Tag Archives: Secularism

New York high school bans Christian club, allows 60 other clubs

Story here from LifeSiteNews.

Excerpt:

A student has teamed up with the Alliance Defense Fund to file a lawsuit against a New York school district after school officials cancelled her once-flourishing Christian club.

At the beginning of her freshman year at Half Hollow Hills High School East, the student was told that the Ichthus Club, a student-led group where she was one of the leaders, had been cancelled without any advanced notification. Four years earlier, her older brother had met strong resistance before the club was finally allowed to form.

School officials claim that unspecified budget cuts and a lack of student popularity spurred their decision. However, leaders in the club point out that it had more than 55 student attendees last year, and complain that approximately 60 other student clubs, including the Gay-Straight Alliance and Amnesty International, were allowed to continue.

[…]“Christian student groups in public schools shouldn’t be discriminated against simply because they are religious,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel David Cortman.

“Singling out a religious student club while letting the vast majority of the others remain constitutes viewpoint discrimination and is unconstitutional. In addition, it’s simply false that this club is not popular with students. More than 90 students signed a petition in favor of allowing the club to continue meeting.”

Another reason why Christians need to vote for lower taxes and school choice. We cannot be paying the government to undermine our own worldview with our own money in government-run secular-left public schools operated by teacher unions. The only solution is to cut taxes, keep your money and homeschool or pay for private schools. These schools don’t favor our worldview and they never will.

Parental rights under attack in Poland and Canada

First, Poland, from Life Site News. (H/T Neil Simpson)

Excerpt:

A controversial bill that critics say would significantly infringe on the rights of parents to bring up their children according to their values has passed first reading in the Polish parliament.

Incorporated into the bill, titled “On the Prevention of Family Violence,” which deals with a variety of issues, is a clause that says, “It is forbidden for persons holding parental power over children to implement corporal punishment, cause psychological pain or to humiliate them in any other form.”

According to the Polish Labor and Social Policy Ministry guidelines, psychological violence includes, “making the child ashamed, imposing one’s own opinions on the child, criticizing the child continually, controlling the child, restricting the child’s social contacts,” as well as “criticizing the child’s sexual behavior.”

Furthermore, the bill would give social workers authority to take children from families if someone suspects parents are in contravention of these guidelines or if it is believed there is a danger they may in the future “harm” their children this in way.

This is really bad, especially for those of us who think that respectful disagreement about controversial is an important part of learning and growing. That’s what shopping malls are for: to buy presents to make up for all the frank disagreement! But there has to be the disagreement first, otherwise how can people really be honest with one another, and change their minds?

Then Canada, also from Life Site News. (H/T Neil Simpson)

Excerpt:

Public school children in Hamilton, Ontario will not be permitted to withdraw from classes that promote homosexuality, according to the Hamilton Mountain News. At the same time, according to a leaked document obtained by a local journalist, teachers are being instructed to tell parents who object to the curriculum that “this is not about parent rights.”

At the end of January, the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) hosted a professional development day dedicated to “equity” training, where they distributed a sheet to teachers with “quick responses” they can offer to parents who object to the school board’s “anti-homophobia” curriculum.

That document was obtained by journalist Mark Cripps, and posted on the website of the Hamilton Mountain News. Cripps observes that the handout “basically indicates parents have no rights when it comes to their child’s education at the HWDSB.”

In addition, Cripps reports that, “The board says no child will be excused from the class when topics of homosexuality are brought into the classroom.”

The school board is developing a new equity policy, as required of all boards under the Ontario Ministry of Education’s equity strategy, announced last year. Among other things, the Ministry is requiring all boards, Catholic and public, to develop a plan for combating “homophobia.”

The sheet given to the HWDSB teachers specifies that teachers do not “condone” the removal of children from classes that deal with homosexuality.

This is the kind of thing that terrifies even marriage-minded men like me, who have been saving and preparing for marriage our entire lives. Can you imagine what would happen if my future children said the wrong thing in public and they were seized by the government? I don’t doubt for a second that some of Obama’s nominees would see nothing wrong with seizing children from parents who don’t agree with them on moral issues. Chai Feldblum and Kevin Jennings come to mind. Even government-run public schools are quite vicious in making sure that parents are forced to pay for secular-leftists schools so that they have no money left over to choose a school more suitable to the worldview of the parents.

Related posts

Comments to this post will be strictly moderated in accordance with Obama’s hate crimes law.

Brian Auten posts book review of “The Faith of the Fatherless”

The book review is here on Apologetics 315.

Excerpt:

Vitz begins by laying out his hypothesis and the underlying principle behind it. He proposes that “atheism of the strong or intense type is to a substantial degree generated by the peculiar psychological needs of its advocates.”2  He notes that the theory that God is merely a projection of one’s needs is a popular position, but “the psychological concepts used so effectively to interpret religion by those who reject God are double-edged swords that can also, indeed easily, be used to explain their unbelief.”3  He makes clear one of the underlying assumptions of his study: “First, I assume that the major barriers to belief in God are not rational but can be called, in a general sense, psychological.”4

The psychological angle that Vitz examines is the role and influence of one’s father in the formation of beliefs about God. The author notes that “Christianity is in many respects distinctive in its emphasis on God as loving Father.”5 Vitz points out that “Freud makes the simple and easily understandable claim that once a child or youth is disappointed in or loses respect for his earthly father, belief in a heavenly father becomes impossible.”6 It is with this thesis in mind – the lack of a father plays a strong role in one’s psychological disposition towards rejecting God – that Vitz engages his case study comparing the lives of famous atheists and theists: “I have selected for study those who are historically famous as atheists. These are great thinkers, typically philosophers, whose rejection of God was central to their intellectual life and public positions.”7

Brian also cites Vitz explaining his own journey into atheism:

Just as I had learned how to dress like a college student by putting on the right clothes, I learned to think like a proper psychologist by putting on the right – that is, atheistic – ideas and attitudes. I wanted as few impediments to my professional career as it was possible.14

[…]In my own case, I now see that it was because of my social need to assimilate, my professional need to be accepted as part of the world of academic psychology, and my personal need for independence and an agreeable way of life that I chose to be an atheist. Hence, the intellectual basis for my atheism, like that of countless others, appears in retrospect to be much more of a shallow rationalization than an objective rationale.

I just ordered the book last week on Brian’s recommendation. You might also be interested in a lecture that Paul Vitz delivered on the psychological causes of atheism. (That link contains the MP3 file)

Related posts