Student Prayers Should Be Respected



Separation between church and state is a controversial thing in the United States. The issue and concept often comes to the fore of mainstream political debate when students prayers are discovered on public premises. The controversy, quite simply, arises from the opposing forces in the idea of separating church from state. On the one hand, you have 90% of a country's population that is religious in some form to some form of a church. Often, when you're a member of a church, you literally take these beliefs to the grave. With over 90% of folks believing in a form of God and attending church, you're bound to butt heads with a government that is trying to be objective and secular, but is composed of people that are obviously not, and telling its people, "Your religion stops here."



Student prayers are a common meeting place to start this debate. These are discovered either while the students are practicing a prayer, or a written script of the prayer is discovered, materially, on the public school grounds. Okay, so we have two opposing forces in society: the objective, sterile, secular government that is trying to do the correct thing, and the very people that run the government that are trying to resolve their personal and emotional convictions with what their Enlightenment Western roots are telling them to "civilize." On top of that though we also have the contradicting and opposing forces within the concept of separation between church and state as well. The concept and proponents of the school of thought is championed based on two ideas: that governments should be sterile, unemotional, unbiased institution in order to promote freedom to its fullest extent; and that the freedom to practice religion of any kind should be its citizens' natural born right.

It is okay to pray for good grades online.

How to reconcile and compromise about this? Some sociologists and anthropologists have a view about the United States that the rise of "other religions" such as the die-hard belief in free market economics, science (futurists such as Ray Kurzweil), etc. will gradually dilute the homogeneity to an extent that the hot button issue is merely relegated to the background of mainstream political debate. In this case and situation, the experts believe the separation of church and state will achieve agreement because the bare minimum number of participants in the debate are reached. Economists, mathematicians and physicists might consider this "political emergence," where agreement cannot possibly occur unless a bare minimum number of parties are participating in the political discourse.