Separation of Religion and State

Normally in any election cycle the issue of religion in school comes up in some form or the other.  This year Ms. O'Donnel from New Jersey had a problem with Constitutional precedence pertaining to the intention of the founding father's when they penned the First Amendment to that great base document.  Other candidates have touched on this electrified issue.  Oh well…I am not going to get into the deep implications of the need for separation of religion from national politics since it will only cause people to get all huffy and silly in their standpoint on the issue.  Instead I will tell you my own little story of growing up in an America that did not keep their eyes on the impact of this issue on the people it was suppose to "protect."  I came to America from Ireland, a small country which can certainly boast being one of the most religiously biased nations in the world for lots of good and bad reasons.  I grew to adulthood in Southern California in a relatively small town atmosphere where virtually all of the larger religions were represented by its residents.  Religion was not something that was a normal topic of discussion except for the occasional crude or ugly stereotypical jokes passed between friends about one or more of the major religions.   This was in the mid-1950s so religion was in fact, a topic of instruction in the classroom normally handled by a weekly one two hour block of instruction presented by a visiting cleric of some sort.  To accommodate the non-Protestant students such as myself and my good buddy, Virgil Applebaum, on those days in which religion was taught, all non-Protestant students were led outside to waiting buses and vans and driven to our respective instructional sites.  The Catholic boys and girls were taken to St. Michael's Catholic Church for our weekly Catechism classes. Virgil and other Jewish students were taken to their Synagogue for Hebrew Schul.  Sounds like a solution right?   Here was a simple solution to accommodating all religions while keeping religious instruction part of the school curriculum.  Well it wasn't all twittering birds and soft breezes by any means and wound making causing all of the non-Protestant children the strongest advocates for absolutely no religious instructions during regular school sessions. Why?  Well here is what really happened.  Protestant children were told that Christian religious training would be provided in school on such and such a day.  Non-Protestant children would be provided transportation to their respective religious training site.  Remember now you are talking to pre-teens!  Here is what they hear.  "Christians who believe in God will be given religious training on such and such a day.  The children who do not believe in God will be taken out of the classroom and sent some other mysterious place that does not believe in God."  When we "pagans" returned to class to rejoin our classmates you can just imagine the remarks, taunts and personal insults that we endured on the playground.   When we entered middle school and later on high school formal religious instruction was no longer provided in any form but by then the die had been fully cast among my classmates.  I, like all Catholics, believed in some other type of God that was not Christian and very mysterious at best.  Same for Jewish students but even more so since they "denied" certain aspects of Christianity.  Do we really want to fill our children with these types of confusing images?  Just think what we went through for the six years that we were California elementary school students.  Now you know why I am so very very strongly opposed to any type of prayer or religious training in our schools.