Everyone here seems to be obsessed with religion. In particular, they're obsessed that not everyone is of their religion. In our county alone, there are 800 churches for about 100,000 people. Some are converted store fronts. Others are ostentatious declarations of piety that seems to convey the idea the the bigger your building, the greater your commitment to God.
So imagine an impious, irreverent little heathen like me thrown into the mix. I'm polite most of the time but there are times when it just gets to be too much for me. Usually some Saturday afternoon when I'm sitting around enjoying a whole lot of nothing to do. Then some lady in a nice dress or some fine young man comes to my door to try to talk to me about Christ. Then my politeness goes right out the window and I tend to shout things like, "I don't come to your house to teach you physics! What gives you the right to interrupt my Saturday with your philosophy?"
Sometimes, I'm less polite than that.
But, despite my general revulsion to organized religion, I have been reading the New Testament. And it's been interesting reading. Mel Gibson should try it sometime.
There I found it! The answer to everything I'd ever wanted to think about religion. It was in Matthew 6:6 (printed here in red so you'll know these are the words of Jesus hisself):
| But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou has shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. |
So there you have it!
Maybe I'm an ignorant savage and I need someone to spell it out for me but
it sounds like someone is saying that prayer between you and your lord is
a private issue and should be kept private. You shouldn't bother other
people with it.
Or am I way off base with this one?
If I'm right and these words of Jesus Christ mean what they seem to
mean, you should keep prayer off the street, out of my house and out of
our schools.