In Texas, there is a furor over not being allowed organized prayer at football games and other public school events.
What reasoning do public prayer advocates use to ignore or dismiss these bible verses? Matthew chapter 6:
5"And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward.
6"But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and you Father who sees in secret will reward you openly…
8"Therefore do not be like them. For your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him.
Is there something else in the bible that supercedes these verses? Why do they insist on including me and the rest of the stadium in their rituals?
Becaue either they don’t know about that verse, or it is simply too inconvenient for them to acknolwedge it.
I have a cousin who is a fundamentalist Christian, and we discussed public prayer (such as in football stadiums) via an e-mail debate. I was actually aware of that quote from the Bible and sent it to him. I never got a real response, and he has never brought up the subject again.
The people at No Pray, No Play (a Texas based organization that supports and promotes prayer at public school sporting events) has this to say in their statement to non-Christians.
This is a rather bizzare reading of the text. It is clear Jesus is instructing his followers and not the hypocrites. Their arguement is rather weak, as well. Jesus was talking about lay people attemping to appear pious with public displays of prayer, not clergymen leading prays for for their parishioners.
I would say that this verse is speaking to people who would pray in public just for the recognition. It’s basically saying, If you’re gonna pray, do it for the right reasons.
If you go to a Christian friend’s house, and they say grace before a meal, do you just start chowing down as they say their prayer, or do you just wait for them to be finished, thus respecting their beliefs?
If the prayer was objectionable to a good majority of students, then they’ll use the same means that the students who pray used to gain the ability to pray, to try and stop the prayer.
I would call it selective adherence to the scriptures. I am sure a fundie could come up with a host of scriptures requiring everyone else to listen to them pray. You attend a football game to watch football, you don’t attend the football game for religious purposes. Each city has multiple churches with multiple denominations with multiple beliefs and viewpoints. There isn’t a “fits all” invocation to start off the event.
Watching someone pray (not that you have to watch… I trust you can entertain yourself for 15 seconds) bothers you why? No one is making THEM pray, that their choice. If you dont believe thats fine, but they do so they chose to pray. Why does the fact that you can SEE their choice offend you? Should all Christians just “take it to the closet”? Yes, I agree that no one should pray publicly so that others can see them and “know” how holy they are. However, that argument just doesn’t stand up in this case.
It’s inherently discriminatory. By offering solely a Christian prayer, you’re excluding Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. Plus, there’s the whole separation of church and state dealie.
I’m sure the Fundies would be the first to protest if someone were to lobby for stopping school three times a day to pray towards Mecca.
One more tidbit–suppose I wanted to offer up a prayer to Satan (hypothetical, I’m atheistic, not Satanic). Would you sit there quietly and twiddle your thumbs while I exhorted my Dark Master to grant me power to gnaw on the bones of the Holy?
This should be in Great Debates, but it’s clear to me that Matthew 6:5-7 is referring to people who pray because they want to be seen praying. In other words, they are more concerned about appearing pious than actually being pious. This is irrelevant to the question of whether it is acceptable to offer prayers at public events. So long as the prayers are sincere, Matthew 6:5-7 doesn’t apply.
Unfortunately, it is not a matter of letting someone simply choose to say a prayer in public. No noseguard is forbidden to pray for his life when the world’s meanest defensive back decides to hit the line right there. However, what has been happening is that various coaches and school administrators have been “encouraging” the players to “spontaneously decide” to pray before each game–and student players who have balked have been sidelined and otherwise disciplined.
Anyone who chooses to pray, may, but when the school or the athletic program organizes the prayer (however much they may lie about their involvement), you have a situation where an agency of the government is forcing its way into religion.
Forgive me, but are you saying students going to a public sporting event at their own school are akin to someone “visiting a Christian house”? That the “house” is Christian, and the reason for that is because the majority is Christian, and those in the minority are therefore “visitors”?
That’s kind of the reason people object to those prayers.
Anyway, it seems to me Jesus is saying there is a temptation, when one prays loudly in public, to end up doing it for the wrong reasons. So do it in private.
If you consider Jesus to have wisdom as to the nature of the human heart, shouldn’t you take his advise on this (“Go into your room. Shut the door”) rather than superceding his wisdom with your own (“Oh, but that wouldn’t happen to me”)?What happend to trusting yourself to the will of the Lord?
Seems to me that the wording is quite clear. It’s not just directed at hypocrites because it says “like the hypocrites do.” That makes it very clear that the statement is intended for non-hypocrites. Then it says, “when you pray, go into your room . . .”
It really couldn’t be any more clear, but, as has we all know, fundamentalist Christians are often the last to care what the Bible actually instructs.
So why do you want a prayer to be public and said aloud?
Why can’t Christians engage in silent prayer?
Ask yourself: Why would a Christian want to pray out loud in the first place? God can hear your silent prayer, can’t He? What is the purpose of praying aloud?
Seems to me that the ONLY reason for paying out loud (or over an intercom) in public is to “appear pious” and to make an impression on others.
That is precisely the sort of thing Jesus warned against.
I grew up in a fundamentalist church myself, but I never thought public prayer was a good idea, or that it could be justified in light of an honest reading of Matthew 6:5-8.
Being an atheist myself, I never worried about this question much. But if Matthew 6:5-8 is intended to tell you to pray only in your room with the door shut, wouldn’t every Catholic Mass and every Protestant church service since the beginning of the Christian era, as well as all of the ceremonies in Jewish synagogues before that time, be outlawed by Jesus, since they involve praying where people other than God can hear you? That would be strange, to say the least.
Anyway, even if it truly was Jesus’ intention that nobody should ever pray in public, no Christian ever follows every rule in the Bible. How many people follow Jesus’ exhortation to pluck your eye out of your socket if you gaze on a woman in lust? A unifying point of all Christian creeds is that nobody ever has or ever will obey every single precept of the Christian religion except for Christ himself. It is not the government’s business to be telling the Christians how to follow their religion’s rules. It is the government’s business to see that the Christians (and other religions) get to pray in public if they want to, because the First Amendment gives them free speech and free exercise of religion. The First Amendment also makes it the government’s business to avoid establishing any one religion as state-sanctioned, as by furnishing its PA systems for the purpose of Christian prayer or having the teachers/coaches lead students in prayer.
This is, of course, how the Mass began. The very word for Mass, missa, means “having been sent out.” Catechumens, or elementary practitioners of the Christian faith, were sent out of the basilicas so that only a few fully-trained Christians were present. They performed the rite in absolute secrecy.
You are also missing the following point:
This is the real linchpin. Ostentatious piety is the issue, not merely praying aloud.
Probably the same people who strike off their right arms if they sin. Rhetorical hyperbole. Extremely common in the New Testament.
Nice try, but the passage is being taken out of context. Keep in mind that Jesus’ disciples were asking Him to teach them how to pray and the admonition was only one example of how NOT to pray, i.e. vainly, pridefully seeking exhaltation of self and not humble communication with God. Jesus prayed in public when He gave thanks before His miracles feeding multitudes which is recorded in most of the Gospels. Paul did the same aboard ship in Acts. Paul also told Timothy to come before the throne of God boldly in asking those things he had need of.
Most public prayers today are celebrations of thanks and acknowledgement of help and/or requests for God’s blessings and insights of wisdom and strength to meet a task at hand. You can go as far as the current 106th congress that has in it’s rules the daily invocation of prayer by the house chaplain.
Note that the ruling says various denominations not faiths. I would be curious if anyone is aware if that has included Rabbi’s, Muslum teachers, or those from other faiths.
