I wasn’t aware of that. Well, its position is fortuitous. I consider it the most important.

First, about our current Supreme Court. I am worried that this particular court, which has already shown, with regard to legal precedent, a, well, unprecedented tendency to ignore it, something previous courts have largely refrained from doing. We are one death away from having a very conservative majority on the bench for many years, perhaps decades to come. This will be Bush’s worst, most lasting legacy, I fear. And even though the senate is now in Democratic hands, does anybody here think they’ll summon the spine to oppose the worst president in modern history? I would not bet on it.

As an aside, a few months ago I remember reading somewhere (I can’t remember) about the ability of either the President or Congress to increase or reduce the number of Supreme Court Justices. We haven’t always had nine, which I didn’t know. I obviously does not happen often, but it’s an interesting thing to think about nonetheless.

As I read the first Amendment, I take from it that the government is to be absolutely neutral with regard to religion, or the lack thereof. This seems pretty straightforward, and is easily acceptable, unless you have an agenda to push, like dominionist, evangelical, fundie faith-heads. As an athiest, I do not want the government taking my side. I only want it to guarantee I can live my life, and raise my children, in a manner as free of religion as I could reasonably expect to get. To my knowledge, no prominent athiest is clamoring for anything more than the comfort of knowing we’ll be left alone, and that the religious zealots will not be able to enforce their crazy beliefs on anyone who doesn’t want them. As I said, a rational person can grasp this and is perfectly comfortable with it. Fundies are not, as we all know, rational in any way.

As for teaching the Bible in school, I think it ought to be done, but under different circumstances than fundies would like. In college I took two history courses on the bible, one for the old testament and one for the new. The professor was a delightfully gruff agnostic who told us as we reviewed the course syllabus that we would be dissecting the bible mercilessly to find out how it came to be. The looks on the faces on the Campus Crusaders for Christ who took the class thinking this would be a puff piece on their favorite book was priceless, but that’s not why I think a course like this would be a good idea. Learning about the bible and its own peculiar history is one of the best arguments around for not being a christian. It is certainly one big reason why I’m an athiest. If approached critically, its not too much to suggest such a course would do much to curtail rampant religiosity amongst our kids. But who am I kidding? Christian parents would torch the school and lynch the teacher before they’d allow their precious bible to be treated with anything more than kid gloves.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/restore

Parrot Lover, I’m curious to know: why do you feel the current Supreme Court is “fundie-slanting” and “radical?” While I don’t agree with their decision in the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case, or on the issue of timing to bring a sex discrimination suit, but I wouldn’t call either of those decisions “radical.” Sure, they’re more conservative than I’m comfortable with, but I think it’s a bit of a leap to start calling them “radical.”

If those decisions are “radical,” what would a (hypothetical) court be called if it ruled that wives were their husbands’ property? I think we would have a long, long way to fall before we could start making such acidic accusations.

Is the pledge itself a mandatory recitation anywhere anymore? It’s a nice piece of patriotic prose for when it was written, but I’d rather see it go completely in the school system.

I also want to see the word “homeland” stricken from government offices (sounds too much like “fatherland” to me). Sigh, when will we get our country back from the crazies?!