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From: ddw@cornell.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Is the jury biased?
Message-ID: <4522@cornell.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 29-May-83 09:12:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: cornell.4522
Posted: Sun May 29 09:12:34 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 3-Jun-83 06:12:13 EDT
Lines: 43

Ah, good ol' Larry Bickford.  What would we do without him and his ilk to
remind us of what we're opposing?

     To Dave Wright: "I'd like to see an end to a small but vocal Christian
     minority out there trying to ram their religions down the throats of 
     American school-children." Reply: I'd like to see an end to the use of
     humanism (it IS a religion) as the basis of educational, judicial, and
     other decisions.

Yeah, I'm sure you would.  And just what would you like to see used as a basis
for these decisions?  Why, I'll bet it's the Bible!  So much for the separation
of church and state.  One of the biggest problems one runs into in dealing with
people of Bickford's stripe is that they don't \think/ they're right, they
\know/ they're right.  This makes it easy to disregard any reasons why we
should maybe not have Christianity ensconsed as a \de facto/ state religion.

Raising this non-existent issue of "humanism" is a favorite tactic of people
like Larry.  It's a real pain, too, since they can immediately start claiming
that anyone who doesn't subscribe to their particular brand of religion is
really a humanist and is thus introducing his own religion into the schools.
Even claiming that you don't know anything about humanism and don't subscribe
to its creed doesn't slow them down, since they can just claim that you picked
it up by osmosis in our godless schools.  Sigh.

     To Don Ellis and Dave: "Public" schools should be an extension of the
     home, not the state. Too many parents have abdicated their responsibilities
     and treated the school essentially as a baby-sitter. They are reaping what
     they have sown.

This sounds good, but what exactly does it mean?  An extension of the home?
Whose home?  Mine?  Yours?  The mythical "average American?"  If parents are
dropping responsibilities (which ones?) then should the schools stand idly
by, or try to do something to remedy the situation?  And "reaping what they
have sown?"  What does this mean?  Come on, Larry, you can do better than
this.  Or can you?

(Sorry for the delay on this note, but I've been out of town.)

                                 David Wright

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