I assume GEEPERS intends to argue that Ahlquist stopped Christian students from expressing their religious views by taking down the banner. I see four problems with this:
GEEPERS said the banner didn’t promote any specific religion; any religious student can and could always pray or express his religious views as he or she saw fit; this appears to be a situation where the school was endorsing Christianity through the banner, which it can’t do; and again for emphasis, GEEPERS said the banner didn’t promote a specific religion. How can the removal of the banner oppress Christians when the banner didn’t promote any religion?
In reality, of course, “Our Heavenly Father” is not non-denominational. That’s ludicrous. It is used only by Christians and comes from the New Testament. The phrase “your heavenly father” is used by Jesus in Luke just after the Lord’s Prayer (which itself refers to “Our father who art in heaven.”) And while we’re at it:
Please familiarize yourself with the concept of tyranny of the majority and what the authors of the Constitution felt about it.
Boy it sucks to be a persecuted Christian in America. How long do you think it’s going to take before you have to hold services in secret? Five years? Ten years?
You name the fallacy that you are committing, yet you still use it?
Wow!
In any event, would you be offended if you sent your child to a public school and that child had to walk past a prayer to Allah? Or how about a statue of Ganesh?
Why does your religion have to be plastered everywhere?
I feel really bad for the American Christians who are in their 60s and 70s now, who know that despite all the progress they’ve made, they probably won’t live to see an openly Christian US President. But maybe their children will…
Since the OP hasn’t provided one, anyone have a link to the story? I have to say that normally I’m at least marginally sympathetic to a religious viewpoint, despite the fact that I’m an agnostic personally, but even with what I assume is a huge amount of spin from the OP I’m not seeing the problem here. Such a banner should never have been left up for years or decades in the first place, so there should have been no need for one lone atheist to have to tear the thing down. Its a joke to say thT the prayer was nondenominational, unless by that you mean ‘well, among Christian sects’.
At the Reason Rally a few months ago she was presented with a check for her college fund made up of voluntary donations of people who support her effort to stop a publicly funded institution that promoted a specific religion, to the tune of $40,000. Given what she went through to protect her basic rights as a citizen of this country, I don’t think it was enough, and I’m glad shes more.
Your knowledge of the Constitution of this country is exceeded only by your understanding of what persecution actually is. You can come in here and whine about being picked on when there aren’t churches on every other block, when your holidays don’t dominate months of this country’s time, and when politicians can’t openly call for the death or imprisonment of groups of US citizens justified solely on their religious beliefs.
It’s interesting to note that you haven’t come back into this thread to respond to anything. Don’t you feel confident enough in your position to attempt to defend it? Are you so utterly stunned at the straightforward and logical arguments put forth here that you’ve gone into seclusion to rethink your worldview? Are you currently on another forum complaining about how the people on this one aren’t converting in droves because of all your laughably idiotic drive by posts?
It tells you everything you need to know about the outlook of conservative Christians that an atheist can use the court system to make a legal challenge based on Constitutional principles and win, then get rewarded with death threats and public vitriol from religious people, and all of that is proof that atheists are mean and nasty people who are oppressing Christians. It would be a sick situation even if this time it didn’t involve a 16-year-old.
According to Wikipedia there was no physical tearing down of the banner. Ms. Alhquist (with the help of the ACLU) filed a lawsuit to have the banner removed. The OP doesn’t actually claim that Ahlquist ripped the banner down, but the wording had me fooled.
Actually it isn’t a violation of the 1st Amendment. The 1st Amendment doesn’t mention public schools, as you can see by reading it:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
So the 1st Amendment only restricts what Congress can do.
How does an atheist or a Buddhist or Jew follow a creed that asks for gifts from a “heavenly father” they don’t believe in?
No, of course, they won’t. The country is 75 percent Christian or whatever the exact percentage is, and that by itself makes the idea laughably implausible. It’s distasteful that this kind of rhetoric is still used in Western Christianity because it’s given rise to a huge persecution complex in a huge religion - and lots of powerful people feeling persecuted by a small minority is never a good thing. It also belittles the problems experienced by Christians who get into trouble for practicing their faith and once in a while it leads to something stupid like Rush Limbaugh defending the Lord’s Resistance Army cult. And all of that said, atheists don’t want Christians to be forced to worship in secret and that’s not going to be the consequence of this ruling or any other. There is a huge gulf between “the state cannot endorse this religious practice” and “private citizens cannot practice this religion.”
The First Amendment has long been interpreted as prohibiting state establishment of religion, and a public school is part of the state. It does not only apply to Congress.