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Court validates student’s right to freedom of religion
From One News Now. (H/T Caffeinated Thoughts via ECM)
Excerpt:
Montana’s highest court has ruled in favor of a former Montana high school valedictorian who was banned from speaking at her graduation because her speech contained religious references.
Among Renee Griffith’s planned comments were such statements as: “I didn’t let fear keep me from sharing Christ and His joy with those around me” — and “I learned not to be known for my grades…but for being committed to my faith and morals and being someone who lived with a purpose from God with a passionate love for Him.” She was ordered by school officials to replace “Christ” with the words “my faith”; and to amend the other statement to say she “lived with a purpose, a purpose derived from my faith and based on a love of mankind.”
Griffith, a co-valedictorian of her 2008 senior class, refused to do so and, consequently, was prevented from speaking at the ceremony.
[…]The Rutherford Institute helped to argue the case on behalf of Griffith. “Renee wanted to mention Christ and God in her graduation speech, and the school said she couldn’t do it — then she insisted that she be able to do it,” explains Rutherford’s president, John Whitehead.
“She was actually forbidden from even participating in the graduation ceremony at all,” Whitehead continues. “So I think this [ruling] sends a shot across the bow of all these other cases that have happened across the country — and it’s a reaffirmation that we still have some freedom in the United States.”
A lower court had ruled previously that Griffith’s civil rights were not violated, and the school district had argued mentioning Christ or God in a speech is a violation of the alleged “separation of church and state.”
“But the [Montana Supreme Court] actually addresses that and says that’s not true — this is just basically free speech and students should have a right, as other students have a right, to mention what’s important to them and their lives when they’re up before the students speaking about graduation,” says the spokesman for The Rutherford Institute.
Whitehead says the ruling affirms to Christian students that mentioning the name “Jesus” in a speech is not taboo.
W. William Leaphart dissented from the majority of the judges – he ruled against Renee Griffith. He was opposed to Christians exercising their religious liberty in the public square.
This is a good lesson about how the public school system tries to force their secular worldview onto Christians. Can you believe that? The National Butte School District #1 actually told her what to say so that she could sound like them. They wanted her to pretend to believe what they believe. And they thought that suppressing her views would cause her no harm at all. That it was OK for her to be suppressed. That is was a good thing to silence her. That her rights could be breached so that their feelings would not be hurt. So that they wouldn’t have to realize that Christianity isn’t stupid, that it might even be true, and that smart people believe it.
The best thing Christians can do is to encourage their children to do well in school and to study apologetics. The atheists really hate the idea that smart people can be Christians. They really hate being confronted by smart Christians. Dumb ones they can accept, but the smart ones make them very angry. That’s what we want.
By the way, this censorship by the public schools actually happens a lot. I blogged about the last time this happened here.
Are atheists just as moral as Judeo-Christian believers?
Here’s a fine polemic from Michael Egnor, writing against radical atheistic Darwinist P.Z. Myers. (H/T ECM)
“I’m about as pro-choice as you can get…”
“…I’m even willing to say that I’m pro-abortion…”
“[I] would like to encourage more people to abort…”
And Egnor’s response: (in part)
Valerie Hudson and Andrea Den Boer, authors of the landmark book “Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population” ask:
What forces drive the deficit of females in Asian nations such as India and China? Why are their birth sex ratios so abnormal? Why are early childhood mortality rates for girls higher than those for boys? Why are most children in orphanages girls? How do we account for the disappearance of so many women — estimated conservatively at over 90 million missing women in seven Asian countries alone?
They conclude:
[T]he modern gender imbalance in Asia, as with historical gender imbalances in Asia and else-where, is largely a man-made phenomenon. Girls are being culled from the population, whether through prenatal sex identification and female sex-selective abortion, or through relative neglect compared to male offspring in early childhood (including abandonment)…
Pro-abortion population control policies are the foundation of this femicide, and Myers’ explicit embrace of abortion and implicit embrace of population control junk-science puts him in the company of thugs. Ironically, Myers’ fellow pro-abortion goons have violated women’s basic human rights — the right not to be sterilized, not to be forced to have an abortion, even the right to live until birth and the right not to be killed after birth because you’re a girl — on a scale unprecedented in human history. It’s no coincidence that the first women’s rights activists in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century were passionately pro-life and anti-abortion. Abortion and population control are primary instruments of femicide and of the worldwide degradation of women.
If a person is pro-abortion then they are necessarily pro-sex-selection-abortion.
Abortion is basically recreational sex followed by murder, in order to avoid having to deal with the demands of an innocent person who is at the mercy of the very people who freely chose to bring her into being. And yet atheists like P.Z. Myers want more abortions.
There is no place for human rights – of any kind – in an accidental universe. We are all just lumps of matter – machines made out of meat. That’s their view. We don’t even have consciousness or free will on their view. They think that we’re just animals acting out our biologically determined behaviors based on survival instincts. It’s a very low view of humans.
Here are some more famous atheists explaining what atheism is:
The idea of political or legal obligation is clear enough… Similarly, the idea of an obligation higher than this, referred to as moral obligation, is clear enough, provided reference to some lawgiver higher…than those of the state is understood. In other words, our moral obligations can…be understood as those that are imposed by God…. But what if this higher-than-human lawgiver is no longer taken into account? Does the concept of moral obligation…still make sense? …The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone. (Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985), p. 83-84)
In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. (Source: Richard Dawkins)
The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate when someone says, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory. (Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-269).
Don’t make the mistake in thinking that an atheist is just like you because he lives in the same time and place as you and seems to act according to the fashions of the day. Atheists have no objective standard of morality. They think that “ought” statements are just arbitrary customs and preferences – like cooking style and clothing style and music style. It’s all arbitrary on their view. They think that people behave well not to conform to a Designer’s plan that values self-sacrificial love but in order to have happy feelings and to be accepted and praised by others. They think the universe is an accident, and the purpose of life is to compete with other people in order to be the happiest. There is no final judgment for anything they do, on atheism.
When a Christian loves someone self-sacrificially, they neither think of themselves, nor even the other person, but instead think of their relationship with God. We act out of the desire to please someone who loves us more than anyone in the world. The good action is basically done out of a desire to respect that prior vertical relationship. We are grateful, and we show our gratitude by imitating Jesus’ example of self-sacrificial love. The demands of a child, or a friend, or a family member are more important to me, as a Christian, than my own selfish happiness. I am more concerned about how my actions will cause someone to either turn to God or away from him. I would not act in a way that turns a person away from God. Even if it made me happy, even if I could get away with it. I just don’t care that much about being happy in this life. It’s not a big deal to me.
