Faced with the Threat of a Lawsuit, Indiana High School Removes Godly Sign

Putting the whole ‘god’ issue aside, it concerns me that they used that many dots in their ellipse. I don’t even think that is a grammatically correct place to put an ellipse. It’s a good thing it’s being taken down, hopefully the next sign they put up gets proofread.  😉

In fundyland, the fact that the majority cannot force the minority to believe (or at least fake the appearance of belief) in the same thing they do amounts to repression and persecution. This has came up in arguments with my Mormon co-workers who think Utah should be able to recognize LDS as it’s official religion. This to them is “State Rights.” It’s funny (in a morbid way) how every time you hear someone talk about states rights, you can be 99% certain they are about to talk some bigoted nonsense.

What always gets me is their constant confusion of a republic (what the United States is) and a democracy (what the United States is not). The local was right in her definition of democracy but she seems to forget that we don’t all have an equal vote in decisions. We vote for people who make decisions for us.

They are usually quite obsessed with the Pledge of Allegiance which has is right in there: … and to the REPUBLIC, for which it stands.

I missed the Book of Athletes. Is that in one of those lost scrolls or something?

What some people don’t seem to realize is that to guarantee maximum freedom , it is necessary to curtail certain types of freedom.  For example, to insure that people are free to believe what they want, it is important not to have the state dictate what the beliefs should be.  The majority has to accept that they have to sacrifice having the state champion their specific beliefs.  The state must remain neutral (or silent) on what are the correct beliefs.  Then the citizens can be free to exercise their beliefs in their own way.  As soon as the state starts taking sides, problems with tyranny can arise.  There is a certain sentiment in the religious community that they are losing the “cultural war” and they want to utilize the power of the state to bring the heathens in line.  If they are losing some kind of war, it is because their message (or beliefs) no longer have currency in today’s world.  They need to change their message (or beliefs).  They don’t need to co-op the state to force or coerce everybody to their way of thinking.

You probably meant “threat of a lawsuit”, not “treat”.

Let’s ignore the state-sponsored religion issue; the content of the sign itself is pretty naive. God doesn’t let cheaters win? In what reality? God has apparently missed out on the last twenty years of Major League Baseball, College Football and the Tour de France, just to name a few.
Many religious people take the ‘have faith like a child’ passage from the Christian Bible too literally, because the sentiment on the sign in question is indicative of a 5-year-old mentality.

I’ve understood the system to be a democratic republic.  That seems to be the most accurate phrase to use.

It’s sad, but I wasn’t even shocked…Indiana, like most faux-Southern states (we have an identity crisis–the state is basically half Chicago and half Kentucky, NV is in the Kentucky half), is made up mostly of small towns, where even the next town over is viewed with suspicion…I’m sure most of the letters blamed Bloomington (three counties over and the location of IU), or, as some area residents call it, The People’s Republic of Bloomington.  We’re outsider enough for them.

If these same folks were greeted at Court Houses and schools and other government buildings with signs praising atheism or Islam or any religion other than Christianity they’d have a cow (probably not in the biblical sense, but I digress). 

Regarding the letter writer who solved her own problem: this is where I just can’t rationalize the disconnect these folks seem to have over their religion. They can pray anywhere they want to. They can cover their automobiles and houses and clothing in any religious paraphernalia they want. They can walk down the street flogging themselves with thorny branches and chanting for all I care. All I ask is that they not make me partake and not make me feel as if my own government favors their beliefs over my own. And that’s what these brouhahas always boil down to — they want their religious convictions sanctioned by government entities. Too bad for them.

Mathematically inclined
was confused
now im okay
thanks

Doesn’t it just suck that you can’t simply assume that everyone in your community believes in Jesus and adorn your local government buildings with explicit endorsements of your religious beliefs? The FFRF is so mean!

Or a representative democracy as opposed to a direct democracy.

There are certainly strong directly democratic elements in the US. But that isn’t necessarily a good thing. Like the broken initiative process in CA or electing judges

This are the same people who praise gawd when they score a goal/touchdown/point

I’m trying to imagine how the indignantly righteous would respond to your statements. Something along the lines of “sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell?”

That’s all it took?! Apparently so.

Well, it actually took much more than that one letter. It also took all the other challenges to public school proselytizing  by very courageous and determined students and parents, many of whom have been featured in articles on this blog.

Their efforts and those of future challengers have a cumulative effect. Word is spreading that public school administrations and staff who flout the Constitution will regret it. I think it’s quite likely that Superintendent Mike Turner acceded so quickly to FFRF only because he had heard of those cases, and he might have been hoping (in vain) that nobody would complain. 

I look forward to the day when correcting something of this nature is always this easy, and is taken for granted, and we have to remind each other about how it wasn’t at all easy in the beginning.

Yeah I’m pretty sure its in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls

It’s not a democracy in the strict sense.  If it were, then Al Gore would have won the 2000 election.

It’s always amusing to witness the “backlash” against us godless heathens after something like this. They actually think they’re striking a blow against us when they do something of a religious nature in public (like wearing a religious t-shirt or praying) of their own free will.

That was delightfully haiku-like.

Exactly.  I consider “State Rights” to be a political wedge strategy to thwart the Bill of Rights.  You see, if they can manage to turn the US into fifty little individual fiefdoms wherein the only role of the federal government is to enforce the will of the fifty individual little feudal lords and their rich cronies upon the populations of those fiefdoms, they can start declaring “official religions” and maybe even be able to enforce those anti-atheist laws on their books and maybe even make new ones, as well as laws that allow them to persecute non-Christian religious people.

Of course, if the “wrong” believers or the non-believers became the majority, see how they’d cry.  Of course, again, once they have their fifty little Christian fiefdoms, they’d have no problem uniting the country again into a whole country and would, of course, make sure to rewrite the laws to avoid allowing any non-Christian any rights (much less power) regardless of population percentage.  What they want is to cut the country up and then sew it back together into a Christian theocratic feudal state.

They really do not see how this works too.  They genuinely think that being prevented from persecuting others is somehow persecution of them.  They genuinely believe that when someone takes away their stick and tells them they cannot beat the other children in the head with it anymore, it amounts to persecution.  They said as much at my Catholic school when I was a kid–that Christians are a majority but are being prevented from exercising their faith, because a part of the Christian faith is to make believers of everyone by any means necessary, so being prevented from using the power of the state to force everyone to believe in (or pretend to believe in) Jesus is essentially persecution.

Somehow, that didn’t fly with me when I was a little kid, and it amazes me  every time I realize that there are a lot of full-grown adults to whom this is perfectly logical reasoning.