School-Sponsored Prayer: What's the Harm?

Last night I didn't feel like reading, especially not the geeky books I usually read. But there wasn't much else to do. So I watched a geeky video. It was an old Bill Moyers interview, from 1987, called God and the Constitution. Moyers talks to Dr. Martin Marty, a Christian and an expert on the religious views of the founders, and Leonard Levy, a Jewish constitutional scholar who edited The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution. All three men are stunningly smart, and I urge everyone to watch it (you can stream it for 3 bucks on Amazon.com, or watch it for free if you have a library card and your local library has Access Video on Demand).

The part that struck me the most was Dr. Levy talking about school-sponsored prayer. (Not voluntary student prayer, which is protected by the First Amendent. I want to make clear nobody is saying kids shouldn't be allowed to pray on their own at school.) Levy offers one of the most powerful and personal arguments I've ever heard for keeping official prayers out of schools. It's more impressive if you watch the video, but here's the transcript:

Moyers: What about school prayer?  

Levy: I think that the state should not promote or sponsor religion.  

Moyers: But there are prayers and "prayers." You grew up in De Kalb, Illinois, right?  

Levy: I did.  

Moyers: 20 Years ago in De Kalb the court said the cookie prayer was unconstitutional.  

Levy: I forgot that it came out of De Kalb!  

Moyers: "We thank you for the flowers so sweet, we thank you for the food we eat, we thank you for the birds that sing we thank you, God, for everything." The court declared it unconstitutional even though the teacher took out the word "God".  

Levy: She did, but the court didn't quite declare it unconstitutional. When the Supreme Court won't agree to review a case, they allow the lower court decision to stand. If that's how you construe it--which is reasonable--yes, the court, in effect, upheld that.  

Moyers: Now, do you think the founding fathers would have thought that little verse an establishment of religion?  

Levy: I think not, but... to begin with, that's a prayer being said in the public school. The founding fathers had no position with respect to this because public schools as we know them did not exist. Prayers do not belong in public schools even though they are sterilized, as in the cookie prayer which is non-denominational, and doesn't even refer to God. I agree with you that religious liberty would not be imperiled if children said the cookie prayer in the public schools.  

Moyers: The teacher said she was only trying to instill a sense of wonder in the children--to make them appreciative of the world around them and of the divine being that made that world. She wasn't trying to persuade or to indoctrinate them.  

Levy: These cases are very complex. That's why the court divides so closely and so frequently. When you say that that teacher wanted to inspire children with a sense of wonderment and you referred to her talking about a supreme being, that is a religious statement. You and I may believe it but there are people who don't believe it. 

Moyers: You think the First Amendment protects atheists?  

Levy: Of course it does! The First Amendment protects religion and non-religion. There are people who are not theists who are in our public schools by the thousands. There are people who are not Christians or Jews or Muslims and they ought not be exposed to that cookie prayer which alludes to a divine being who allegedly created the world. You think so and I think so, but there are people who don't think so and they shouldn't be made to feel like outsiders, as if they don't belong, as if this is not their country. It's their country as much as it is ours. 

Moyers: If I remember correctly you refused to take part in prayers in De Kalb, Illinois, when you were a boy there--1935, 1936. What happened when you said "I can't participate in that prayer."  

Levy: What happened? Well, I was ostracized. No, more than that--I was persecuted. They beat me up regularly as I went home from school. Gangs of kids would jump out and beat the hell out of me and call me a "Jew bastard" and "Christ killer." I loved to play softball, and I was kept off the team. "No kikes on our team," was the motto which had, by the way, some sponsorship from the faculty. When religion is introduced directly into the public schools there is a price that may very well be paid by people who are different. There have often been times when persecution was visited upon children who wouldn't participate in the public school rituals of religion.

Powerful stuff. Of course, the thirties were a very different time, and I don't think that kind of thing would happen to Jewish kids these days. At least not as commonly and openly. But kids can be very cruel when they decide to single out another kid, mobbing them like a bunch of crows. And I can certainly imagine them abusing a Hindu or Sikh kid, or especially a Muslim or atheist kid, for declining to participate in Christian prayers. Even if they didn't (and most often they wouldn't), that kid would be put in a very, very uncomfortable situation. Now, some people will say that this doesn't apply in overwhelmingly Christian areas. But it does. I'm from a small, white, Protestant town smack in the middle of the Bible Belt, but there were a handful of Hindu and Muslim kids even there, and probably more than a handful of non-religious kids. The Hindu and Muslim kids were younger than me, and I don't know if they were ever harassed because of their religion. If so, I would think it was probably minor. But I might be wrong, and I'm pretty sure they would have had a tougher time if they had been put in the position of deciding whether or not to say prayers along with the Christian kids. That could have opened up a can of worms. So why open it? Leaving official prayer and other religious observances out of school keeps the problem from ever arising, or at least from arising because of school policy. And besides, Dr. Levy is right. It's their country, too.

The Dog and the Hitchhiker: A Ghost Story

Last night I went to see a horror movie called the Conjuring. It wasn't the best I've ever seen, but it gave me a couple of literal shivers, so I guess it got the job done. It's one of those "Based on True Events" horror movies, in the tradition of The Amityville Horror. In fact, two of the main characters are Ed and Lorraine Warren, the real-life "demonologists" who also worked the case that The Amityville Horror was based on (rather loosely, it seems). In The Conjuring, the Warrens are nice, normal-seeming people, whose work just happens to require them to battle unclean spirits. Ed is a strapping, God-fearing, all-American kind of guy with a bit of a swagger, while Lorraine is unassuming and fearless. They're the heroes of the movie, which makes it clear they've fought their good fight in spite of all those skeptics who scoffed at them

Now, as anyone who reads the blog knows, I'm one of those skeptics. I figure there's no such thing as the supernatural, in either the religious or the New Age sense. Angels, demons, fairies, auras, and psychic phenomena all seem equally unreal to me. But I'm an open-minded skeptic, and I honestly don't think that's an oxymoron. If someone can give me hard evidence that I'm wrong, then I'll change my mind. Besides, I hate seeming like the wet blanket skeptic from some horror movie (especially since those guys usually get killed off rather horribly). Besides, I like a good ghost story as much as anyone else, and I've had a few odd experiences in my life too.

Have you ever felt like you had a premonition, or thought a coincidence was too unlikely to have happened by chance? I have. In my 41 years, I've had exactly three such experiences. The first was just silly. I was about 16, and my dad had me clearing brush on a lot he owned. I decided to walk to the motel in the next lot and get a Coke out of the machine, so I pulled the change out of my pocket--three quarters. I glanced at them there in my palm, and something possessed me to throw them all on the ground. They all came up heads, and they were all from 1967...pretty old quarters, even then. That's a pretty weird coincidence, for all kinds of reasons. What are the chances they would all be from the same year and come up heads? And what made me want to throw them on the ground? I never do that. Anyway, I looked at them, thought, "Wow, that's freaky", and went and spent them on my Coke. If they were lucky magic quarters, somebody else has them now. Maybe I should have waited for the beanstalk to sprout.

The second freaky coincidence happened on April 11, 2007. I was at my parents' house in Arkansas, and I woke up thinking about Kurt Vonnegut. That was odd, because I hadn't thought about him in years. He had been my absolute favorite author when I was in my late teens, but I was 35 in 2007. I was lying there thinking, "He's getting really old now. He surely won't live much longer." Then I got up and went downstairs, and my mom said, "Well I just heard on the radio that Kurt Vonnegut died." Later that day my sister, who was also visiting, looked at me and said, "So, Mom told me how you killed Kurt Vonnegut this morning."

That's two freaky, pseudo-psychic experiences in 40 years. They were pretty strange coincidences, but I honestly think they were just that--coincidences. Forty years is long enough for a few coincidences to happen just by chance. People do draw royal flushes every now and then, and that's explainable by statistics. Magic isn't necessary.

But let me tell you my ghost story. Or maybe it was just another dream, even though I was half-awake at the time. Whatever it was, for years afterward, my scalp would prickle every time I told the story. It was March 25, 1989, and I had turned 17 a few days before. That was the heyday of hair metal bands, and Cinderella was coming to Little Rock, which is 90 minutes south of my hometown. I wasn't a Cinderella fan myself, but my friend Dave was, and he made me a deal--if I drove, he would buy the tickets for both of us. That sounded good to me. Going to the big city without grownups was a big deal then, and David and I had a grand time.

We must have gone to eat after the concert, because it was around 2:00 AM when we finally headed home. By the time we got back to the foothills of the Ozarks, where the road gets curvy, Dave was asleep, and I was fighting to keep my eyes open. That's when saw a big, beautiful collie walking down the side of the road. We were nowhere near a town, or even a visible house. I wondered vaguely what it was doing out there, but I was too sleepy to think straight. So I kept on driving.

Then, after a couple more miles, I saw another, identical collie on the side of the road...just trotting along like the last one. That struck me as very odd, but once again, I was too sleepy to think about it much. So I kept on driving, curving down into a steep little valley toward the old Cadron Creek bridge.

Just as I started descending, I saw that collie again. There it was, on the side of the road, dead and decomposing.

That's when a little jolt of fear finally broke through the sleepiness. But I kept driving. Then, just as I hit that layer of cold air you find in those little valleys at night, I saw a hitchhiker. He was a couple hundred yards in front of me, and he just stepped out into the road like he didn't see my headlights. But he didn't seem to be getting closer to me, even though I was going pretty fast. As soon as I realized how strange that was--just before I crossed the bridge--the laws of physics kicked in again, and he was right in front of me. Looking across the hood of my car, right at me. And then he was gone.

I hit the gas and roared out of the valley, pulled over, and shook Dave until he woke up. "You've got to help me stay awake, man, I'm seeing things!" We drove a few more miles and stopped at an all-night convenience store. I got out and did jumping jacks to try to wake up, and then we headed on home.

The strange thing is, the whole thing startled me, but it didn't seem truly scary until the first time I told the story, and felt the hair on the back of my head stand up. But that stopped happening after a few years, and it just became a good spooky tale to tell. I still think I was just falling asleep at the wheel, and dreaming while I was half-awake. That's a much simpler explanation than ghostly hitchhikers, to say nothing of ghostly collie dogs.

But it's not like I know everything, and it's a weird old world, whether there's a supernatural or not. I hadn't thought much about that story for years, until today, when I was thinking about that movie last night. I was trying to find the real story it was supposedly based on, and ended up finding some creepy, sad articles about "exorcisms" performed by real clergymen. I was thinking about how different my naturalistic view is from someone who truly believes in demon possession. So much less scary. So I started thinking about my "paranormal" experiences, and decided it was finally time to write about them.

But then, as soon as I got home from work, I got a message on Facebook from my old friend Dave. He had attached a picture of his ticket from that concert, 24 years ago. "Remember this?" he said, "I kept the ticket stubs to every concert I ever went to....man, what a crazy night!"

So, my third freaky "psychic" experience in 41 years was earlier today, just as I was getting ready to write this story for the first time. I don't know if it makes me or Dave seem like the psychic one, but it's pretty strange either way. In the three years or so that we've been friends on Facebook, how did he happen to send me a picture of that ticket today? If it's been roughly 1,000 days, that means the odds are 1/1,000. I know a few long shots like that are almost certain to happen in 41 years, statistically speaking. But who knows? It's still a weird old world.

Philosophy is Not Optional

Last night I picked up a book on philosophy written for undergrads. It's a good book, but certainly no late night page-turner. Nevertheless, one of the first lines jumped off the page and slapped me. It said:

Philosophy is not an optional experience in your life.

"Wow," I thought, "That's true." But what struck me about that statement isn't that it's not optional for me. I've never been able to resist pondering the big mysteries in life. What's striking is that it's not optional for anybody. Nobody can go through life without facing some of life's big questions and deciding how they're going to answer them. Consider the idea of economic justice: the question of who deserves what in society. How you vote depends on how you answer that philosophical question. Is it right to tax wealthier people to give poorer people a bigger slice of the pie? Why or why not? To what extent do the wealthy deserve their wealth? Does it matter whether they inherited it or earned it by being smart and hardworking? If it does, to what extent do people deserve credit for being smart? If some people are simply born smarter, do they deserve to be wealthier based on an accident of birth? Why or why not?

These are all tough questions, which is why people still argue about them. And they're just some of the philosophical questions we can't avoid, either individually or as a society. On the individual level, suppose a friend asks what you think about his new, expensive car. You think it might be the ugliest thing on four wheels. Should you be honest, or should you tread lightly on his ego and say it's great, since he can't return it anyway? That's a philosophical issue, but a fairly trivial one. Most of us will have to face far bigger ones someday. For example, we may have to decide whether a dying family member should be taken off life support. That's not idle dorm room philosophy. How you decide that particular philosophical issue is literally a matter of life and death. Even if you believe the right answer is provided by religion, and can be looked up in the Bible, you still have to weigh philosophical issues. How do you decide which interpretation of the Bible is correct, or example? If different Christian denominations have different answers, how do you decide which one is right? If a non-Christian asks you why he should accept what the Bible says, how do you respond? It won't do any good to say, "Because the Bible says so." You need to provide independent reasons. In other words, you're back to philosophy.

Actually, though, maybe it's not philosophy that's not optional. What's really not optional is facing big philosophical questions and making decisions about them. Actually engaging in philosophy--in hard thinking about those questions--might be optional, because some people make decisions without thinking. They may never question their intuitions, or just automatically apply rules from the ideology, culture, or religion they grew up with. We can't avoid facing life's big questions, but we can avoid really thinking about them, if that's what we really want to do. But most people, I hope, don't really want to do that. Most people like to think they can back up their opinions with solid reasons for believing them.

But oftentimes, they can't. They think what they think because they grew up thinking it, or because their friends or family think that way, or because they just feel in their guts that one answer is right. Those clearly aren't adequate reasons, because they can all lead to false beliefs. Some people "just know in their guts" that men are superior to women. Their guts are wrong. Young Vikings grew up believing that Thor caused thunderstorms. They grew up mistaken. Their dear old Viking mamas and daddies were wrong.

This means that if we want to be able to back up our opinions with real reasoning, not just appeals to authority, tradition, or gut feelings, that's when philosophy isn't optional. That's why people need to learn a little about philosophy, because philosophers really have clarified some of these questions. To take a currently contentious example, many people who oppose gay marriage do so based on two arguments 1. God says it's wrong, as shown in certain Bible verses 2. It's not natural (it goes against the laws of nature or God's plan). The first is the Divine Command theory of ethics, and the second is a Natural Law theory. But here's the thing--philosophers have discovered serious logical problems with both of those theories, which have caused most to abandon them. The Divine Command theory runs into the Euthyphro Dilemma, and Natural Law arguments run into many objections, one of which is: Who says what's natural is good? Many male mammals kill babies of their species who aren't theirs. Does that mean infanticide is right?

The fact that philosophers have mostly rejected Divine Command and Natural Law theories of ethics doesn't mean those theories are wrong, but it does mean it's worth taking a critical look at both of them. If you want to defend either one adequately, you need to know what the objections are. They may not be convincing to you, but they certainly aren't trivial. Some of those philosophers were pretty smart people, after all, and some of the big questions they've wrestled with are questions we can't avoid. It might be possible to avoid thinking about those questions--to avoid doing philosophy, in other words--but it certainly isn't wise. If we want to be able to say our beliefs about some of life's most crucial questions are based on solid reasoning, then philosophy just isn't optional.

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The Voyage of Discovery: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy / William Lawhead