists no means, other than some form of force, logical or physical, to escape.

And you are mistaken. Faith by itself is fully irrational. Create a logical reason for a belief and there exists no need to have faith in that belief.

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Originally Posted by Odysseus

Rationalism and faith together gave us the Renaissance and the enlightenment. Rationalism alone gave us the gulags. Rationalism alone gives us the means to any end, but the determination of the end is a moral decision, not a logical one.

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So rationalism is a slippery slope from which we cannot recover? You are mistaken. Anytime we can question we can recover from our mistakes. It's only when edicts disallow questions that man is forced to submit. The gulags were the product of authoritarian rule and authoritarianism can be reached when either rational or irrational philosophies are at their worst. The difference is that with the irrationalism there really is a slippery slope from which it is almost impossible to recover...

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Originally Posted by Odysseus

We do want freedom. We just don't think that a small group of judges dictating the rules of our lives based on their whims constitutes freedom.

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My question was with respect to secularism not a hand full of judges. In a nation as diverse as ours you cannot have freedom for everyone without secularism and yet conservatives seem terrified of it. I have to wonder if it is secularism or diversity that they fear...

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Originally Posted by Odysseus

The Constitution is the law of the land, and the Constitution was written in simple, clear language that even a judge should be able to understand. You dislike citizens united, because you believe that corporations should be able to influence elections, but the NY Times is a corporation. Why is it that the Times can endorse a candidate on the OPED page (and omit embarrassing news on the front page) without any issue, but if I were to buy an ad right next to that endorsement and repeated the contents of it, it would be illegal by your logic?

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Why would that be illegal based on my logic? The individual like or dislike for a action does not predicate its legality and it is the legality that is the only thing of importance. You also left out that the Times can do the same thing whether it is a corporation or not as could you if the Times agreed to publish it...

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Originally Posted by Odysseus

No, but then, irrational arguments generally leave me cold. A display of a historical document doesn't infringe my rights, and I'm a member of a minority. It doesn't threaten yours, either, but it does offend you, which is not a rational decision, but an emotional one.

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To view something as irrelevant because it has no application to my life does not imply that I am offended by it, and that is rational, and whether you or I view something as an infringement isn't the question, nor has it ever been. We do not, individually, write the laws that govern our country...which is probably very fortune for all of us...

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Originally Posted by Odysseus

Two things. First, I'm sorry for your Grandmother's horrific experience, but that level of abuse was always grounds for divorce, even back in the 1800s. She did have that option, but chose not to act on it.

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Options are only relevant if you can see them and she couldn't. Liberalisms greatest attribute is that it removes stigma from our lives and allows us to see in order to free ourselves...

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Originally Posted by Odysseus

Your grandmother's experience was highly atypical. Most marriages don't entail 40 years of physical abuse, and the laws back then had remedies, which she either didn't know about, or chose not to take up. It wasn't religion that kept her married, it was her choice, and clearly there may have been rational choices that kept her there (financial security, desire to provide for her children, or maybe she did love him, despite everything). The point is that you are blaming religion for her life, instead of recognizing that she had options that she chose not to take. That's the kind of secular irrationality that we've come to expect from liberals, even as they pride themselves on their rationality.

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Blame religion? Not at all, in fact religion for much of my grandmothers life all she had and was probably the most positive influence throughout. No, if I blame anything it is a society that stuck it's head in the sands with respect to such things and preferred to pretend that abuses didn't happen. What my grandmother was talking about was that by my time women were no longer being ostracized and shunned for abuses that were not their fault nor looked down upon for being divorced; at least by the majority of the country.

The First Amendment basically states that the US would neither establish nor support a state religion:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;"

There are two parts to this statement, both equally important, especially in the context of the late 18th century when it was written. The American colonies were mostly Protestants of varying sects, with a concentration of Catholics (especially in Maryland) and a smattering of Jews, some who had been in North America since the days of New Amsterdam.

European wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics, starting in the 16th century, in addition to the proliferation of Protestant sects, many of whom had been oppressed, targeted, or expelled, made it vital for the budding United States NOT to establish an official church, like the Church of England. However, this in no way indicated that the nation was to be secular. It would have been unthinkable at the time to have had a nation of atheists (or secular humanists). Hence, the second part of the amendment: the new government would not prohibit the free exercise of any religion by its adherents.

So to answer Peter's contention that the nation is secular, the answer is "no", the nation is not secular. The government may not establish a religion nor prevent religious people from practicing their beliefs, but the First Amendment does not create "a secular nation." The government's role is to stay out of the way of religious practice, neither dictating nor preventing it. This way, the government could not exile people, imprison people, or torture and kill them (as had been done in Europe since Martin Luther) based on the existence of a state church or the religion of any given monarch.

Now, does this give freedom from religion? By default, yes it does. Since there is no official state church and the government is out of the membership enforcement business (which is what European government were, in fact, doing), atheists, agnostics, and non church goers could not be coerced by the government into being an Anglican, a Catholic or anything else. This does not mean, however, that the government's job was to enforce atheism--it wasn't. This also does not mean that your God-fearing neighbors can't give you a hard time about not belonging to a church--they can. They just can't deny you the rights guaranteed by your government as a result. So, they cannot prevent you from teaching in a public (state) school, but they can prevent you from teaching in their private religious institution.

As the Bill of Rights is about the rights of the people (and not the rights of the government) it is safe the say that the First Amendment's guidelines on religion were specifically designed to recognize the religious freedoms of the people, not create a government that would enforce secularism.

Of course, there have always been problems between churches and state because certain religious practices impinge on the state's laws: the Mormons and polygamy come to mind, but there have been others. The Amish are a good example, especially in recent decades when the Amish fought (and won) the right to keep their children from attending state high schools and fought for exemptions from certain building codes based on their religious practices. (Amish were jailed for these offenses but were later released.) Great video on the Amish here.

Catholicism has also provided challenges to the First Amendment. "Confessional Privilege" (the right to have confession of a criminal act to a priest be kept confidential and not reported to the police) was gained in an 1813 court case. Such confidentiality was considered as part of religious practice and was protected under the First Amendment. Interestingly, while the Irish Catholics in New York made gains like this one, they actually participated in getting (Protestant) religious instruction removed from public schools in the 1840s:

http://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/timeline/

"Archbishop John Hughes is born in Ireland, where he witnesses oppression of Catholics by the country's ruling Protestant minority. After emigrating to America, he is ordained in Philadelphia and then moves to New York, where parents have taken many of the city's 12,000 Catholic children out of the public school system. They see the schools as bigoted against Catholics and object to the use of the Protestant King James version of the Bible. Arguing that no religion should be favored above another, Hughes petitions the city council, demanding Catholics be given money to set up their own schools. After losing the vote, he turns to politics, urging Catholics to vote for his slate of candidates in the 1841 state elections. Nearly all of his candidates win, and in 1842 the state passes a bill ending religious instruction in public schools. Four days later, riots break out; bricks are thrown through Hughes' windows, and the doors of his house are kicked in."

So the impetus of the secularization of public schools actually begins with the Catholic church. Go figure. Of course, you're really talking about an Irish vs English political rift underneath the religious argument as well. The Irish were not too welcome in the US during their potato famine, brought on, of course, by overfarming and the plantation system that the British had brought to the Emerald Isle.

The other problem, of course, is what happens when the state strikes down its own laws related to moral behavior, which are supported by many religious Americans. For example, sodomy laws were consistent in almost every US state up to the 1970s. The state's law coincided with religious "law" (or a religious concept of "sin"). Of course the state's interest in these laws was not a religious one, although the interest of the general population may certainly have been. The state was interested in the social stability gained by (heterosexual) marriage, which was the best guarantee of security for children. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the family preceded (and superseded) the American Constitution and was regarded as the building block of societal stability. Homosexual behavior was seen as undermining the whole paradigm of the family and, therefore, of stability. While dovetailing with religion, the state's interest was not construed as a religious one.

However, the gay rights movement based its argument on the state's interest in applying all its laws equally to all citizens (the "Equal Protections" clause of the 14th amendment, originally designed for freed slaves). This legal argument--which preceded the cultural shift we have seen over the past 20 years--was the basis for the legal challenges to the sodomy laws. As sodomy laws fell and homosexuality was no longer criminal, this opened the door to open homosexuality and the demand for not only rights but representation. To religious people, this is a major problem, as homosexuality is still a sin in many religious circles. While not necessarily opposed to decriminalization, many religious people ARE opposed to its current moral neutrality and, here in California, to its active promotion in the public schools. Suddenly, something your religion teaches you is a terrible sin is now a behavior protected (and in CA promoted) by the state. The state and religious Americans are now at odds. This is what brings out the political activism that you are seeing. There is no established church to prevent this, and the government has been argued out of sodomy laws, so it's up to the religious to prevent what they perceive as a sin from becoming legitimized and promoted.

Oddly enough, the gay rights movement has turned to marriage as its way to gain acceptance. The very building block of society that homosexual behavior was seen to undermine is now the brass ring that the movement is fighting for. In some ways, this is gratifying since there is a desire for societal stability. In other ways, especially if you read Michael Savage, it's rather threatening, since Savage actually wants to change the nature of marriage once gays obtain the right.

However, and this goes back to Peter, the religious in this country have as much a right to fight what they consider to be wrong, sinful or evil behavior as the gays have a right to fight what they consider to be oppression. The First amendment secures the right for the religious to practice, freed of state interference, and the history of this country demonstrates over and over again how the religious folk in America fight to make their notion of right and wrong the law of the land. Whether you agree or not is immaterial: the right to the free exercise of religion is guaranteed and, sometimes, that free exercise will have political ramifications. It's inevitable.

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Originally Posted by PeterS

So once again you are making the argument that the founders didn't intend us to be free. So why is it you screech so much when you perceive you freedom being encroached upon?

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Um, no. It says free exercise thereof. When due to the pining of atheists, religious symbols are removed from the public square, doesn't that mean that the atheist religious point of view is being thrust upon the majority? Putting up a Nativity scene or a sign that says Merry Christmas in front of city hall is hardly respecting an establishment a religion. Christmas Day is a federal holiday. Would you like to revoke that? Do you brow beat your boss to work on 12/25?

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Originally Posted by NJCardFan

Um, no. It says free exercise thereof. When due to the pining of atheists, religious symbols are removed from the public square, doesn't that mean that the atheist religious point of view is being thrust upon the majority? Putting up a Nativity scene or a sign that says Merry Christmas in front of city hall is hardly respecting an establishment a religion. Christmas Day is a federal holiday. Would you like to revoke that? Do you brow beat your boss to work on 12/25?

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As the Bill of Rights is about the rights of the people (and not the rights of the government) it is safe the say that the First Amendment's guidelines on religion were specifically designed to recognize the religious freedoms of the people, not create a government that would enforce secularism.

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Originally Posted by Elspeth

The First Amendment basically states that the US would neither establish nor support a state religion:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;"

<snip>

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http://gifs.gifbin.com/1233928590_ci...20clapping.gif

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Originally Posted by NJCardFan

http://gifs.gifbin.com/1233928590_ci...20clapping.gif

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Clapping for the First Amendment? :friendly_wink:

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Originally Posted by Generation Why?

Correct. However it is mentioned in the explanation of a certain rule in one of our founding documents.

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That's a private letter to members of a church stating personal opinion...it has zero to do with the 1st Amendment.

If one of our Libtards can point to me where the government of the United States has officially endorsed one religion...be it the Catholic Church...Judaism...Baptist Buhddist or even Islam as the "official" religion of the United States...then I'll believe we have a seperation of church and state 1st Amendment violation.

Till then you're just continuing to prove you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

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Originally Posted by PeterS

And logic hinged can see value to life and still dispose of it. Individual rights do not supersede each other irrespective of value assigned to life otherwise there would be no question whether I would receive your kidney. And I don't believe there ever was...

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Individual rights do not supersede each other if your logical framework concedes individual rights. Without a moral compass, logic simply guides us to our preferences more efficiently, but that does not mean that logic cannot lead us to atrocities.

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Originally Posted by PeterS

This is gibberish. Clean it up if you want a reply...

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It isn't gibberish, but you clearly don't understand it. The absence of logic does not automatically presume faith. One can be a nihilist and still be illogical or irrational. To conclude that anyone who doesn't reason exactly the way that you do is espousing faith-based arguments is a straw man. As to whether I want a reply, well... let's just say that your entertainment value is diminishing with each post. Don't feel the need to respond to everything that I say.

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Originally Posted by PeterS

In a very clumsy way you are making my argument...irrationalism absent rationalism does degenerate into fanaticism, (and I would add) examples are the dark ages, or today’s reactionary Islam and Christianity. Further, since irrationalism does not allow us to question religious edicts there exists no means, other than some form of force, logical or physical, to escape.

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First, irrationalism is not a doctrine, so to claim that it allows or doesn't allow us to question edicts or dogmas is false. A fanatical Muslim is perfectly free to question the edicts of other sects, just as fanatical Catholics and Protestants fought tooth and nail over dogmatic details. Different faiths have different approaches to existential issues, some of which are rational (one of the fundamental differences between the Judeo-Christian interpretation of creation and the Muslim interpretation is that the Judeo-Christian interpretation accepts that there are physical laws in the universe, while Islamic doctrine states that everything that exists is due to the will of Allah, and that causal relationships are illusions. This is why Judeo-Christian countries have a history of scientific inquiry, while Islamic countries do not (the advances in science credited to Islam were mostly looted from the cultures that they conquered, and many of the Islamic scholars that we associate with advances were converts who had to continue their studies in spite of the rule of the caliphate, not because of it). The Dark Ages were not simply caused by irrational faith. The collapse of the Roman civil order led to anarchy and constant warfare in which barbarian tribes destroyed most of the knowledge that had been amassed by the Romans and Greeks, and the survivors were too busy trying to stay alive to advance human knowledge.

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Originally Posted by PeterS

And you are mistaken. Faith by itself is fully irrational. Create a logical reason for a belief and there exists no need to have faith in that belief.

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On the contrary, faith can be rational. The scientific method demands that we believe in a hypothesis enough to test it and accept the results. The founders of the great universities of Europe were religious men who believed that the discovery of natural law brought them closer to God. Our entire concept of quantum physics is based on belief in things that cannot be seen.

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Originally Posted by PeterS

So rationalism is a slippery slope from which we cannot recover? You are mistaken. Anytime we can question we can recover from our mistakes. It's only when edicts disallow questions that man is forced to submit. The gulags were the product of authoritarian rule and authoritarianism can be reached when either rational or irrational philosophies are at their worst. The difference is that with the irrationalism there really is a slippery slope from which it is almost impossible to recover...

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Hardly. If that were true, then we would never have had the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. In fact, the Renaissance came about precisely because men of faith chose to embrace the natural world and observe it directly. The Protestant Reformation was a faith-based rebellion against doctrine. The gulags were the product of authoritarian rule, but that rule had its own relentless logic, a secular ideology that held that the state and the party were the center of life, not the individual. Flawed logic can lead to despotism, but there is no perfect logic, because there are no perfect minds to contemplate it. We are flawed beings, who seek to advance, but our logic alone cannot do it. Logic can teach us to split the atom, but it cannot tell us what to do when we have done so. Logic can teach us that life has value, but logic can also tell us that the human brain is a more efficient delivery system than a missile, and that a single suicide bomber can advance a cause that a hundred missiles cannot. Logic is neither good nor evil, it is only a tool to find our way towards one or the other, but the decision to seek good or evil must be ours. That requires values that transcend logic.

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Originally Posted by PeterS

My question was with respect to secularism not a hand full of judges. In a nation as diverse as ours you cannot have freedom for everyone without secularism and yet conservatives seem terrified of it. I have to wonder if it is secularism or diversity that they fear...

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So, we weren't free when schools had prayer? We weren't free when the City of Los Angeles had a cross in its coat of arms? We won't be free as long as there is a chaplain opening the sessions of the Supreme Court and the congress? We are not free as long as the president is sworn in on a Bible?

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Originally Posted by PeterS

Why would that be illegal based on my logic? The individual like or dislike for a action does not predicate its legality and it is the legality that is the only thing of importance. You also left out that the Times can do the same thing whether it is a corporation or not as could you if the Times agreed to publish it...

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It would be illegal because a corporation buying the ad would have fewer rights to express itself than the Times corporation that has the option of running the ad, if your objections to Citizens United were to stand. And the Times doesn't need to buy ads. It already has a venue to publish its opinions. Prior to Citizens United, news corporation had more rights to publish opinions than any other corporation or individual. Citizens United simply established that all corporations had the same basic right to disseminate information, or rather, that the individuals who form a corporation for the purpose of producing a product do not abrogate their rights under the First Amendment when they act as a group. Why do you find that objectionable?

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Originally Posted by PeterS

To view something as irrelevant because it has no application to my life does not imply that I am offended by it, and that is rational, and whether you or I view something as an infringement isn't the question, nor has it ever been. We do not, individually, write the laws that govern our country...which is probably very fortune for all of us...

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If it were truly irrelevant to you, you wouldn't object to its display or feel threatened by its presence (and you do claim that its presence threatens your freedoms), so clearly, it does offend you. Whether your reaction is rational or not (and I don't think that it is), the logic by which I arrived at your motivation is pretty clear. And while we do not write the laws individually, the case can be made that our legislators no longer write them at all, since the courts can now decide, not only what is and is not Constitutional, but can change the intent of a law to suit their own biases, regardless of the letter, spirit or explicit intent of the legislators. This is why we have Obamacare, for example. As written, the individual mandate is an unconstitutional mandate that is too broad to be covered by the Interstate Commerce Clause, but if it is a tax, it is within congress' authority under Article I of the Constitution, but since the law was passed as a mandate, and not a tax, the retroactive application of a new definition has made it legal. In this regard, the Supreme Court rewrote the law in order to allow it to pass muster, but writing laws is not a function of the courts, now is it?

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Originally Posted by PeterS

Options are only relevant if you can see them and she couldn't. Liberalisms greatest attribute is that it removes stigma from our lives and allows us to see in order to free ourselves...

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Options are relevant, whether you see them or not. The world didn't have to invert its standards in order to address your grandmother's myopiea. The elimination of the stigma of divorce has opened a floodgate that has made marriage into a far less stable institution, with the result that children now grow up in what used to be called broken homes, with massive expansions of social pathologies that accompany them.

Many studies have shown that children of divorce have more behavioral and conduct problems when compared with the children in intact two-parent families. ^[1] They have more aggressive, impulsive, and antisocial behaviors and more problems in their relationships with their mothers and fathers. They exhibit lower academic achievement, with three of four children showing a deterioration from their previous school performance. Children who experience the divorce at younger ages are more likely to have problems. Divorced boys living with their fathers and divorced daughters living with their mothers showed fewer effects than children living with the opposite-sex parent. ^[9]

And that's just for starters.

Each year, over 1 million American children suffer the divorce of their parents; moreover, half of the children born this year to parents who are married will see their parents divorce before they turn 18. Mounting evidence in social science journals demonstrates that the devastating physical, emotional, and financial effects that divorce is having on these children will last well into adulthood and affect future generations. Among these broad and damaging effects are the following:

• Children whose parents have divorced are increasingly the victims of abuse. They exhibit more health, behavioral, and emotional problems, are involved more frequently in and drug abuse, and have higher rates of suicide.
  
• Children of divorced parents perform more poorly in reading, spelling, and math. They also are more likely to repeat a grade and to have higher drop-out rates and lower rates of college graduation.
  
• Families with children that were not poor before the divorce see their income drop as much as 50 percent. Almost 50 percent of the parents with children that are going through a divorce move into poverty after the divorce.
  
• Religious worship, which has been linked to better health, longer marriages, and better Family life, drops after the parents divorce.

The divorce of parents, even if it is amicable, tears apart the fundamental unit of American society. Today, according to the Federal Reserve Board's 1995 Survey of Consumer Finance, only 42 percent of children aged 14 to 18 live in a "first marriage" family--an intact two-parent married family. It should be no surprise to find that divorce is having such profound effects on society.

Restoring the importance of marriage to society and the welfare of children will require politicians and civic leaders to make this one of their most important tasks. It also will require a modest commitment of resources to pro-marriage programs. Fiscal conservatives should realize that federal and state governments spend $150 billion per year to subsidize and sustain single-parent families. By contrast, only $150 million is spent to strengthen marriage. Thus, for every $1,000 spent to deal with the effects of Family disintegration, only $1 is spent to prevent that disintegration. Refocusing funds to preserve marriage by reducing divorce and illegitimacy not only will be good for children and society, but in the long run will save money.
Liberalism removed a stigma, but that stigma served a purpose. People who abandon marriages without cause (and the vast majority of divorces today are not for the kinds of causes that your grandmother faced) sentence their children to increased risk of poverty, emotional instability, abuse and academic failure. That should be stigmatized.

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Originally Posted by PeterS

Blame religion? Not at all, in fact religion for much of my grandmothers life all she had and was probably the most positive influence throughout. No, if I blame anything it is a society that stuck it's head in the sands with respect to such things and preferred to pretend that abuses didn't happen. What my grandmother was talking about was that by my time women were no longer being ostracized and shunned for abuses that were not their fault nor looked down upon for being divorced; at least by the majority of the country.

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You certainly implied that you blamed religion for forcing your grandmother into a bad marriage and keeping her there. As you stated in the previous post, "It turned out that my grandmother, who, at the age of 26 was regarded as a spinster by her parents, community, and perticulary church was pressured to marry my grandfather which she finally relented to. My grandfather then proceeded to beat and abused her for all of the 40 plus years they were married until god finally had mercy on her and called the SOB to heaven." So, was religion a comfort to her, or was it an irrational pressure that forced her into 40 years of painful marriage with a cruel man? And if the irrational faith was a comfort, then wasn't it part of the psychological cage that kept her in that marriage? You can't have it both ways.

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Originally Posted by txradioguy

That's a private letter to members of a church stating personal opinion...it has zero to do with the 1st Amendment.

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I am to beleieve that Thomas Jefferson, in a personal letter, explaining what the 1st Amendment is, is not in fact Thomas Jefferson explaining what the 1st Amendment is? You should be a politician.