It’s ironic how that policy grew out of a case involving an atheist mother’s abusive relationship with her son, and her manipulation of him for her own ends, rather than out of the conscience of a child about being forced to pray. No doubt, though, the ends justified the means.
Yes, that is ironic. Cases like these require what is called “standing”. To bring a suit, you have to be damaged in someway to get relief from the court. So today that is very hard to do. But now there is a lot of precedent of past decisions so courts will side with FFRF 96% of the time. Here is one concerning prayer that we won just yesterday.
More irony, in that it doesn’t seem to matter that key cases are based on deceptive testimony posing as evidence. William Murray was set up as a case of conscience, but wasn’t, and lived to campaign against the decision.
Norma McCorvey was set up as a rape victim unable to obtain an abortion, though she invented the rape story to speed up her case, and even before her conversion and renouncing of pro-choice ideology despised her lawyer for making her a test case, when she could easily have shown her where to get an abortion, having had one herself. In effect, the direct cause of McCorvey’s (at the time) unwanted childbirth was not the law, but an activist lawyer valuing the case over her client. Subsequently she developed a good relationship with her (not aborted) daughter and granddaughter. And she too lived to campaign against the law made in her (false) name.
Which makes one wonder why they bother with real cases at all, rather than getting the judges to look at a hypothetical case. I sincerely hope that the FFRC takes more care for the individuals involved in the cases it takes on than did Madelyn O’Hair and Sarah Weddington. The constitution, after all, was supposed to protect individuals, not ideologies.
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And an innocent man was set up to die for the transgressions of mankind past and future. Not fair at all.
“No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.”
Do you not see the important difference?
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Yes, FFRF takes great care for the individuals. In most cases a pseudo name like Jane Roe is used. If it is a parent and child, names ,location and schools are redacted. We even protect the defendants like teachers and administrators who cross the line innocently.
Well yes - or in the case I cited “Jane Roe”. But it didn’t change much for her.
Yes, it is mind boggling. God, who has a Son who is Himself, creates a prefect universe where creatures on a lonely planet evolve for millions of years to acquire enough intelligence to displease this God. So God has no choice but make Himself into one of those creatures, in the most backward place and time on the planet in order to have Himself killed by these creatures in order to save these creatures from His Wrath. Sure, makes prefect sense to me.
Well, I disagree with most of your premises, but your conclusion is sound enough. I refer you back to an answer I gave before: if a billion or so understand something well enough to ground their lives on it, then one individual’s failure to understand it either shows many of the brightest people on earth are idiots, or they know something the individual has missed.
In this case they know an individual the individual has missed.
EDIT: That’s actually 2.2 billion, plus deceased, but I’m allowing for over 50% nominals.
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There are a billion or so Muslims who understand Islam well enough to ground their lives on it and a few to crash airplanes into buildings based on their beliefs and faith.
Yep - and that makes sense, even if in my view it’s mistaken. Muslims are not, for the most part, irrational… which is not to say that Islamism as a minority view is rational. But then there are other minorities with views generally considered irrational, too.
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They understand that the are sinners in need of God’s forgiveness. They are not wrong about that part. The problem is that the “solution” they have is not only incorrect, but incorrect in such a way that it severely retards progress in their cultures. Islam is a system of works whereby one tries to pile up enough brownie points with God to make Paradise. This is why so often the Muslims who commit acts of terror are not the most devout Muslims but more often the least devout. You will hear things like “He didn’t practice Islam much. He drank. He did X or Y.” after some pathetic wretch has committed an act of terror. The ones who are devout don’t think they need to resort to that- they have a big bag of good works to impress God with. But the ones who haven’t- they are dangerous because they think they need to do something dramatic to make it right with God. One big sacrifice to make up for all the screwing up they have done with their lives.
Islams takes an impulse which is supposed to lead man to his need for God’s grace and mutates it into something destructive, score-keeping on religious works. Nominal Christianity can and has done the same thing. It is ever the temptation to turn away from the gospel and seek a return to a religious system which puts us back in “control” in an effort to gain negotiating leverage with God.