Translation: Live and let live, but only as long as you live the way I let you live. Count me out Genie.

Someone once told me that when a christian claims ‘persecution’ it means s/he’s not being allowed to persecute non-christians.

By that measure, I guess that ‘Live and Let Live’ means ‘Live as I want you to Live’.

So why atheists are focused on the “prayer in school” issue, they are missing the point that morals and values of our children are not nearly what they use to be of many moons ago.  All you have to do is look around and you see that on a daily basis.  Parents are failing in the jobs that churches use to provide - guidance on what is right vs wrong.  Parents are not doing their job.  As much as atheists would like to believe otherwise, it is not happening for the great majority.

That is the point of such emails as above.

So it’s easy to focus on the little point of prayer in school, but the bigger picture is being missed.

I think all of us atheists need to address the bigger issues.  The decline of values and morals of our country.  We didn’t want our children to get them from church, from schools.  So where?  That was never addressed.  From parents?  That should be the answer, but it isn’t happening.

As much as atheists, myself included, may not want to hear this, churches do provide a valued service.  We may not like the stories, we may not believe in the man in the sky, but the lessons learned is what our children are missing.

And it shows.

FYI, I can’t see any comments…

Man that is one batshit crazy email. Probably better left un replied to.

How do you remove Christ form a secular place?

For some reason I cannot view the comments on this post.

OK, let’s say that I was a Christian. Which I very well may be, but I’m not the type of Christian who is going to rant and rave at “godless heathens”. But let’s just say that I was that type of Christian.

I would then ask myself, “What type of Christian goes ‘neener, neener’ to the ‘godless heathens’?” What type of Christian gloats that they personally will be saved whilst all others drown in their godless morass?

Not a very good Christian, in my book. A true Christian should pray for the salvation of all, while trying to learn how to love everyone for who they are, not who they want them to be.

So to my dear Genie, I will add you to my list of prayers so that you can learn the true meaning of Christianity, and Christ’s love. If you channel that anger into love, you could probably work miracles.

The Defensio spam filter unpublished all comments so far. I opened them again…

On edit: Damn, this thing is rabid.

Hmmm…where do we start?

A rather rambling and incoherent email. The message reads like something from a drunk. Has our good friend Genie been dipping into the communion wine again?

I won’t even go into the atrocious grammar and sentence structure problems. Substantively, it doesn’t appear to be begging a response at all. Rather, it’s merely a “position statement” by the writer, griping about a perceived lack of christian indoctrination in schools.

The first sentence is amusing - that Christ has “been removed from secular places.” If it was truly secular, Christ wouldn’t have been there in the first place.

The main flaw in the email is its glaring contradiction - one that you picked up on with your comment.

A question for Genie:
Genie’s “the right to choose or not choose” and “Why can I not live like I want to and you live like you want to and leave each other alone?” advocate self-choice. So how does Genie reconcile those statements with that about Christ having been “kicked out of the schools”, which laments the element of self-choice?

Rub your magic lamp all you want, Genie. Can’t have it both ways.

I’ve installed Defensio for the time being. Not sure what went wrong with it, but it’s acting up.

Thats some powerful hypocrisy there. It almost hurts.

Henceforth America is going to the dogs.

Bowwow.  Rrrowff.

Angie,

My father and mother were both atheists (my father, I believe, “second-generation”, my mother first). They taught me a lot of morals, though I never received a lot of moral lessons (especially not in a Sunday school format). They (especially my father) simply lived a kind of life I will be proud of trying to emulate.

So while I don’t dismiss out of hand your argument that morals have gotten looser, I don’t buy into all this nonsense that they have gotten WORSE (conservative guilt-talk). If you took a time machine back into the 1950s, or the 1900s or into 1259, or 200BC, you would find lots of things were no better or worse today on a human level (some people are bastards - certain blog owners notwithstanding - and some are nice folks).

The rest is window dressing, straight jacket or sensible guidebook, depending on what part of the cultural set of instructions of any time you are looking at. And I feel that there’s much less of the straight jacket stuff around, thankfully.

Everyone seems to be under the impression that the United States (indeed, the whole world) is a million times worse than it used to be.  But is this true?  I don’t have the info with me right now, but I bet that if I were to procure statistics of school violence and violence in general, we’d find that we’re actually safer today than we were 60 years ago, when god was supposedly in schools.

Every single generation seems to think that the former was better, the current a waste, and the future nearly non-existent.  Every generation,  Since time immemorial.  The idea that children and adolescents today honestly have no plan for the future is laughable.  More kids than ever are going to college, and people still marry.  And none of this has anything to do with “god in the schools”.  Also, presumably god was still the schools 30 years ago, yet today’s middle agers have a 50% divorce rate.  What does that tell you?

If you measure morals by the rate of violence, there has been considerable moral improvement since historic times.

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. 
- Socrates (circa 490(ish) BC)

Just throw in Magic Jebus and you’ve got the same damn argument that Socrates (who may or may not have existed, just like Jebus!) uttered some 2,500 years ago.  We all tend to forget just what hell raisers we and our friends were when we were kids.

As far as I know (in Kansas anyways) you can pray in school.  Teachers, being government employees, simply aren’t allowed to lead students in prayer during school hours.  In my school there were Christian groups: FCA, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes used the gym, and there was also a group of students that prayed (led by teachers) at the flagpole before school started.  Both were fine by me.

They have no thought of marriage and children, just what they can get out of life.

First of all, I would assume people who get married are doing it because it is one of those things “they can get out of life”. 
Secondly, marriage is so highly sought after that people are actively fighting to stop certain groups from marrying.  If marriage and children are moral in and of themselves, I know some people would love to tie the knot and start adopting.

Tell me, what do you have in our young people now? Nothing!!!

This whole letter reads to me like someone went to the mall and got culture shock.  The new generation is nothing like my generation.  Therefore it’s going to the dogs *faint*

Careful, people. The UN has passed a resolution, sponsored by the Saudis, prohibiting defamation of religion. Anything you say ...

They have no thought of marriage and children, just what they can get out of life.

I’m amused that this is assumed to be a bad thing.

As far as I know (in Kansas anyways) you can pray in school.  Teachers, being government employees, simply aren’t allowed to lead students in prayer during school hours.  In my school there were Christian groups: FCA, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes used the gym, and there was also a group of students that prayed (led by teachers) at the flagpole before school started.

That’s pretty much true in every state. Prayer in school isn’t banned. Prayer initiated and led by school faculty while performing their state function is banned.

I choose to live for Christ and when He returns, you will watch me leave this old world that people like you have made Godless.

dammit! This fucker doesn’t even have the faith that he is gonna show us all and get raptured while we are ‘left behind’.

Hey, Invisible Sky Dude!  This is supposed to be the End of Days.  So get off your lazy butt and rapture Genie and the rest already.  Well, maybe wait until say 8 am Central Standard time Monday.  I wanna see some of it happen live on CNN.

I love quoting games - especially the source of this:

If our society seems more nihilistic than that of previous eras, perhaps this is simply a sign of our maturity as a sentient species. As our collective consciousness expands beyond a crucial point, we are at last ready to accept life’s fundamental truth: that life’s only purpose is life itself.

Which sums up how I feel. I just happen to be among those people who think that having a “good” life involves doing things for others. It makes me feel most good when people do them for me.

As far as the next generation being screwed, even Socrates thought so. We’ve come a long way, despite.