Yostivanich

I never quite under­stood the point of there being offered a time for stu­dents to pray dur­ing school hours. For one, teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors always seem to be all about push­ing as much into the kids as is pos­si­ble, so to waste any­where from 5 — 10 min­utes every days just seems like a lot of time to waste in a 90 minute class­room set­ting, much less in a 50 minute class­room setting.

Or the thing that I really could never wrap my head around was that admin­is­tra­tion feels that they have to offer stu­dents a time to pray or to do what­ever. It just seems ridicu­lous, if a stu­dent wishes to pray, I would hope they are able to start the process on their own and not need prompt­ing from a loud­speaker that now would be a great time to pray if they so wanted to. Really gee thanks Mr. Loud­speaker, thanks for putting me in the mood to pray. With­out you remind­ing me to pray, I never would have done so.

The main rea­son this is on my mind is a recent arti­cle in the NYT regard­ing the Naval Acad­emy, which has a law­suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of 9 stu­dents who wish for the daily prayer at lunchtime to be abol­ished. You can take a pretty good guess based on my intro­duc­tion, that I am for a daily prayer being removed from the offi­cial schedule.

There are sev­eral rea­sons that I am against reli­gion even being side­ways endorsed by gov­ern­ment and gov­ern­men­tal organization.

First the gov­ern­ment isn’t going to make some­one believe in a par­tic­u­lar reli­gion, no mat­ter how much they might stress it or include the oppor­tu­nity to buy license plates with reli­gious sym­bols. The sec­ond impor­tant rea­son is that when reli­gion is empha­sized by the gov­ern­ment, it may say it allows for all, but really only allows first the main­stream reli­gions and then only the ones that are fol­lowed by the major­ity of the pub­lic. Could you imag­ine what would hap­pen in some high schools or even at the Naval Acad­emy if dur­ing their time for prayer, some­one decided to pray to Mother Nature or pulled out a prayer rug and prayed towards Mecca? Actu­ally now that I think about it I wish I had done that some­time dur­ing high school, I won­der what would hap­pen. I have sus­pi­cions that the school would have wound up stop­ping offer­ing up the oppor­tu­nity to pray if stu­dents started pray­ing in the man­ner of some of the lesser fol­lowed religions.

The next big con­cern is that the per­cent­age of peo­ple ide­ti­fi­ty­ing them­selves as hav­ing no religoin is grow­ing in the United States, cur­rently at 15% and going up as the per­cent­age for younger peo­ple in the US is even higher.

Being neu­tral on reli­gion is a dif­fi­cult task and hard for any­one of deep and strongly held reli­gious beliefs to accept, but is nec­es­sary here in the United States.