[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Festive Note - Nativity Plays

[Jennifer Boggess Ramon]

At 9:18 AM +0000 11/23/03, vulgarweed wrote:
>
>Also Bible stories
>read to us every morning, like it or not (as the only atheist-family
>kid in town, believe me, I did NOT feel free to pipe up and object).
>It was only when my 3rd-grade teacher came out and told me that
>dinosaur bones were tricks of the devil that my dad called the school
>board and objected, and after that the months of death threats were
>so stressful that I wished I'd never said anything. Yes, this was all
>in a public school, in Virginia.

I grew up in a large town in Mississippi (well, large for 
Mississippi, anyway), and while we were too diverse to have a 
Nativity play in the school, the school Christmas program certainly 
had religious carols in it, which we were all required to sing.  Our 
third-grade teacher also read a Bible-devotional snippet to us every 
day just after the Pledge.

Now, my mother is a fundamentalist Lutheran.  One of the tenets of 
the WELS Synod Lutherans in the US is the concept of "closed 
fellowship."  That means, among other things, that we were not 
supposed to pray or otherwise have the appearance of being in 
religious fellowship with anyone (Christian or not) with whom we knew 
we had major differences of doctrine.  (That meant pretty much anyone 
who wasn't a conservative Lutheran.)  So my mother was absolutely 
incensed when I told her about this.  She called up the school and 
had a major hissy over the phone at various people.  The outcome: I 
had to stand outside the classroom when the devotional was being 
read.  No one ever even suggested to the teacher that she should 
stop, as far as I could tell.

However, the fact that I had permission to leave the room apparently 
made the atheist child's parents brave enough to complain, so shortly 
after that started, at least I had company.  We were both mercilessly 
teased about it, of course, but we were both nerds and so were used 
to it anyway.

Trying to explain this to a substitute teacher once was highly 
amusing (in retrospect - at the time, we were rather upset about it). 
The teacher had been concerned enough about her daily Bible story 
that she had *written it into her lesson plan* for the sub - and she 
hadn't included the exemption for me and the other kid.  The sub 
simply could not understand why on Earth we would want to leave the 
room, and she refused to let us do so . . .
-- 

  - Boggles, aka J. C. B. Ramon			boggles(at)earthlink.net
"It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the 
act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. "
	- Gauss, in a Letter to Bolyai, 1808.