But which prayers?

I received another one of those e-mails urging me to back prayer in the schools. This one began with a take off of the nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb and so I got sucked into reading it.

I usually delete these e-mail campaigns but because this one was forwarded by a friend in Australia I found myself writing a reasoned reply. You want prayers in the schools? But what prayers? Do we rotate to give equal time to all or base it upon the majority of kids in the classroom?

I frankly have nothing against prayer at various events. I frankly find invocations comforting at the beginning of conferences where weighty issues are going to be discussed. And I have attended many a twelve step meeting that ended with the holding of hands and the recital of The Lord's Prayer. I love attending churches of different denominations and bowing my head in reverence along with everyone else.

Unfortunately the people that are most advocating prayer in the schools are not just about these moments of shared quiet or inspiration. Prayer in school campaigns have noting to do with the belief in God. They are the about the desire of certain fundamentalist Christian sects that want to make our government a theocracy. In that theocracy it would be a capital offense (death penalty) to utter any prayer but the one they approved. In fact texting OMG would be taking the Lord's name in vain and get you hauled before a tribunal.

All other religions but theirs or any prayer to other than Jesus would be a capital offense. So no Zen mediation. No Muslim bows to the east. No Shaloms. It would be a death penalty offense to call God Allah or any other name used currently by the many religions of this world. It would be a crime to be a Hebrew or a Buddhist or a Gnostic or a Wiccan.

I found it interesting that this particular e-mail campaign chose Mary had a little lamb. It's fleece was white as snow . . . In their perfect world where prayer was back in the schools there would be no other colors of lambs. All the black and brown and red fleeces of lambs would be gone. Doesn't this sound a lot like Hitler and his chosen Aryan people?

You Would Think Men Could Learn

Talk of going to war with Iran. If the war with Iraq was any example we could say that George W is on a roll up to invade Iran without provocation. Or that provocation he mentions being manufactured like the WMD excuse in Iraq.

I cannot figure out what he is thinking. Every single military leader has talked about how totally stressed the military is, how much longer this level of troops (it has gone up even after the surge) can be maintained, the lack of available quality recruits (now the army is taking high school drop outs and felons), and the need to let the National Guard go back home before they are all bankrupt because of the lower wages of the military.

We are so extended in Iraq that the war in Afghanistan is suffering and we cannot send aid to places in this world suffering from ethnic cleansing. The United States was once the force to be counted upon to right the wrongs of the world. Now we are the wrong. We invaded a country on trumped up evidence by a mega-maniacal idiot and have occupied it even though the majority of the population has asked us to leave.

What about war have we not learned? Men have been doing it since before the beginning of recorded history. And all that seems to changed is the weapons and styles in armor. Hell, we are still mounting crusades to the holy land. All these years of civilization and we have not learned tolerance, diplomacy, tact, and the ability to talk to each other (not at each other which is the Bush style) and come to compromises.

I thought that a woman president might give us hope of ending this vicious cycle and yet it would seem that Hilary is going to be as much a sword rattler as the men she is running against. She even voted for a bill that would give the president tacit approval to invade Iran.

This silliness has got to stop. It kills people, causes shortages of materials (including people), and poisons the plant we live on.

The Illustration used is from Drawing Swords.