Channel 6 carries the story with video. The Star quotes “Reba Boyd Wooden, the executive director for the Center for Inquiry, said she believes government and religion should not mix. "Would you like to be told that this is the national day when you should pray to Allah? I don't think most people who are Christians would want to do that," she said. "Government should not take sides when it comes to religion. They should be very neutral."
This is part of the argument to remove God from the public square because we are a pluralistic society and should be a non-offensive public, rests mainly on the idea of separation of church and state; a largely misapplied concept originally meant to repel any attempt for a compulsory State endorsed religion. The inherent mistake of Reba Wooden is found within her rhetorical question because she thinks public prayer assemblies would involve Christians praying on Islamic prayer rugs or Muslims being offended by praying to a Christian or Jewish God. Therefore, she wants even less than a generic God; she wants no mention of any God, so as to be ‘very neutral’. Yet, anyone who has read of our founding cannot ignore the Biblical God whose laws of morality formed the underpinning of inalienable rights coming from God and were embedded within our documents and our tradition. Freedom OF religion; not FROM religion. No Ms.Wooden; it isn’t that Americans are being ‘told’ when you ‘should’ pray. It is a volunteer effort and officializing the matter does not make the U.S. a theocratic nation that mandates one God on anyone. I don’t care for peas but that doesn’t mean we should make the cafeteria neutral so no one is offended.
I’m reminded of the movie ‘The Ten Commandments’ wherein Pharaoh, having learned of Moses’ Hebrew birth and alleged ‘deliverer’, instructed “Let the name of Moses be stricken from every book and tablet. Stricken from every pylon and obelisk of Egypt. Let the name of Moses be unheard and unspoken, erased from the memory of man, for all time.’ Opponents of public prayer would like to do the same with God, so everyone can be neutral; a concept alien to our founding fathers.
