I never believed, but I was dragged to church as a kid, by fairly religious parents. I was never comfortable with being told to pray, even when I knew perfectly well what to say. I was worried about being a hypocrite. Then I quit worrying about it, because since I didn’t believe it in, it didn’t matter to me if I was stepping on someone else’s belief unless they thought I was. But it took me years to get to that point.
I will say, almost everybody went to church, some regularly, most not, but one guy didn’t, ever. I don’t know if he was an atheist, but he also refused to pray. And he was teased about it, and people told him he was going to hell.
People also tried to get him to lie about it, so our class could have a chance at getting our Church Count to 100%. He wouldn’t do that, either.
Nobody would have called me shy, but I was just a bit too insecure to walk out of the class so as not to have to hear the prayer. If it was just reading a Bible verse to the class, well, I could do that. I still didn’t feel good about it but it was no worse than reading any other book.
The more that I think about it I don’t think I’d have much of a problem being called on to read a Bible verse or passage as long as I got to pick which one ;). Though I’d probally stop getting called on eventually.
Well, considering it was a Catholic hospital, I don’t think it WOULD be out of the ordinary. Nor do I think anyone could complain if they did have a problem. (If they accepted a job there)
If I’m remembering correctly, in elementary school (for me 1958-1963), we started each day with The Lord’s Prayer.
As others have pointed out, this was strictly ritual. We had learned the prayer’s words by rote…they were pure sound and nothing more (does any 2nd grader know what “hallowed” means?).
By the time of the Supreme Court decision, I was pretty well out of elementary school. I don’t remember prayer being a part of my regular school experience after that. However, all through high school, long after the decision was handed down, we continued to say The Lord’s Prayer at the start of assemblies.
I can recall writing a paper on this in my 12th grade Problems of Democracy class. I pointed out that maybe, just maybe, we ought not be doing this in light of the Supreme Court decision. I also pointed out how meaningless it was for hundreds of students to parrot words completely by sound, and wondered what was really being accomplished in having us do this.
The P.O.D. teacher, who was a very conservative man and doubtless disagreed with my views, nevertheless wrote on my paper that I had presented my argument very well!
School prayer was mostly gone from Lexington KY by the time I was in school, though I vaguely remember The Littlest Angel and a couple nativity plays. I recall that they had a Bible as literature class at my high school but there was no pressure to take that course.
I also recall that a student died from a chronic illness and the principal, after announcing his death, recommended we bow our heads for a moment of silence. Whereupon a fellow student merrily began to sing “Another One Bites the Dust.”
I’m atheist or at least agnostic, and I think religion in general is silly, but I don’t quite understand why they can’t just do it like they do it at college. There’s religious meetings or servings for those that need them, in the various flavors, at a particular time, or you can abstain entirely if you wish. Why not just give a particular period to religious studies, or an after school club, and make it optional and segregated by religious affiliation?
OTOH I can see where conflict can come into play when a coach wants to say a prayer before a big game or a principal wants to say a prayer before graduation or something. But even ignoring the heathens, do even small towns have such a majority of one particular denomination of Christianity that they don’t recognize the need for a more involving ceremony?
As a matter of fact, quite a number of the “classic” church/state cases have been brought by minority Christian sects (or local minority, like Catholics in certain places).
It’s not so much that as it is the idea that a “non-denominational” that only mentions God (& not say Jesus) is inclusive since “*everybody *believes in God in one for or another”. :rolleyes: Take NYS’s Regent’s Prayer; which was written by a panel of Catholic, Protestant, & Jewish clergy.
No prayer in school that I can recall in my Chicago suburb in the late '60s/early '70s.
By about the 5th grade I had begun skipping over the “under God” line in the pledge of allegiance. If anybody even noticed, they didn’t care.
But we did sing Jesus-based carols in school Christmas pageants, and I don’t remember anybody getting bent out of shape over it.
And if someone HAD become bent out of shape over it, that person would have been ostracized. Look at what happened to Newdow and his daughter…“After the Ninth Circuit decision, Newdow received numerous death threats and other abusive messages on his phone answering machine. His daughter, then eight years old, was living elsewhere for her own safety”. Most people know very well what would happen if they made any sort of fuss about school-sponsored religion.
The lone Jewish girl in my junior high school got a lot of oh-so-well-intended shit from our home room teacher because she did not wish to participate in the Christian prayer he led every morning, much less his readings FROM THE CHURCH OF GOD IN CHRIST SUNDAY SCHOOL LESSON. And his attempts to convert her led to any amount of not-well-intentioned-at-all shit from her classmates.
I was born 4 years after Oak.
Contrariwise, during the the two years I spent at Christian Brothers High School as one of the few non-Catholic students, I never had any problems with being forced or pressured to pray. There may have been a size issue involved, though.
One main point of a public prayer is for the majority denomination(s) to imply that there are, in fact, no significant other beliefs to involve in the ceremony. Hence the emphasis on 100% participation mentioned several times in this thread. Hence the longing to go back to the good old days when it was just US and none of THEM, or at least THEY knew not to rock the boat.
Having an inclusive ceremony that allowed minority belief systems a share of the limelight directly harms that projection of monolithic uniformity, which is why they don’t want to do it.
How do your quotations refute the hypothesis that, “Everybody believes in God in one form or another”? I’m not saying the hypothesis is or was true, mind you. I’m claiming that it had a reasonable basis as applied to the US in 1962-3. It seems to me that the opinion didn’t address that hypothesis: rather it was consistent with the foundational principle that intermingling church and state acts to the detriment of both.
Or, to go about as far in religious debate as I would care to in GQ, that the proper methodology is not to cite single-verse prooftexts, but to refer to the full context of Jesus’s message to find out what it was that He actually was teaching.
Proper methodology is important in any discipline, including moral theology.