A Debate on School Prayer Between an Expert and an Idiot (featuring Mr. Conservative from Lubbock)

[TexasTowelie]

[font color=green]I rarely venture into this group, but this article drew my interest when it appeared on the Patheos Website. The article includes excerpts from the "That's Debatable" opinion section of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and features the Obama-hating retired ophthalmologist, twice-defeated GOP House primary candidate, and self-proclaimed Mr. Conservative, Dr. Donald R. May. Those who read the Texas Group are familiar with some of the comments that I posted about Dr. May and his ridiculous conspiracy-laden blogs, so please sit back and enjoy the stupid crap written by Dr. May in his debate with Arnold Loewy, the Chair of Criminal Law at Texas Tech School of Law.[/font]


Arnold Loewy (left) and Donald May

Let’s start with the sensible Loewy:

How, you might ask, can removing prayer from school possibly be good news for religious people? Well, in the first place, the Court did not remove prayer, it only removed school-sponsored prayer. There is a huge difference. Students are free to pray in school anytime they wish so long as they don’t disturb the class in doing so. So, if a group of two, 10 or 100 want to meet at school during lunch, recess, before or after school, or at any other free time and offer a prayer, they are free to do so.

…

We are so much better off today when students for whom a particular religious exercise is meaningful can participate in it on their own at school, unencumbered by the presence of others who neither revere nor understand their sacred blessings. Much of the objection to the school prayer decisions come from those who do not understand them.

Well said. Perfectly reasonable. Thank you, professor.

Now, let’s hear the rebuttal of Donald May, a failed congressional candidate who, proving Loewy’s point, doesn’t understand the law whatsoever.

Murray v. Curlett and Abington v. Schempp, two cases decided together in 1963, prohibited prayer and Bible reading in public schools. In doing so, the Court recognized atheism as a religion, gave it preference over Christianity, and established secular atheism as our national religion. This is a clear violation of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The educational achievements, discipline and manners of our youth have since been in a steep decline.

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/09/07/a-debate-on-school-prayer-between-an-expert-and-an-idiot/

[font color=green]My apologies for invading this group with only my second post and since I am a Christian, but I definitely recognize an idiot and thought I would share the laughter. The rest of the article doubles down on Dr. May's stupidity. Carry on...[/font]

[AtheistCrusader]

1. No worries. Welcome.

People usually only run into problems by proselytizing here, and that post, isn't proselytizing.

[onager]

2. Come back anytime and bring BBQ!

(Which doesn't have to be BBQed baby...)

As an addendum to your fine post - people like May usually seem to think all students in American schools were happily praying to Jebus before 1962.

Not so. Many states and municipalities had already recognized it as a divisive practice and outlawed it.

Nice summary here, provided by the Freedom From Religion Foundation:

Haven't Public Schools Always Had Prayer?

At the time the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 1962 and 1963 decrees against school-sponsored prayers and bible-reading, it is estimated religious observances were unknown in about half of the nation's public schools.

Horace Mann, the father of our public school system, championed the elimination of sectarianism from American schools, largely accomplished by the 1840's. Bible reading, prayers or hymns in public schools were absent from most public schools by the end of the 19th century, after Catholic or minority-religion immigrants objected to Protestant bias in public schools.

Until the 20th century, only Massachusetts required bible-reading in the schools, in a statute passed by the virulently anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party in the 1850's. Only after 1913 did eleven other states make prayers or bible reading compulsory. A number of other states outlawed such practices by judicial or administrative decree, and half a dozen state supreme courts overruled devotionals in public schools.

As early as the 1850's, the Superintendent of Schools of New York State ordered that prayers could no longer be required as part of public school activities. The Cincinnati Board of Education resolved in 1869 that "religious instruction and the reading of religious books, including the Holy Bible, was prohibited in the common schools of Cincinnati."

Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt spoke up for what Roosevelt called "absolutely nonsectarian public schools." Roosevelt added that it is "not our business to have the Protestant Bible or the Catholic Vulgate or the Talmud read in these schools."

For nearly half a century, the United States Supreme Court, consistent with this nation's history of secular schools, has ruled against religious indoctrination through schools (McCollum v. Board of Education, 1948), prayers and devotionals in public schools (Engel v. Vitale, 1962) and prayers and bible-reading (Abington School District v. Schempp, 1963), right up through the 1992 Weisman decision against prayers at public school commencements and Santa Fe v. Doe (2000) barring student-led prayers at public school events .

[progressoid]

3. FFRF always comes through.

If I had disposable income, I'd send a few bucks their way.

[AlbertCat]

4. the Court recognized atheism as a religion,

and bald as a hair color

and of course not collecting stamps as a hobby.



The most annoying thing about this, and many (every?) other debate of this kind is how the religious folks seem to be completely deaf. It's like they simply cannot hear anything that they don't like.

[Cartoonist]

5. Prayer in Catholic schools

I went to a Catholic school for seven years and really, I can't recall much praying in class. We had to attend Mass each day, but in the classroom, it was mostly business. We did have some time for bible study, but that was more historic in nature than praying. We studied from prepared texts that were very different from the bible, and that's what puzzled me.
I'm sure I was there at my grandparents wishes, as my parents weren't that keen on paying tuition, and religion was never discussed at home. So here's the odd thing about it.

Once a week, a priest from the parish would come and talk with us for an hour. Thank whoever my brain didn't retain any of that BS. But there was one event that stood out that represents the whole phoniness of religious instruction. One day the priest decided to give us a pop quiz on the bible. He had us take a piece of paper and told us to list as many books of the bible as we could. You know, Genesis, Leviticus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Judas (kidding) etc.

This was in the sixth grade, and almost all of us were lifers. We all came up empty. This freaked the priest out like you wouldn't believe. He didn't explode in anger at us, he just couldn't believe what had just happened. He didn't know how to deal with it. He ended up turning the class back to the nun in charge and left in extreme consternation. When next we saw him, there was no mention of the incident, and we never again talked about the books of the bible.

Looking back, I saw what was the problem. No one read the bible at home, but most importantly, no one read the bible in school. Here we were, students at a religious institution, and never once was a bible cracked open. All the texts were specially prepared interpretations of religious history. Not just new translations to make the bible easier to read, but a completely different take on it.

When I got to high school, memories of this incident played a large part in the questioning of faith. Clearly, we were not being allowed to think for ourselves. We were fed a steady diet of dogma prepared by a specific sect that held the source code away from us. I wonder how many of us, besides myself, began their journey to apostasy upon realizing this.

The other subjects we took, like math, history, spelling, etc., used standardized secular texts. I feel I was given a good education despite the many hours wasted on that other stuff.