Correction to the following post: Even though AP reported before Friday that administrators would NOT allow student-led prayer during Friday's Lincoln County commencement ( http://bit.ly/15a1EUV ), I'm glad to make a correction. Student prayer was allowed and stated after all. My apologies for not catching the story over the weekend from Lincoln County's nearest newspaper, the Advocate-Messenger. The updated details are here: http://bit.ly/Za3Sz5
Instead of what I assumed had happened when I wrote the post below, the administration did not "capitulate" to secular pressure after all. However, this quote from a leading atheist involved with complaints supports my main point in my blog: "Every student should feel safe at their graduation and should not have to worry about religious bullying."
Consider whether public prayer really comes close to bullying while reading my original article below:
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I once laughed when I heard a Christian comedian shout through the mic, "If it offends you when I publicly state my Christian beliefs, where a helmet!" The audience then erupted in laughs and cheers.
I know what it's like to be a minority among, not just a crowd, but a whole national culture, when it comes to publicly expressed religious belief and worship. Yes, I admit without hesitation that the call to prayer, broadcast at various times throughout every day over loud speakers during my visit in predominately Muslim Malaysia, sounded eerie and unsettling. That and much more that saturates Malay culture constantly aroused strange feelings of loneliness throughout my stay. But it never crossed my mind that someone should stop the call.
Even if, hypothetically, I were to stay in that or a similar country long term or, again, hypothetically, to change my citizenship with such a people, I would never conceive of asking the imams even to turn down the volume on their speakers. I can't conceive of confusing my discomfort as a minority with some contrived "right" not to be made uncomfortable by the surrounding majority, regardless of the majority's intentions.
Do the young and the old in America--now, surprisingly, in Kentucky, more specifically--no longer have the inner stamina to survive and thrive through feelings of cultural and civic discomfort? Does some weakly conceived idea of a thorough "separation" of church and state give some of us the only pitiful strength we can muster to push away what hurts our feelings? This is what civic integrity has come to, even in the small community of Lincoln County, Kentucky, where school administrators capitulated to a very small minority of self-proclaimed atheists. They complained that they would be overwrought if student-led prayer were forced upon them during last Friday's commencement.
It's being reported that most Lincoln Countians have had to work hard to understand and accommodate the decision.
Perhaps it would have been much easier on all those citizens if the shaken atheist minority had just aroused a morsel of intellectual strength to defend their worldview through the lost art of public discourse. They also should have done what any frightened soul should do when ravaged by the onslaught of terrifying public prayers that slap "human rights" in the head. Wear a helmet.
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Some Thoughts About Snipping
What abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell had been doing in Philadelphia is making all who care to listen to the gruesome details more than just a little sick in the stomach. How could this have happened anytime, anywhere as a part of the unfolding of the human race? How could this have happened in America, in the city that birthed our constitution; the city that's named after "brotherly love?"
We all gasp at the details of Gosnell and employees allegedly snipping the spinal cords and killing fetuses in the womb and babies who had just been born. "Babies just being born" seems to produce the loudest gasps. Let's ask why. What do you say we keep asking why until answers are made as clear and articulate as possible from abortion rights advocates?
Since this trial is grabbing the nation's heads by the hair and forcing us to look at blood and death and the snipping of innocence squarely at what it is, there's now absolutely no justification for any thinking, feeling soul alive who's learned these details also not to face the mother of all questions regarding human life, reproductive rights, and the choice of terminating pregnancies. This is the question of what justifies any demarcation--any warranted dividing lines--between which heart we may legally stop before God and before human law and which we may not. What makes a baby breathing outside the womb worthy of snip protection, while another, inside the warm water of the feeding womb, unworthy?
Politicians of various American states have stroked their chins and voted a collective confusion of snip-worthiness with "man's measurements," such as 24 weeks in one state, a particular trimester in another. We, of course, who have come of age, attempt to hide the naked arbitrariness of such measurements by sewing together our fig leaves of "science." Kermitt Gosnell is a scientist--credentials, smock, and lots of tools to do science with. Some legislators have determined snip-worthiness based on which stages and proceedures present too great of a risk to the mother's health. Nature, it seems, labors to outwit science, at least for now. But science will relentlessly find the right concoctions for inducement, chemicals for detachment, and instruments for delicate peeling and prying that will put maternal health risk in the history books. Our current understanding of what it means to be human will become mere history as well.
We embarrass ourselves with how this demarcation of abortion worthiness is so will-of-the-wisp. There is nothing, however, that is ambiguous about when these little bloody lives will be terminated. It's at a decisive point in time and at an eternally hallowed place where such a little thing gets touched by the tools of science.
"Science." "Rights." "Laws." These little ones have not been allowed to grow into any comprehension of such things. If they've been able to comprehend any significant idea at all, it's the idea that they are not wanted. But the very last idea they possibly encounter is their babyish puzzlement over What exactly is that foreign object coming after them? Too bad they'd never grown to be able to appreciate the thing that killed them-- science.
As arrogant as I can be sometimes, I know I'm not the first to raise such questions. Just let me remind you to watch how people squirm when asked to justify any demarcation of fetal development. When do abortionists have to put down their "medical" instruments and just let the thing grow? Let's take the tiny tweezers of intricate logic to any answers abortion advocates might give. Let them squirm about it until, some day, the little ones in the womb squirm no more. And the only tool they're concerned with is their own little suckable thumbs.
We all gasp at the details of Gosnell and employees allegedly snipping the spinal cords and killing fetuses in the womb and babies who had just been born. "Babies just being born" seems to produce the loudest gasps. Let's ask why. What do you say we keep asking why until answers are made as clear and articulate as possible from abortion rights advocates?
Since this trial is grabbing the nation's heads by the hair and forcing us to look at blood and death and the snipping of innocence squarely at what it is, there's now absolutely no justification for any thinking, feeling soul alive who's learned these details also not to face the mother of all questions regarding human life, reproductive rights, and the choice of terminating pregnancies. This is the question of what justifies any demarcation--any warranted dividing lines--between which heart we may legally stop before God and before human law and which we may not. What makes a baby breathing outside the womb worthy of snip protection, while another, inside the warm water of the feeding womb, unworthy?
Politicians of various American states have stroked their chins and voted a collective confusion of snip-worthiness with "man's measurements," such as 24 weeks in one state, a particular trimester in another. We, of course, who have come of age, attempt to hide the naked arbitrariness of such measurements by sewing together our fig leaves of "science." Kermitt Gosnell is a scientist--credentials, smock, and lots of tools to do science with. Some legislators have determined snip-worthiness based on which stages and proceedures present too great of a risk to the mother's health. Nature, it seems, labors to outwit science, at least for now. But science will relentlessly find the right concoctions for inducement, chemicals for detachment, and instruments for delicate peeling and prying that will put maternal health risk in the history books. Our current understanding of what it means to be human will become mere history as well.
We embarrass ourselves with how this demarcation of abortion worthiness is so will-of-the-wisp. There is nothing, however, that is ambiguous about when these little bloody lives will be terminated. It's at a decisive point in time and at an eternally hallowed place where such a little thing gets touched by the tools of science.
"Science." "Rights." "Laws." These little ones have not been allowed to grow into any comprehension of such things. If they've been able to comprehend any significant idea at all, it's the idea that they are not wanted. But the very last idea they possibly encounter is their babyish puzzlement over What exactly is that foreign object coming after them? Too bad they'd never grown to be able to appreciate the thing that killed them-- science.
As arrogant as I can be sometimes, I know I'm not the first to raise such questions. Just let me remind you to watch how people squirm when asked to justify any demarcation of fetal development. When do abortionists have to put down their "medical" instruments and just let the thing grow? Let's take the tiny tweezers of intricate logic to any answers abortion advocates might give. Let them squirm about it until, some day, the little ones in the womb squirm no more. And the only tool they're concerned with is their own little suckable thumbs.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Academic Standards for Your Kids: The "Art" of Missing the Point
This letter to the editor was published in the Glasgow (Ky.) Daily Times weekend edition, April 27/28, 2013, page A5, under the headline "Academic Standards Missing Key Aspect."
Do the people who drafted the Kentucky Core Academic Standards document, who have recently been given serious authority to determine the ultimate educational goals of your schools, share your most fundamental beliefs about the world and life? Decide for yourself, especially in the Arts and Humanities sections, the sections that one would think should inspire students toward the most important ideals and truths we hold as families of Barren County. (Space here limits me from sharing significant quotations, but the document is easily accessible online.)
Something huge is missing from this agenda. What should art education really be all about? I’m concerned about the way the KCAS writers limit the purposes of art to the mere feelings and emotions of the artist. Good art truly strikes us, often emotionally, but in doing so it should prod us towards reality that we behold as something ultimately beyond fleeting sentimentality and feelings. The KCAS document implies that graduating students need no comprehension of the difference between art and aesthetics. The word “aesthetics” is not even mentioned in the Arts sections. Aesthetics relates to the ideals and values that transcend the piece of art, the artist’s own feelings (no matter how interesting), and even the cultural setting from which the expression arises. One must at least begin to understand aesthetics—as opposed to mere art—in order to become educated. Parents must then develop tastes in their children that readily identify works of art that convey these universal aesthetic ideals. If you agree that you should do this as a parent, the people behind the KCAS don’t seem to be willing or able to help you.
So proper aesthetic education, of course, requires judgment by families and the community to determine what ought to be preferred, and ought is becoming more and more passé when it comes to art, humanities, and cultural discussion. While the diversity of cultures in America must be taught and understood, the celebration of various cultures must be tampered with discernment. Some cultural expressions, especially in art, are simply inferior to others in aiming students toward what south central Kentuckians believe to be their highest ideals. There, I said it!
Art best expresses such ideals when they move the souls of us, the observers, as well as the artists. The KCAS Arts and Humanities drafters—whoever they are—seem to care little for teaching the relationship between material works of art and eternal souls. In fact, the general KCAS document implies that nurturing the souls of your students toward transcendent truth is of little concern to the Kentucky Department of Education. Of course that’s ultimately your job as a parent. But are they working alongside you, staying out of your way, or are they hindering you? If they’re hindering you, it’s time to ask them why and ask yourself what you’re going to do about it.
Comments welcome, especially from parents and educators.
Do the people who drafted the Kentucky Core Academic Standards document, who have recently been given serious authority to determine the ultimate educational goals of your schools, share your most fundamental beliefs about the world and life? Decide for yourself, especially in the Arts and Humanities sections, the sections that one would think should inspire students toward the most important ideals and truths we hold as families of Barren County. (Space here limits me from sharing significant quotations, but the document is easily accessible online.)
Something huge is missing from this agenda. What should art education really be all about? I’m concerned about the way the KCAS writers limit the purposes of art to the mere feelings and emotions of the artist. Good art truly strikes us, often emotionally, but in doing so it should prod us towards reality that we behold as something ultimately beyond fleeting sentimentality and feelings. The KCAS document implies that graduating students need no comprehension of the difference between art and aesthetics. The word “aesthetics” is not even mentioned in the Arts sections. Aesthetics relates to the ideals and values that transcend the piece of art, the artist’s own feelings (no matter how interesting), and even the cultural setting from which the expression arises. One must at least begin to understand aesthetics—as opposed to mere art—in order to become educated. Parents must then develop tastes in their children that readily identify works of art that convey these universal aesthetic ideals. If you agree that you should do this as a parent, the people behind the KCAS don’t seem to be willing or able to help you.
So proper aesthetic education, of course, requires judgment by families and the community to determine what ought to be preferred, and ought is becoming more and more passé when it comes to art, humanities, and cultural discussion. While the diversity of cultures in America must be taught and understood, the celebration of various cultures must be tampered with discernment. Some cultural expressions, especially in art, are simply inferior to others in aiming students toward what south central Kentuckians believe to be their highest ideals. There, I said it!
Art best expresses such ideals when they move the souls of us, the observers, as well as the artists. The KCAS Arts and Humanities drafters—whoever they are—seem to care little for teaching the relationship between material works of art and eternal souls. In fact, the general KCAS document implies that nurturing the souls of your students toward transcendent truth is of little concern to the Kentucky Department of Education. Of course that’s ultimately your job as a parent. But are they working alongside you, staying out of your way, or are they hindering you? If they’re hindering you, it’s time to ask them why and ask yourself what you’re going to do about it.
Comments welcome, especially from parents and educators.
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