posted March 18, 2012 06:19 AM            

My own personal view is that it's energy, time, money, and effort that is not well-spent. I don't honestly see any point to it. You don't need to pray publicly to pray. You can do it silently, at any time, at any moment. God is always with you if you want to connect. It just seems pointless to me to push for school prayer when it's never really been taken away.

Further, I do agree that forcing people to pray in public schools is unfair. I for one would not want to be forced to pray for/about things if I disagreed with it, nor would I want to be intimidated/pressured to do so even if I wasn't literally forced. I don't want other religions forced on me, so I don't feel that it's fair for me to force mine (liberal Christian) on others, either. I also can't help but feel that a lot of people pushing for this wouldn't be happy if the prayers said were non-Christian prayers (Christianity being the most common religion here, though there are sizable numbers of non-Christians as well as people who are Christian culturally but not spiritually).

That's my basic viewpoint.

The other side argues it as taking God out of schools, but (a) I don't feel that God can be taken out of anywhere--being omnipresent is one of the perks of being God and (b) again, separation of church and state.

posted March 18, 2012 12:47 PM            

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Originally posted by Randall:
Here they have moments of silence in class. And they actually still have public prayer before school sporting events.

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Where I am, I don't know what people do about school prayers before sporting events; there's the national anthem, but I don't know that they do prayer.

They did have some at my college graduation--Christian prayers, mentioning Jesus Christ specifically. The school has numerous different religions as well as non-religious people; not sure why only one group was represented. Seemed odd, given that the school is really diverse and the school is public.

I wonder how non-Christians at my alma mater felt about it, especially considering that it's a non-religious affiliated school.

I'm not anti-prayer obviously, but, at the same time, it's also important to respect student diversity.

I think that perhaps a better solution would have been to invite leaders of different traditions to do a prayer *together* and to do something more unifying, so as to symbolize a coming together of different groups to form one student body.

posted March 20, 2012 05:03 PM            

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Originally posted by YoursTrulyAlways:
Neither is Hebrew on the crest of a university that is supposed to be blind to religious faith. Check out Yale's. How many Presidents in recent times went to Yale?

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interesting...didn't know that!