Political Commentary, Science And Society

You Can’t Pray In Public Schools

31 Comments

…but you can ostracize kids because they don’t adhere to the sacred rituals of the green religion:

“Ziplocs are the biggest misstep,” said Julie Corbett, a mother in Oakland, Calif., whose two girls attend a school with an eco-friendly lunch policy. In school years past, she said, many a morning came unhinged when the girls were sent to school with disposable sandwich bags.

“That’s when the kids have meltdowns, because they don’t want to be shamed at school,” Ms. Corbett said. “It’s a big deal.”

Someone should bring a First-Amendment suit.

31 thoughts on “You Can’t Pray In Public Schools”

  1. I like that you’re equating religion with irrational belief but there’s logic fail here that annoys me and I would hope it would annoy you too. All kittens are cats, but not all cats are kittens.

  3. Except the required element of the divine, sure. If you can show me someone talking about the supernatural and recycling in the same breath then I’ll buy it, but otherwise it’s just guilt-based social stupidity, which only shares a few of the attributes of religion.

    Not all cats are kittens.. it has to be an *infant* cat to be a kitten. No matter how much a grown cat acts like a kitten, it aint.

  4. WJ Alden had a good comment there.

    Funny how for years we’ve been told that schools can’t discipline students who come to school dressed like pr0n stars and talking like rap stars, but come to school with a paper lunch bag and watch the Wrath of Gaia rain down.

    Selective and hypocritical punishment is a sign of an undemocratic state.

    Then there was this quote from Judith Wagner who implemented the policy in question:

    What comes next, she said, is a hard call. “Do you go back to the parents and say, ‘Gosh, can you rethink the plastic bags and all this food?’ Or do you talk to the children, and you make the children feel guilty because they’re throwing this all away?

    In other words, she resorted to state-sanctioned bullying to enforce her environmental beliefs on children. I think the real solution was to eliminate her job altogether and remove her from education.

  7. Curt, no..

    divine (n) Providence or God.
    divine (v) Of, from, or like God or a god.

    or you can substitute “spirituality” or “supernatural” if you prefer.

    If a belief system is concerned with such matters, and has some public function or form, then it is a religion. If it doesn’t, then it is not.

    I believe coke is better than pepsi and will try to make you feel guilty for suggesting otherwise – no, pepsi is not ok, I asked for coke! – it isn’t a religion either. These really are not hard concepts to understand..

  8. Except the required element of the divine, sure. If you can show me someone talking about the supernatural and recycling in the same breath then I’ll buy it

    Seriously? You’ve been so out of it, you haven’t noticed all the left-wing blathering about the Goddess Gaia punishing humanity for its environmental sins?

  9. or you can substitute “spirituality” or “supernatural” if you prefer.

    OK. Sorry, but that is a mother-lode of hilarity:

    As long as environmentalists continue to fight economists in purely economic terms, they are destined to lose. Thus there is a need to re-inject something of a religious faith into environmental debate and have it accepted into the debate on those terms.

    Also without an environmental ethic present in our day to day activities we find that our impact grows incrementally.

    For example our rail system was more than adequate in 1950 but today it is woefully inadequate. The railway has not shrunk. The urban has sprawled and there has been no ethic in place to keep the railway expanding with the city.

  10. Sorry, hit “submit” too early. Here is the punch line:

    An ecospirituality would help provide an autpoiesic system whereby environmental action expanded to cope with the environmental problem.

    I challenge you to top that.

  12. Some people deify nature yes.. but we already have a name for these people.. they’re called: Pagans.

    Thanks for at least acknowledging that there is a spiritual/supernatural element required before beliefs can be called religion. If you think you can make the case that environmentalists hold such beliefs, and that it is thus a religion, then please do. I hope that you’ll be doing more good than bad – remember, if you’re successful at getting them prohibited from teaching environmentalist dogma in public schools, you’ll also be handing them all the tax benefits and religious protections.. but hey, maybe we need a few more not-quite-religions claiming those benefits and protections in order to get rid of them.

  13. So why do we have to have the “required” element of the supernatural? Because Trent says so? It’s not a required part of the definition of religion. In addition to Gaia, there’s the New Age spirituality.

  14. Which are both examples of the spiritual..

    Are you seriously debating this? Where have you been living that the definition of religion is outside your experience? Are the summers nice? What are the rents like?

  15. Screw these semantics!

    It that was my kid, I would start adding another extra sandwich per day to her lunch for her to throw away till that busybody Gladys Kravitz bitch started minding her own fucking business!

  16. Trent, you were claiming that environmentalism wasn’t a religion because it lacked the “divine” element of religions. We merely showed that condition existed.

  19. Alternatively: print up a variety of stickers that say “Biodegradable/recyclable”, sell them to the parents, and suggest that kids stick them onto any problematic items. 🙂

  21. Print up a carbon sequestration sticker! The article doesn’t actually specify what about plastic bags is bothering them so it is hard to know which sticker will address their concerns.

    I’ve heard this tongue-in-cheek theory: The Gaia “buy green” movement is a conspiracy by multinational corporations to deflect attention from their environmentally destructive practices by making individual consumers think that they can personally help the environment by changing their buying habits. This way, corporations get new products to sell consumers, but much more importantly, consumers don’t notice that individuals’ behavior is just a drop in the bucket with respect to environmental damage compared to corporate behavior.

  23. Karl Hallowell Said:
    > Selective and hypocritical punishment is a sign of an undemocratic state.

    Correction: Selective and hypocritical punishment is a sign of a tyrannical state. Democracy can be as tyrannical as any other form of government if the majority opinion isn’t tempered by proper ethics.

  24. Trent, you’re getting hung up on the etymology of the word ‘religion’. However, the definition of ‘religion’ is fairly broad and hard to succinctly define. In fact, if you look up the word ‘superstitious’ you will see that its root actually goes back to describing people that have too much religion, an inordinate fear of godly beings, and a belief that all inexplicable events are divinely inspired. In these modern times we are starting to see new religious movements spring up left and right that have more of a cultural system as the basis of their beliefs and values rather than some kind of chiseled in stone by the hand of god scripture.

    I was in Santa Fe, NM when I saw a troop of old ladies, dressed in pure white, wearing white turbans, and huge gold plated masonic symbols on their foreheads paraded through the mall. They no doubt belonged to some fusion religion of Buddhism, Druidism, and Native America sky people stuff. It was also fitting while I was up there that I saw an episode of Penn and Tellers Bullsh*t railing on environmentalism where they tracked down some “environmental psychic” in Santa Fe who would alleviate people’s “environmental anxiety” by giving them a rock from her gravel driveway so that they could keep in contact with a piece of the Earth while they were trapped in their urban coffins. This is no better than any talisman or bone fragment of a saint peddled by religious orders of the past.

    Then, there are the carbon trading schemes that peddle indulgences for a guilt free trip to the Starbucks on your way to pick up a new pair of $500 Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses. This is no better than the indulgences offered by Catholic priests in the past. Or, the Ancient Egyptian priests who would sell Shabti dolls as a promise that Horus’ would offer salvation if your heart was found to weigh more than a feather on your journey through the Underworld. Obviously, the more Shabti dolls you bought the more sins you could commit in the waking life to offset the heaviness of heart in the afterlife.

  25. The opposition greenies have to plastic bags (and bottles) is that they are not biodegradable, and thus will “be in a landfill forever!”

    Do they think that being underground “forever” is bad? I doubt it. Their preference would be to leave the raw material in it’s original resting place. Since that raw material is oil, it’s original resting place is: underground (where it has been for 500 million years, a period aka “forever”).

    The only difference between oil resting forever in a rock formation as oil and oil resting forever in a landfill as plastic is that in the latter case human beings derived some benefit. One can only conclude that it is human beings deriving benefit is what the greenies fundamentally oppose.

  27. The idea that greenies believe what they do because they oppose human industrial benefit is silly — while some do think that way, I think you can tie plenty of concern about waste and industrial pollution to human health risks.

    Googling “the problem with plastic bags” for a moment shows that that environmentalists are concerned that plastic bags end up in the ocean where they break down and contaminates marine life. In other words, they are concerned that the human food supply is becoming contaminated.

    Environmentalists are also concerned about the extinction of other species (another reason they are targeting plastic bags) and we could talk about why a human-centric individual might also oppose the extinction of other species, but I’d rather just stick to direct threats to human health.

  28. As long as the human lifespan continues to increase, concern about the health risks associated with industrial pollution is overblown. The dose is everything. Just because you can measure it does not mean it is a problem.

    Environmental concern about extinctions shows a breathtaking ignorance of how their Goddess Gaia has operated on this planet for the last 4.5 billion years and an even more breathtaking hubris about the notion that humanity can somehow stop extinctions in their tracks. As long as we are not actively killing the animals on an industrial scale (passenger pigeon, for example), why should we stand in the way of a perfectly natural and normal event – a species extinction – or take the blame for what the “Goddess” is doing when it cleanses the gene pool? Cheers –

  29. Ahh plastic bags. Aren’t those the things the environmentalists told us to use instead of paper?

    The day electric cars actually become feasible, will be the same day environmentalists say they are evil because their batteries are toxic.

  30. Agimarc,

    Natural species are (among other things) a resource for humans to learn fro and use. Allowing all-out extinctions throws away opportunities for future generations. That’s why.

    (I fully expect that humans will soon be inventing new species by tinkering with DNA, and when that day comes, the above argument will be bolstered, not weakened. )

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