The Times and the P-I covered it like it was an important community event.

Will you please write an article about what a waste of time the prayer vigil was?

Writers of the Constitution wanted only to prevent big government from building a state mandated religion such as the Church of England. The Constitution is silent on school prayer, parochial schools, or faith-based subsidies to the Church of Elvis or the First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ. President Grant's Peace Policy, 100 years after the Constitution, was channelled through Christian denominations. (Jefferson, as noted, was silent on the writing of the Establishment Clause because he was being French with Dusky Sally. As for me, i wouldn't want to be part of any Establishment Clause that would have someone like me for a member.)

No argument from me on the basic intent of the First Amendment, and if some elements of the faith-based community could accept the idea that the Establishment Clause=no favoritism on the government's part when it comes to religious expression, things would be mostly hunky-dory (even for a Strong Atheist such as myself).

But let's face facts: some religions, if given the opportunity, would impose their particular viewpoint on everyone, at the exclusion of all other viewpoints, and the people who wrote the Bill of Rights feared THAT just as much as they did the idea of a state-sanctioned religion.

They'd seen the results of of theocratic rule, both in the form of church run states AND state run churches, and decided neither was acceptible.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

OH -- and he does it all for FREE!

The previous post needs an honest answer. Has anyone here successfully petitioned the Lord or the Goddess with intercessory prayer?

And tying up Luce Enz about the Constitution, OTLA is correct. We don't know the final answer to what the Fathers meant in 1787, and we should demand a paternity test. We don't totally know what Thomas Jefferson meant in his 1802 rap to the Danbury Baptists about a wall of separation. He do know this: the Constitution is whatever Ruth Buzzi Ginzberg & 8 old men in long black dresses say it is.

You just don't see the Jews bringing that level of contemporay cultural bullshit into their religion, and they've never done the kinds of things "in the name of God" that the Christians have.

We're lucky to have an anti-Christian publication in our town, it's a nasty cult. Please don't go soft on the Christians. It's good policy to hate all Christians and not get tricked into their bullshit, Stranger readers have come to expect that.