Ed Brayton says it plain

In a post today, Ed Brayton covered the issue of "public prayer", i.e., those insipid prayers that are often said at governmental meetings, allegedly to "open" the proceedings -- as if we have to talk to god first before getting down to business. Ed asks a question of the people who insist on this "right":

Why is it so important to you that others have to listen to your prayers? Every person at a city council meeting can pray silently any time they want. If the council wants to have a prayer before the meeting, they can do so in their offices before they start the meeting. The attendees at the meeting can pray before the meeting starts, individually or as a group. Why does it matter to you so much that others who don’t wish to pray have to stand by silently while you do? I think the answer to that question is patently obvious.

Indeed. (Bolding mine.)

Separation of church and state in the European Union

“There is a movement in the European Union that wants total religious neutrality and can’t accept our Christian traditions,” said Archbishop Zvolensky, [the Roman Catholic archbishop of the Slovak capital] bemoaning what he sees as a rising tide of militant secularism at a time when Europe is struggling to forge a common identity. 

There go those "militant" secularists again. What an irritant they must be, huh? So what made Zvolensky so upset?

[T]he National Bank of Slovakia announced that the European Commission, the union’s executive arm, had ordered it to remove halos and crosses from special commemorative euro coins due to be minted this summer. The coins, designed by a local artist, were intended to celebrate the 1,150th anniversary of Christianity’s arrival in Slovak lands...

Ah, I see. The nasty old EU won't let Slovakia plaster government-issued coins with halos and crosses, thus blocking the god-given right of Christians to place their religious symbols wherever the hell they please. Those darned militant secularists! They're always ruining everything.   

Yup, it's the same old story. Christians want to paint the world with crosses and gods and mentions of heaven and grace and sin. But those nasty secularists keep stopping them! To deluded Christians, this is "religious persecution". Horrors!

Christians will never understand that they can't force the world to worship their god. They see their pushing of religious iconography into the public sphere as a god-given right. It's not. It's religious piggery.

Feel free to worship your stupid, nonexistent god, but leave the rest of us alone. That shouldn't be so hard to understand. But to religiously damaged minds, apparently it is.

“I need to voice a serious and disturbing suspicion: that the E.U. is under the control of Satan or Satanism,” said Rafael Rafaj of the Slovak National Party, a far-right nationalist party. 

The view that the European Union serves Satan has become a popular theme for some extreme Christian fundamentalists, who cite the Bible’s Book of Revelation as proof that dissolving national boundaries signals an approaching apocalypse. 

Sigh.

Tell me again why churches are tax-exempt

These days, Roman Catholic churches are hotbeds of political protest. Isn't that supposed to be out of bounds? Doesn't engaging in political activities mean tax exemptions are inappropriate? I mean, I thought the granting of tax-exempt status was all about the separation of church and state. So we're going to get rid of the tax breaks now that the church has violated this pact, right? (Some re-paragraphing ahead.)

Catholic leaders across the region on Sunday railed against the part of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s “women’s equality” package of bills that deals with abortion, calling it a “radical measure” that would expand the number of late-term abortions.

At the end of the homily, the church played Malone’s recording over the sound system.

“The position of the Catholic Church through every age is clear,” Malone said in the recording. “Life is sacred. Our focus is to enhance and promote the life and dignity of all human beings from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.”

How can they do this? Why doesn't the government clamp down on them and call foul? Oh, right, I forgot. Churches can do no wrong. Because this is America. U!S!A!

A seemingly non-political, female church attendee also seemed to have a problem with this onslaught of political maneuvering during mass:

“There’s little kids in there, and they’re talking about abortion,” Sontag said, calling the homily “totally inappropriate.”

Well, she got the "inappropriate" part right. Jeez.

Sensible article in LA Times

God at the Head of the Class is a nice, normal, accurate article in the LA Times today. It briefly recounts the case of a teacher who tried to proselytize his students in a public school, and the decision that came down as a result of his actions.

The reason I point to this article is that you rarely see such clarity in a major newspaper. Kudos to the LA Times. It's not so hard to say: religion doesn't belong in public schools. See how easy that is?