Quote:
Originally posted by Silver Cheetah:
Never met a vampire - personally I like my blood just where it is, i.e. in my veins ( ) but can't see what their beef is with witchcraft and totem poles.. All the witches I know are lovely people, and as for totems, everyone should have one...... Lots of fun and dead helpful...
Having done bible reading AND some of that other stuff, I'll take the witchcraft every time...... 
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Silver Cheetah the witch. Of course!
The problem with the poem is that it states a popular bit of untrue political propaganda -- namely that it is illegal to pray in school. No Supreme
Court opinion has ever held that, or any american law said that.
What the constitution forbids is state sponsorship of a religion to the exclusion of others. That applies to All religions equally, Christianity and the others. And THAT is what certain fundamentalist christians who continue the above propaganda really object to. Their real beef is that they want Christianity recognized by the state as a sort of official amercian religion, and are frustrated by resistance to that idea.
The propaganda is based in part on erroneus claims that american was founded on Christian principles or as a Christian nation.
What formed the political entitity known as the United States, through its best and noblest aspects of law designed to maximize freedom, were political philosophies born from a meeting of liberal political philosophies from Europe such as the English philosopher John Locke's social contract theories with a wild and vigourous strain of freedom born of the anarchistic frontier and Indian influence, for instance the Iroquois confederacy, a personal study of which profoundly influenced Benjamin Franklin's (who was of course one of the key figures in the Revolution) ideas on democracy.
Christianity had little or nothing to do with the political principles which the US gov't is founded on.