by Josh Hostetler

Created on: March 25, 2007   Last Updated: April 30, 2007

To me, this question is a complete no-brainer. The problem is, we have to know what we are talking about.

It is completely absurd to me that people want to keep children who want to pray from doing so. However, there are other issues that need to be addressed.

I believe this debate started out as legitimate, and spiralled out of control into the ridiculous question we are debating here.

Let me explain.

As a child, I was a mostly Atheist Agnostic living in a very homogenous community of "Christians." (I put Christians in quotes here, because I constantly witnessed the way the people in my community acted, and I hardly think they qualify. They were hateful, racist, and closed-minded. Those traits are decidedly un-Christian to me, but that is neither here nor there.)

The public school I attended in this community had MANDATORY prayers on a regular basis.

I spent many years fighting against this, personally. I cannot tell you how many hours of my life I spent in the principal's office, charged with insubordination and causing a scene, because I refused to participate in the prayers. I never actually raised a scene, mind you, I simply did not bow my head or say 'Amen'. That was enough to get me in fairly big trouble on a regular basis.

I believe the anti-prayer debate started because of things like this. Sure, there are people out there who think it was the right thing to do to send me to the principal's office for this, but I can tell you it's a very harsh thing to do to a 7-year old. I felt displaced, unappreciated, and disrespected.

But these incidents are very different from denying children the right to voluntary, self-initiated prayer.

In my high school, there was a boy whose religion mandated that he kneel down on the sidewalk, facing a certain direction, and pray several times a day.

He faced the same persecution I had years before.

There was great public debate over whether or not he should be allowed to continue with this practice. Of course he persisted, and of course, eventually, he won. But it took a long time, and I'm sure it was torturous for him.

The school that inflicted this treatment on him was caught between a rock and a hard place here. You see, while they were trying to deny this boy his rights, they were enforcing mandatory prayers on the rest of us, during assemblies or other gatherings. I spoke to some of my teachers about it, and a couple of them told me, in secrecy, that there was a great political division throughout the administration and staff

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