In my American Government class tonight we got sidetracked on to the issue of school prayer. Now, for
the longest time I was anti-school prayer in a very, very heavy way. I have changed my mind tonight. I believe in school prayer
now as a concept, although I remain skeptical of its implementation. With children whose parents work 50 or 60-hour work weeks
there is little time for religion at home, so I can see the purpose for structuring morals in schools through religion. However,
when little Billy goes home to his strict Catholic family with ideas of Hinduism and Buddhism as his religion of choice, that
may raise major issues. My solution; teach kids about all sorts of religions. Yes, this means more money spent on education,
on teachers, on books, on more classtime.
Many of my friends before they met me were strictly Mormon because that is all that was offered to
them... Mormonism. They were curious about other religions and they knew that their church promoted learning about them, however
it failed in providing resources for their study, as most churches do. So I shared my copies of the Koran and the Qabbalah
and Margot Adler's "Drawing Down the Moon" and the Catholic bible with them - every miscellaneous religious book I could think
of. They ate them up and from them the developed a greater understanding of the differences in people and some of the reasons
for those differences. They no longer made fun of Jewish yarmulches (I know I've spelled that wrong. Someone please correct
me!) And they no longer saw all Muslims as terrorist groups. I refuse to believe that my friends are the only teenagers capable
of enlightening themselves. We are not the brainless, mindless robots the baby-boomers would like to think we are.
So I say up with prayer in schools! Pray a different religious prayer for every month and during that
month learn meticulously about that religion. Cover everything from Agnosticism to Zen Buddhism... All of it.
What would this do? Well, it might create a generation tolerant of everyone's religion and curious
about new ideas that differ from their own - somethign that is utterly nonexistent in most of the population. We might actually
be able to say that this country has begun to cross the cultural barriers that have kept us from one another for centuries.
Perhaps then we would have a generation open enough to each other to stop bickering about what color skin they have or whether
they call their god 'God' or 'Goddess' or 'Allah' or 'Bob'. This may be the start of a beautiful world. Wow, I feel so Motivational
Speakerish. I must need caffeine.
