Letters to the Editor
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Useless
My objection to this article wasn’t about the war, Bush, the right to say the pledge or not, the ability to live in France, own a country home or send your kids to school on the UWS. My objection isn’t even about the overwhelming number of Salon’s articles that come from this urban, privileged, out of touch perspective (although that’s getting annoying too).
The author is prejudice. I can’t imagine she speaks the same way about Jews as she speaks about Christians – if she did I don’t think she’d last in NYC as long as she did doing her anti-townie routine upstate (at least I hope not). Is she going to call the ACLU when the bar mitzvah invitations start getting passed out at school? And the way she assumes so much about members of the military is gross. Are NYC police and firefighters among the unclean as well? The author doesn’t live in NYC – she lives on the UWS and ignores the masses who are trying to get by just like her republican counterparts do and it’s bringing Salon’s stock down to be associated with that kind of thinking.
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Hey Richard--
Richard wrote:
"'But it wasn't until our boy came home with an invitation in his backpack to attend a "released time" Bible class that my husband and I panicked.'
Oh, yes. Far be it that our children learn anything about the morals on which this country was founded! Quick, somebody get the ACLU to stop this indocrination of our children with horrible Truth!"
OK, so apparently Christianity is your "truth." Good for you. However, it is not my truth. It is not the truth of many other people--and in matters of religion, each of us has the right to believe as we will, and to direct our children's religious education as we see fit. We have no state religion.
Why are you so insistent on indoctrinating other people's children with your religious beliefs? What business is it of yours? Who appointed you the Chief Religious Educator for other people's kids?
Suppose for sake of argument that I am a Pastafarian (I may or may not be). I firmly believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the earth, trees and a midget, and that this is the Truth; all else is blasphemy. I insist that every child should learn the Truth. Do you want your child indoctrinated with my Pastafarian beliefs? Would you be angry if your child came home from school with pamphlets promoting Pastafarianism? Would you be upset that someone else was attempting to indoctrinate your child with beliefs with which you disagree? This is exactly how I feel when Christians prosyletize--angry.
Teach YOUR kids whatever Christian claptrap you want--it's your absolute right--but leave other people alone. That is not too much to ask, and that is exactly what most non-Christians want--to be left alone. Not to be indoctrinated with Jesus junk. Not to have our children indoctrinated with it. Not to be sneered at, preached at, or ostracized because we are not "saved," whatever the hell that means, in those lovely sanctimonious tones of voice.
I was raised to respect everyone's religion--when I was growing up, even asking what religion someone was was considered extremely rude, much less trying to convert other people's kids. But back then, you didn't have people screaming at others that they were going to hell for holding different beliefs. You didn't have nutjobs protesting at soldiers' funerals. Most people kept their own counsel in matters of religion, unless asked, and respected the right of others to believe differently.
FWIW, I don't hate evangelicals--but I sure do hate their pushiness; it's rude. I have found most of them to be extremely judgmental and self-righteous, and I have a very hard time with that. I do not care to hear about someone's religious beliefs unless I ask, and I do not want to be converted, by anyone, to anything. Why can't evangelicals respect other people's basic right to be let alone?
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Living in France
I think that Cary had a letter about this a few weeks ago, but let me recap that to go live in France, you do not need to be a trust fund baby.
To start, my boyfriend and I are not trust fund babies. His family is firmly middle class -- the first time he went out of the country was when he went to study abroad from his state university to France. He loved it so much, he came back to the US, finished his degree, and got a plane ticket and a student visa for a university in france (not in paris), and went out there. he got his two master's degrees out there, he fought for months to convert his visa to a carte de sejour which is a sort-of work visa, he worked for the french education system teaching english, he worked at two bars, he worked at a dot.com. He spent many years living there on a tiny budget. My family are immigrants from the USSR which are now in the middle class. No, buddy, going to france does not mean flying first class on Air France and whiling away months at the Ritz like Angelina Jolie.
A student visa to France costs about $120 dollars, plus the passport fee. University in France costs about 300 euros per year, so my boyfriend actually saved a lot of money by going there for his master's degrees, instead of accumulating even more student loans here. A dorm room in paris costs 315 euros per month. Subway pass, 55 per month.
No, you can't go live in France if you are so poor you can't afford a passport. Most americans are not as poor as that. But you don't need millions, or even hundreds of thousands, to afford it.
Stop painting it as the realm of Park Avenue trustafarians.
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Religions do not teach tolerance
Someone wrote this:
Lucky for you the school closed before one of his little friends showed him a Veggie Tales video, or worse, invited him to Sunday School! He might learn respect for those stupid red-state Christers, and ythat would be the true tragedy. Keep working on him. Teach him hate, contempt, more swearwords. If you do your job right, he'll grow up to have the same cynical contempt for life that you do. That's his true birthright--the nihlism of the Angry Left.
It seems almost a waste of time, but here goes. It's not secularism that teaches that your religion is bettter than others, that your god is the only god, that you are right and everyone else is going to hell. I'm not sure how Sunday School is supposed to teach anyone respect for differing opinions, even if in the most benign form, christianity teaches that yes, love your neighbor, but if he or she doesn't accept jesus into her heart, she's going to hell. can someone explain this to me? And Christians are not only thinking they are in the right club, one of their basic ideas is to go around and try to change everyone's mind (prozletyzing). talk about respect.
Do you see many secularists around who kill pro-life activists? Many atheists who commit acts of terrorism? How about all those secular humanists who want to outlaw what you believe, or oppose modern medicine because it may violate their morals (the cervical cancer vaccine comes to mind here)? Or all those agnostics sending petitions to the FCC to keep depictions of religion off the TV screen?
Sigh. The basic tenets of every religion is that your club is the right one, and all other clubs are wrong (except maybe buddhism). How that's supposed to teach respect for those with differing opinions is beyond me.