We do that every day in school!Yeah, that's it. For an idea of what so-called freethinkers think about the issue of prayer in school (or prayer in general), check out Infidels.com, EvolveFish.com, or Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Homeschool energizers...
Every so often my wife and I get a reminder of why we home school our children.
Recently, after a dinner at my parent's house, we sat around the dining table and chatted. I commented on how the same amount of time has passed, since 9/11, as between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the end of WWII. My mother then recalled how, at the end of WWII, her elementary school teacher, the wife of a Baptist preacher, led their class in a prayer. She paused for a moment, and then reiterated, "and this was in school!"
Our four year-old looked up and proudly said, ####
At our Home School Open House this week we were treated to a short-sermon by a ninth-grader in our group. It was refreshing to see that he has grasped the basic fundamentals in Biblical understanding what with his comments regarding a certain verse in the Bible. Which verse? You guessed it - Jeremiah 29:11, "For I know what I have planned for you," says the Lord. "I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope."
Questioning why this verse seems to be quoted so much by Christians, he wondered why Christians didn't quote other verses of the Bible so vigorously - verses such as Matthew 5:30, "If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away! It is better to lose one of your members than to have your whole body go into hell."
If one is to read the Bible, then one should read the entire Bible, and not simply the passages that happen to make one feel good.
How wonderful to see that a ninth grader has a better understanding of Biblical interpretation than many adults!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Rusty, Rusty, Rusty...
Oh puuullllleeease...No one is stopping prayer in school. Any public school kid at any moment in the day can say a prayer. You know that, I know that.
The argument is over whether government should help organize, lead, and support that prayer in the school.
Somehow...someway... I think your God hears the sincere prayers of the smallest kindergartner throughout the day in my local public elementary school, even when it's not written up by some educational district office bureaucrat, xeroxed, stapled, distributed in the district mail, and boringly recited each morning with a yawn by a tenured teacher daydreaming about summer vacation.
And if there is a God...
I betcha He gives that kindergartner extra points (a real gold star?) for sincerity.
Amen.
Rusty,
Did you happen to notice the link to a Greg Koukl article on the Infidels.com site?
Wendy, No I hadn’t noticed the link. Thanks for pointing it out.
Tom, Re-read my post. It’s about a teacher led prayer occurring in a public school. The First Amendment is about freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. It seems strange that, despite the plethora of historical examples of the inclusion of prayer in government led institutions, the Supreme Court determined, almost 200 years after the First Amendment, that school sanctioned prayer is somehow an establishment of religion. If it was an establishment of religion, then what exactly was the structure of this religion? What was the hierarchy and who were its designated leaders? How about the location of its seminaries or administrative facilities? How often did the general presbytery gather? Being established by the government we would, of course, be able to easily identify the government’s tentacles within the framework of its established religion just as easily as we do when visiting virtually any federal bureaucratic facility.
The Supreme Court’s decision was nothing more than unmitigated secular nonsense, the gist of which has now procreated into complaints about the Pledge of Allegiance, nativity scenes on public property, religious symbols worn at public schools, federal funding of the restoration of historical sites that happen to be Catholic churches, etc., etc., etc.
Will returning to teacher led prayer solve the matter? I doubt it. But that wasn't the point of my post.
No one is trying to stop prayer in school? That's a riot.
Rusty, I'm not waiting for school choice, the ACLU and the teachers unions have finally sold us on private Christian school. Thanks be to God.
Post a Comment