Atheist prayers can be barred by House chaplain, appeals court says

And Christians fail to realize that as far as morals, ethics and principles there is little if any difference between their beliefs and an athiest.

 

The only difference being that Christians believe in just one deity more than Atheists do.

 

yeah, they make no sense, they think if they can't force their religion on people, that is supporting the people that do not want religion forced on them.... crazy logic, it just means no one is allowed to force religious dogma on the people, not thiests, not athiests

 

as it should? if one religion gets a tax free status, it shoudl apply to any belief, they shoudl also qualify for faith based initiatives

 

The dummies who want to post the Ten Commandments everywhere don't have a clue as to what the real Ten Commandments are. If I was a judge I would laugh the fools out of the courtroom.

 

There being no such prohibition in the Constitution, it doesn't matter.

You don't know what you're talking about.

Like Hell we are.

I am of course perfectly aware of the rhetorical convenience of the pretense that they can all be cavalierly conflated, but at least one atheist has acknowledged the absurdity of praying to nothing in this very thread; so I don't know what the hell your problem is.

In the present context, it doesn't matter a lick.

Yeah, really.

You lack a belief in the Source of unalienable rights. This being the case, just as one can, being utterly ignorant of the effects of gravity, presume nevertheless to hold forth on celestial mechanics, you can just as intelligently hold forth on the principles in the DoI.

 

The whole case makes no sense.
I am a Atheist, I do not get the idea, to whom or what ever I should offer my prayers.
A prayer is a religious affair, asking a higher authority for forgiveness or help. I do not believe in a higher authority, so I have no prayers.
If somebody needs payers, he/she is not a Atheist, they are Agnostic..

Simple as that.

 

Your knowledge is incorrect. All of our Founding Fathers were either Christians or Deists, with one Jew excepted. It was understood at the time that religion was a necessary part of any stable society. Thomas Jefferson even came around to that understanding after founding the University of Virginia as a secular institution and discovering that the students went wild (or at least as wild as we can imagine 18th century students to be) without any religious... boundaries, shall we say. All during the 19th century, the nation was heavily religious, with presidential candidates and office holders frequently calling on God's blessings. The anti-slavery movement was mostly made up of religious people, including a lot of Quakers, who found slavery to be inconsistent with the Bible's message of the brotherhood of man. Anti-Catholic sentiment, aimed mostly at Irish and Italian immigrants, was motivated by the strong Protestant culture present in the United States.

"In the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, it was common practice for public schools to open with an oral prayer or Bible reading."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_prayer_in_the_United_States


Prayers of the Presidents

From George Washington to George W. Bush, a sampling of personal and public prayers of America's presidents.

https://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/faith-tools/meditation/2005/01/prayers-of-the-presidents.aspx

“Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers. National prosperity can neither be obtained nor preserved without the favor of Providence.”

John Jay, the 1st Supreme Court Justice of the United States

http://www.faithofourfathers.net/jay.html

 

What atheism monument are you referring to? To my knowledge, no such thing exists. My contention is that by forcibly removing religious monuments, the Court is enforcing secular humanism on an unwilling populace. I agree that atheism is not a religion, but that's not the religion the Court is enforcing, it's secular humanism, which is a religion.

 

Ugh...this religious nonsense gets so tiresome.

Religion will be the death of humankind.

 

Bahahahaha! Mankind has always had religion. If anything is going to be the death of mankind, it's going to be technology. Say hello to Skynet, I mean, AI.

 

Technology has been around just as long, if not longer than religion. I'm sorry to have to inform you.

 

Artificial intelligence has not. Real stupidity seems to be omnipresent, however.

 

You're telling me.

 

This doesn't really seem to contradict anything I've said. Obviously, I do not mean to say that there haven't been any religious people in the US throughout its history.

"Secularism concerns aiming for a separation of church and state"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Secularism_in_the_United_States
Secularism in the sense of separation of church and state is protected by the establishment clause and arguably the free exercise clause. This is also the sense in which the Supreme Court and Constitution favour secularism, as per post 88.

 

It is a Supreme Court interpretation of clauses in the American Constitution, yes.

'"Separation of church and state" is paraphrased from Thomas Jefferson and used by others in expressing an understanding of the intent and function of the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state_in_the_United_States

 

Atheism PREDATES Christianity!

 

How? I can drive through any town and see religious displays throughout. I can see billboards advertising religion. Why do they have to be placed on government property?

https://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=crmas&p=athiest+want+to+erect+monument+display

 

Do you not make a distinction between society and government. The founding fathers were also quite familiar with the Church if England and the Renaissance Popes and the need to separate matters of faith and matters of government and the power each welds.

 

Well for example

Atheist gives invocation, first since high court decision

...Noting the Declaration of Independence's assertion that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," Courtney said this central premise of the Founding Fathers "is today, more than ever, under assault. This central pillar of free society; this notion that is deeply heretical to authoritarian culture, proclaims that it is from the people that moral authority is derived."

He urged the officials on the dais to "heed the counsel of the governed, to seek the wisdom of all citizens and to honor the enlightened wisdom and the profound courage" of the founders of American government...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/07/16/atheist-invocation/12726957/

IMO more appropriate and more effective.

 

Don't believe in a hell but yes we are.

Nothing cavalier and the words of wisdom of an athiest are just as valid if not more so than those of person who claims to speak for a super natural being who refuses to show himself.

So you agree Wiccans should also be in the rotation?

What about my "source of inalienable rights"? What principle in the DOI?

 

I disagree with both of those formulations, and I say that the former interferes with the latter. Secularism is not the separation of church and state but the deliberate suppression of religion from society. And the separation of church and state was meant to protect religious people from having the state impose a religion upon them. It was not meant to have the state force religious people to keep their religion to themselves, which is the way the Supreme Court has been interpreting the 1st Amendment since about 1950 or so. So while I agree with you that the Supreme Court has been favoring secularism over religion, that is not the intended meaning of the 1st Amendment. To the extent that the Court enforces secularism, it is violating the free exercise clause, not upholding it.

Here's a good formulation of what I mean. I am an atheist in a family full of Christians. When we bow our heads in prayer at Thanksgiving, I don't demand they shut up or give me equal time. I respect their beliefs and I don't interfere with them. I don't demand they remove their religion from their sleeves or keep their opinions to themselves. They aren't disrespecting me when they pray to God in Jesus' name. They aren't hurting my feelings in the slightest. A cross doesn't offend me. A Bible doesn't give me the shivering fits. (I still have several, actually.) A prayer doesn't make me feel oppressed. This idea that Christianity needs to be suppressed and removed from the public sphere is idiotic and dangerous. We're living on a borrowed morality from another age which is swiftly disappearing from our youth. The parents of today don't know where the morality they were taught came from and they aren't passing it on to their kids. It's a recipe for a complete societal breakdown.

I wasn't saying that people were religious, I was saying that government was religious, from the 18th to the middle part of the 20th centuries, and it was no violation of the 1st Amendment. The notion that religion was suddenly forbidden by the Constitution was a novel invention of the Court in the early to middle part of the 20th century.

 

which is not legally binding under said Constitution.

a phrase which appears nowhere in the Constitution, but which is constantly employed by American atheists to misrepresent the establishment clause.

Obviously not, your fraudulent insistence to the contrary notwithstanding.

are nowhere to be found, as far as the principles expressed in the DoI are concerned.

The relevance to anything I said is, of course, a complete mystery.

In the present context, it doesn't matter a lick one way or the other.

Read it again, and maybe you can think up some questions that aren't retarded.

 

A better question is why do five guys in black robes get to outvote more than half the population. If a town wants to display a cross and a creche in the town square, and the voting public supports the idea, why can't they? Just because some atheist is ****ing offended? I'm sorry, but your feelings just aren't that ****ing important. This isn't a case of the government imposing a religion, taxing people to support a particular church, or cutting your head off or stoning you to death for being an atheist, as they do in the Middle East. It's a ****ing cross. Get the **** over it.

And yet George Washington offered up a prayer as his first act as president and no one said ****.

 

Well, an interpretation is not a law in itself (I don't think), it's merely an interpretation of how the legally binding bits of the constitution is meant to be applied. The feature of the law being legally binding comes from it being in the constitution, the interpretation merely tells us what the constitution means in practice.

The phrase was used by Jefferson who wrote the bit to explain the clauses in the first amendment
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/jefferson_dba.html

I am responding to xwsmithx's mention about the Supreme Court favouring the non-inclusion of specific religious things. My argument is completely related to how the constitution is applied and the reasoning behind it, not the exact phrasing in the Constitution.