What is the goal in getting religion in public schools?

[prolesunited]

Why has there been such a big push to get prayer and creationism into the schools?

Their argument is that once it was taken out, society fell apart. Do they honestly believe that it will magically fix everything? Are they hoping to get new converts?

And why do they believe that it's a parent's responsibility to teach sex education so their own family's values are reflected but it's their job to give lessons in God in the Bible, with or without the parent's consent?

So, why are they pushing this so hard?

[havocmom]

1. Kids start asking more questions when they go to school.

Fundies don't handle questions well. They want it stopped. They want to subvert the objective of education, to teach kids to question and think critically, because they want to stay ignorant about what the parents are ignorant about. No questions, only control. Do not think for yourself lest you learn something which proves your parent a fool. Don't EVER get curious cuz that leads to the possibility of changing the status quo where Daddy (your local god) is in charge.

Now, why the powerful are feeding the fundies on this venture is the same but taken to more sinister heights.

edited to add: getting control of 'stop thinking critically' in school is also a way to stop the neighbor's kids from getting less ignorant. Heaven knows those heathens down the street are not raising their kids to meet fundy standards! Something MUST be done about it. Have to do if for the children! </Lewis Black impression>

[sendero]

2. I agree with you...

... but I think the fundies are dead wrong. I don't think that if they got everything they wanted that it would change the percentage of Christians, secularists, whatever in this country by any substantial amount.

What these folks fail to come to grips with is that the preacher's son is often an atheist. That lots of folks come out of Catholic school and swear off Catholicism forever. They assume that everyone thinks (or lacks the ability to think) as they do, and that if they were only exposed to the tenets of the religion they would buy it.

They are delusional.

[havocmom]

10. Yes, you & I know it's a delusion as we can think critically & ask

questions. It is that very thing they want to wipe out.

Ever deal with a diagnosed delusional and not play along with their delusion? You get met with the same responses as die hard fundies will have when they find out you do not drink their flavor of Kool Aid. And yes, some do react strongly enough to become violent. The powerful count on that when they work the base up to a froth. The powerful want their base to be the force which beats us into submission or the (litereal) ground.

First they made wanted posters for women's health clinic workers. Now they are doing it with judges and the DEMS in Congress who think there should be limits to the Nazi types bush* wants appointed.

The base is the loaded gun the junta keeps us busy avoiding.

[sendero]

13. I guess I have a ..

... philosophical outlook on this. Yes, we should fight them every way we can. But the truth is that their influence is much greater than their numbers would suggest. America simply would not get in line with their agenda and as soon as they start causing real pain there will be a backlash.

I agree that these folks are trying and having some success at amassing power. I just think it is a self limiting exercise.

The Republicans have been playing them since 1980. Maybe they are starting to figure it out. Maybe they will start pushing hard.

But they have a tough row to hoe. Most of the population doesn't see, for example, gays as they do. The plan to demonize gays isn't going to fly very high after Will & Grace, Queer Eye, and countless other exposures that show gays as the pretty much are - just people.

I've never really talked to my sons about religion but they see it pretty much as I do. Lots of people do. And Nobody HAS to play along with their delusion, they can scream and throw a hissy fit, so fucking what?

[Mandate My Ass]

11. Yes! It's to stop critical thinking and...

I read an essay by one of these RW think tank arm-chair general types and he said the ideal conditions for a corrupt government to flourish and hang onto permanent control is to create a populace that is uneducated, uninformed, hungry, religious, jingoistic and consider their rulers as a class apart.

Everything they are doing now bears this out.

[ultraist]

23. Well said! n/t

[atreides1]

3. The Same Rason That The Nazis Did

Not with prayer, but Nazi ideology. The Nazis knew that they wouldn't be able to convert adults , but children were a different
matter.
And like the Nazis, the Christian fundamentalists are determined to mold the minds of children to accept their view of Christianity, np matter how twisted or perverted it it!!!!

As the leader of the Nazi Teacher's League, Hans Schemm put it:"Those
who ahve the youth on their side control the future."

That's why they're pushing so hard, they can't convert the adult population but if they get control in the schools, it won't take that long before they control our children.

[burn the bush]

4. lots of kids don't go to church

if they can get them in the schools then they can make religious fanatics out of them-taliban style.

[sendero]

14. Again...

.... you assume that exposing kids to this crap will convert them.

I say no way. There will always be people who think for themselves, and the only thing the right can do is force them to ACT like they believe at the point of a gun.

[Virginian]

17. "you assume that exposing kids to this crap will convert them."

It may convert some of them and make it a little more difficult for the free thinkers.

As in, "You can't say that, teacher (authority figure) says that's blasphemy."

Topic could be anything, Big bang theory, Law of Natural Selection, anything the teacher's religion is against.

My answer to prayer in schools:
Ask them who is going to lead the prayer.
More than likely, the answer is, the teacher.
Then ask, what if the teacher is a Hindu or a Islamist or Jew or Wiccan or Athiest?
Since most of the School Prayer supporters are Christians, they think they can impose their belief system on others, what if their child had to pray under some other belief system?

[Name removed]

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[Name removed]

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[bryant69]

5. Well, from their point of view

It's back in. They feel like in the old says schools did things right and we ruined them. So theirs the traditionalist arguement.

They also assume they have the majority and that it's just a few minority elitists and pagans who object, so there's a kind of low grade populism attached to the cause.

Plus they are encouraged by their political leaders and pundits to feel persecuted. So fighting to get their schools teaching what thye want them to teach is a way to fight this persecution. It's an envy/resentment sort of plug. I suspect that a good part of why they want this so badly is that they know that we don't want it.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[blogbear]

6. I think it may have someting to do with control..

[Mizmoon]

7. Knowledge and education kill God

therefore they must kill knowledge and education before it kills them

Religion has been dying in the West since The Enlightenment. They are locked in a struggle to the death. Knowledge will win, but the fundies and their icons will eventually go the way of the Roman pantheon.

[supernova]

8. Yes, they think it will fix everything

that's it exactly. They want to turn back time and put the genie back in the bottle.

They have a nostalgia for a simpler time that never was that simple.

[mwb970]

9. Check out the madrasas in the Muslim world.

That's the goal.

http://www.pipeline.com/~rougeforum/holywarriors.html

[Double T]

12. Religion Does NOT Belong In Schools Or Politics.........

......Look At All The Trouble It Has Already Caused Throughout History.

[HockeyMom]

16. Moment of Silence in Daughter's HS

Several years ago a teacher in her Junior homeroom class tried to start the day by telling the class to stand for a moment of silence. This was definitely not a policy of the school district. Nobody had ever done this before. The teacher did this on her own.

The first day she did this, 23 of the 25 students got up and walked out. My daughter and one other boy sat in their seats. As my daughter said the kids all knew what she really wanted was for them to pray. The teacher glared at my daughter and the other boy, but my daughter said she was not standing and praying.

The switchboard at the district office was swamped with angry phone calls from the parents of not only the students in this class, but many, many others. The parents did not like this guise of moment of silence as a underhanded way of putting prayers in public school. As my neighbors said, if we wanted our kids to pray in school we would send them to a parochial school of our own religion.

But tell me this. Would these religious nuts take away parents rights? They keep pushing parents rights, parents rights. Or do they believe that all parents must be religious and want their kids to pray in public school? Just like they seem to think that if you are a parent you cannot possibly be pro choice too?

Just as they have the right to raise their kids with a Bible attached to their heads, other parents also have the right not to. They cannot force their religious beliefs on other people's children.

To that other poster, yes, I spent 12 years in Catholic school and that certainly did turn me off on all this forced praying. FORCED prayer means absolutely nothing.

[smoogatz]

15. They're defending God

against attacks from meddlesome politicians and the know-it-all smartass atheist communist liberal ACLU-types, also known as Jews. To a fundie, everything "christian" is inherently good, and everything secular is, by definition, anti-christian and therefore bad. Also, they look at a simplified timeline and here's what they see: organized prayer banned from schools; violent crime up, teen pregnancy up, world gone to hell in a handbasket. Never mind that violent crime and teen pregnancy were actually down significantly during the Clinton years--no fact that doesn't support God can actually be relevant or true.

[ChickMagic]

19. It also corresponds

to the time they started putting fluoride in our water. Maybe that's responsible for society "falling apart." It also corresponds with our efforts in space. Maybe THAT's it! :eyes:

[smoogatz]

24. The birth control pill. Women's lib. The list is endless...

And any argument that society is, in fact, not in decline (not 'til Bush siezed power, anyway) falls on deaf ears. Remember the good old days of segregation, rural poverty, burning waterways, oppression of women? What they yearn for is an imaginary past that can only be reinstated through magical means. That's who we're up against. That they have any political pull at all is stunning. In fact, they're sharing power more-or-less equally with the corporatist warlords. Talk about terrifying.

[ikri]

18. Religion in schools will solve everything!

I mean, just look at the UK, we have a state religion here and prayer in school.

And about 85% of the population never go to church and most people here couldn't care less about religion. We're probably one of the most secular countries in the world.

Let them teach religion in school. Then let them deal with rebellious teenagers who resent any authority figure. They'll lose more converts than they'll gain.

[ultraist]

25. There is one small problem with your suggestion

Allowing religion in our public schools violates the US Constitution.

I'm also afraid it would have a different effect here. Our compromised educational system creates a fertile ground for brainwashing. The schools would become a vehicle in which to convert people; it would increase the number of followers.

[dbt]

20. Perhaps it's to keep the girls in line?

So they'll grow up "knowing their place?"

[ultraist]

26. That is certainly part of it

Christianity is riddled with misogyny. And of course Gays would be taught to "keep their place." The children would be brainwashed to be submissive to the white patriarchal hierarchy. (Well, they already are to some degree, bringing in religion would exacerbate this).

[AnnInLa]

27. R U Tired of blogs analyzing changes Dems must make to win back America?

Me too....BUT I read this yesterday, and it makes SO much sense...and it scared me, because it made me realize how much work there is to do. Please, please, if you read no other blog today, go to www.mydd.com and read Chris Bowers's analysis of what we need to do, long-range.

from www.mydd.com

"As far as I can tell, the main problem facing Democrats is that conservatives, when compared to liberals, have superior organizational control and power over what Louis Althusser famously called Ideological State Apparatuses and what on this blog I have taken to calling ideological conversion machines. To put this another way, I believe that conservatives are largely in control of those mechanisms that determine an individual's ideological outlook, which these days is largely determinative of how an individual ends up voting. I believe that our problems are growing particuarly severe when it comes to four specific ideological machines:

* Education While education is the most unionized profession / industry in the country, and while voters with a post-graduate degree favor Democrats, outside of actual educators liberals are getting crushed by conservative organizing within the field of education. This is particularly true when it comes to on-campus student organizing in colleges and universities, where conservative student organizing is exponentially more advanced than liberal student organizing. This is also the case among school board seats that largely determine the curriculum of primary and secondary schools. It has been a decades-long priority among the Christian right to capture and dominate school boards, again with little organized liberal opposition outside of teacher unions. Of course, this hasn't stopped some factions of the Democratic party from assisting in the demonizing of teacher's unions which remain pretty much our only bulwark against total conservative domination of the American educational system.

* Labor Speaking of unions, we must increase union density, or we will continue to lose ground in another major area of ideological influence: the workplace. While union members tend to have a pro-Democratic partisan index of over twenty points, union density in the American workplace has steadily declined for the past forty years. If this situation is not reversed, liberalism will be facing a near-total collapse of influence over one of the nation's most powerful ideological conversion machines.

* Media. I expect all of us here know about The Republican Noise Machine by now, so there is no need to explain it in detail. It simply goes without saying that we must match or surpass the Republican Noise Machine or else conservatism will continue to dominate the nation's political discourse, which is an undeniably important ideological conversion machine.

* Religion While I have written in the past that long-term religious demographics clearly favor liberalism, .the fact remains that over the past three decades right-wing religious organizing has far surpassed that seen on left. During that time period, white Christians have become significantly more conservative, and considering the current imbalance of organizing within religious circles that trend will almost certainly continue. If this does happen, any gain Democrats make in this area from demographic trends will be significantly muted, if not entirely wiped out. The religious left absolutely must begin to organize voters of faith on an equal level to conservative efforts or else Democrats will continue to surrender yet another important ideological conservation machine."

www.mydd.com