The Point Of Public Prayer

This is a little thing that has been bothering me- somebody will say we need to put prayer back in schools. Someone else will say something to the effect of which god?
The focus on the beliefs of the individual would be almost insane to the ancients- regardless of their religion. Of course, generally speaking, folks who lived in a particular area held to the same beliefs as their compatriots because that was, you know, normal.

But corporate worship in ancient times and public prayer in America until recently had little to do with what you believed and everything to do with what you wanted for your community. You wanted your tribe, village, city, etc...- to thrive, and it is this desire that public prayer ultimately reinforced. Especially in America. Freedom of religion, in this nation, was actually developed with the assumption the people would be Christian and Protestant although there were Catholics here, and the Louisiana Purchase kind of screwed up the idea of this being a Protestant nation.

So there's no way public prayer is supposed to somehow reflect on anyone's belief in God. It does, however, reflect on people's belief in their communities. Do you want your community to be blessed, become strong and productive? Or are you feeling a bit like that Cruz kid?

So, yeah, maybe prayer in schools might have helped a little bit. Not by itself, which is one of the problems with the right, and why we should just ban public schools. A lot of people on the right will just latch onto one idea and think just changing that one thing is good enough. Meanwhile, the entire school system in America, from Pre-K to Post-Doc has been high-jacked by the enemy. For the public schools- it is just easier to ban them. Failing that, you have to invade them and kick the cultural Marxists out. But then you've just invaded a bunch of minimum security prisons for children, and one of the problems is that these are actually prisons. And a lot of these prisoners have been brainwashed.

But I digress...

The ancients would make sacrifices to the gods for the health and well-being of their community. If there was a significant present of non-participants there, that meant they A: weren't part of the community and B: didn't care enough about the community to pray for it. Occasionally, their might be people willing to pray to their own god for the sake of the larger community, and/or a ruler willing to accept such a idea, but in general, these multicultural experiments didn't work out too well.