What would cause the City of New York to out-of-the-blue ordain religious services verboten in city schools off hours?
Why? Why now?
Most people probably had no idea that school gyms have been rented for years on weekends by poor congregations, of many faiths, to hold services. But they have been. And all for the good.
A school is a building. It is a roof over one’s head. Schools across America have doubled as places for Saturday or Sunday services since before the American Revolution. Haven’t City officials ever seen Little House on the Prairie? The Waltons?
Or does the City believe that the air in schools is somehow tainted during weekends by religious scholarship and prayer? (But the hot air of politicians at weekend church lecterns is sweet smelling.)
Stories like these leave me feeling a little sick. I am not pious, but I fear for the future when witnessing the systematic excision of all things religious or spiritual, with even the most casual association with government, e.g., the Menora or Christmas tree in a village square. I am hardly alone in that.
Dogmatic secularism is the religion of government today. It is more rigid than any religious orthodoxy west of Kabul. From Washington to City Hall, doctrinaire bureaucrats seek out breaches in their ideology like dogs sniffing out opiates in an airport (oh, how Marx would love that.)
Meanwhile, 60% of all African-American pregnancies and 40% of all pregnancies in New York City are aborted each year. This rush to secularism is really paying off.
Secularism is a religion like abstinence is a sex position.
religion: 4
: a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith
Agreed. I think they have taken this too far. George Washington warned about completely removing religion from the town square in his farewell address to the country,
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports… Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”