Prayer in America: Has anyone watched this program?

[TZ]

It's on my public television station, about the "important role" prayer has played in this country. While I found it irritating that we have to hear how all the important civil rights advances can be attributed to prayer it had an interesting discussion about prayer in school that was pretty evenhanded. However I think I might skip the next hour which talks about the role of prayer in healing.
I wonder if this kind of programming is a result of the fundies demanding that Public Television be "fair and balanced".

[moggie]

1. That's a pretty disgusting claim

hear how all the important civil rights advances can be attributed to prayer

Fuck that! Civil rights were achieved through hard work, blood and heartache, not kneeling and begging daddy for help. To pretend otherwise is disrespectful of the sacrifice of many brave people.

[Warpy]

2. Civil rights were obtained through both peace and violence

The peaceful protests shamed the Jim Crow backers into writing new legislation. The violence scared them into getting it passed.

I am nonviolent. Unfortunately, most change through history has happened not through shaming the power structure, but by provoking it into overreaction.

[trotsky]

7. Especially as it pertains to women's suffrage.

The leaders of the suffrage movement are like a Who's Who of Freethinkers in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/stanton.htm

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/quote-a1.htm#SUSANB

A lot of DU Christians would do well to heed this beauty from SBA:

"What you should say to outsiders is that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our Association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself shall not stand upon it."
-- Susan B Anthony, Susan B Anthony: A Biography, by Kathleen Barry, New York University Press, 1988, p.310

[YankeyMCC]

3. Two recomended readings

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism Susan Jacoby - Gives a nice history of secularism in the US and in particular how secular values and humanist, atheists, and agnostics contributed to civil rights struggles from the very founding, through slavery, and the women's suffrage movement etc...

Also, a nice little piece about secularist role in the 1960's civil rights movements: http://www.humaniststudies.org/enews/?id=333&article=0

[enlightenment]

4. "The role of prayer in healing"

Wasn't there a study recently that showed prayer actually makes people sicker? Or something like that . . .

I admire your intestinal fortitude, turtlensue; I can't tolerate that sort of programming these days. Too much god-talk everywhere.

[and-justice-for-all]

5. Praying is begging....

To hands working can do more than a million together in prayer.

[JNelson6563]

6. As I like to say in regard to prayer

Give me one pair of working hands over a thousand pairs of praying hands any day!

Julie

[onager]

8. And I like to say...

The only difference between prayer and carrying a rabbit's foot is a three-legged rabbit. :evilgrin:

[JNelson6563]

9. touche'!

Well said dear. :toast:

Julie

[Deep13]

10. I guess they are overlooking the role of religion in supporting...

...first slavery and then segregation. It remains the main source of misogyny in the world.