Religious Discrimination in the USA
 

A student in North Carolina was suspended from school because of his religious beliefs. Although religious beliefs are not explicitly disouraged, it appears one has to adhere to the correct religion, to avoid being singled out and harassed.

School officials claim that their "decision to suspend Killian for a day has nothing to do with his religion, and quite a lot to do with his repeated refusal to heed warnings against wearing pirate outfits." Clearly some mandatory sensitivity training is in order here. They should have known that Pastafarians "acknowledge pirates as being 'absolute divine beings', and stress that the worldwide decline in the number of pirates has directly led to global warming."

I say: shame on you, hatemongers. It's people like this who want to undermine the values this great nation was founded on.

Hey, Monster...you should talk to this guy...

From its founding, the US has been a Pastafarian country don't deny the truth.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of his noodley appendage to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I thought it went "Ouija people, in order to form..."

And let's not confuse this with noodling.

*snickers* "spagnostic" I love it.

That bit made me laugh .

Maybe he thought it was Sept 19th? :D

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/

Ha! We actually celebrated that here. Well, mostly Undertoad celebrated it.

I did too, drove the people at work crazy, but by the end of the day 4 or 5 others had joined in and we made the rest happy when the day ended.

To me, that's all that counts. 4 or 5 people is actually awesome results for something like that.

It is infectious...

Yes, but you have to work to make it that way. For instance, if you Google the word SOUPFIG, you get plenty of hits, despite the fact that it's a nonsense word that I made up and subjected people to, until they started repeating it. You know, somebody has to initiate these things.

Screw that, pirates can do whatever they want!

What's with the humping ninja?! ha ha ha

Pretty damm good animation.

I wouldn't know.....I just got the song and a blank white screen.

file ended in .swf I don't know if you can download a codex to make it work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF

Freedom of religion means ANY religion.

I'm with the pirate/kid. If full pirate regalia is what is demanded by the holy FSM, then full pirate regalia it shall be!

NOPE-NOPE-NOPE!

Because if it's okay for a school to say the Muslim girl can't wear her full-face veil (which I believe it is), then it's okay for them to say the pirate kid can't wear his disruptive outfit.

Then I want the god squad kids around here to have to stop wearing their shirts that say "Body Piercing Saved My Life" in reference to the crucifixion.

:blush: I was being facetious. :blush:

besides, I thought the full face veil was a cultural thing? Anyway, the Muslim girls at our local HS wear the head scarf veil thing. Doesn't cover their faces, though.

Yeah, I wasn't pointing my finger directly at you, Bri. There was also that thread not too long ago about the girl with the Tigger socks at school...

You...you mean you can't wear Tigger socks at school?

If someone can wear their star of David or their cross, he can wear his costume.
Remove all religion, then remove it.
Allow it... then allow it.

I suspect that your point is that the Star of David and the Cross are symbols of something just as made up as the FSM.

Why can't he wear a pirate's outfit? He is just trying to make a scene and get attention but you can't disallow him from wearing it.

He's not one of the kids from that whackadoo Pirate family that was on Wife Swap a few weeks ago, was he?

It's all just made-up. It was not disguised as a point, I am saying it as a fact.

But as usual, your "facts" are you're bullshit opinion.

All religions are something that somebody just made up. Of course, there's much more to it than that, and there are many more differences between various religions than there are similarities, but they all share that one core attribute: being something that somebody made up. This isn't even debatable; this is the definition of a fact. We can thrash around in the quagmire of semantics surrounding this fact, but it's not going anywhere.

But in "my" religion, (fillinblank), that somebody was God.
Who can rightfully say they are wrong?

How cool would that be, if we all got to make any statement we wanted to and everyone has to believes us because they can't prove a negative?
Court would be fun, huh?
I'm not saying that everyone should go around telling religious people that they can't believe what they want.
I am saying that if they are going to say one person's belief system is wrong, then they have to prove their own.

If, by "they" you are including the kid in the pirate suit, then we're going in circles here. If not, we're back at square one.

It's ok for them to make him not wear his pirate suit. They probably don't allow veils or anything like that either. :)

Except of course the religious people who believe that immoral behavior (sin) leads to negative consequences (hell)? Because according to you that's child abuse.

I'm sorry your parents were overbearing and probably completely misinterpreted the concepts of sin and forgiveness in the Bible. But that doesn't make all teaching of the concept of an afterlife to be child abuse. You've alluded to other treatment you received which actually is child abuse, and I think you've permanently associated the two, which is unfortunate.

If you let them take away the kid's right to wear a pirate suit, they'll follow up with making the hot chicks wear bras. Folks, that's downright unAmerican.

I hate you for even thinking that!

I was not raised Christian or by religious parents of any kind... nice shot in the dark though, keep tryin'. :rolleyes:
I never said all concepts of the afterlife child abuse or anything of that nature. I made a very clear, specific, statement, if you read into that, that is your problem.
Belief and action are two, very different, things.
It is anyone's right to be a homophobe or racist... just not to act on it.

That's why faith is in church and law is in court.

So what you're saying rkz is that it's fine to have faith in your own religion, just don't think you have the right to tell someone else their own religion and therefore faith is wrong because if you do then you're putting the onus of proof on yourself first?

As Bruce points out, religion is about faith. I guess many people have trouble with the concept of other people having faith in other things. Religious fervour is a problem in many ways, but in others it can be good.

I think that's important to remember when it comes to arguments like these that even though religion and government should be separate, religion serves a great purpose to many people.

C'mon, you know deep down this kid is shit stirring to the nth degree.
He thinks he's more clever than the school administration, and has found a loophole in the rules.

What he hasn't learned yet is the rules are fairly loose, don't cover all the possible loopholes because;
1- they become ponderous and
2-The school administration can do anything they want. Change rules, enforce or not enforce them, makes new ones retroactive, on a whim. That's how kids learn that life ain't fair and power corrupts.

moi? *looks round for other monsters...*

Hell, I have a zillion opinions on this.

10) Piratin' clothes should be school uniform.
20) Hubby (beest) should dress like a pirate for work. And at other times
30) still thinking about line 20 *drool*
40) have middle kid's pirate-theme birthday party next week -need all the inspiration I can get
50) coffee moms suggested I should dress beest as pirate
60) goto 20
70) if program fucked up and you got past of images of beest as pirate (good, all the more images for me), then the school was right. If the clothing is disruptive towards education in any way, then it is not appropriate for school, regardles of the reasons for wearing it. However, if the school allows other disruptive clothing -regarless of the reasons for wearing it, then the kid is right to claim discrimination. Aaaarrrrrr.

My son wore this outfit to school one day.

Attachment 12335

Why?

Cause it was a free dress day and he wanted to. I think he put shoes on though. I'm pretty sure he didn't wear sox and thongs to school, although sox and thongs is rather formal for us here.

It is a little hard for me to truly comment on this because at my kids' school, pirate dress -whilst not "common" is not unseen and would not be disruptive. nor would any other outfit. Something really unusual might form a topic for discussion/research, but I can't say I think that's a bad thing. My son went dressed as superman one day (my shy retiring son). For no other reason than he wanted to. The class had impromptu lesson about flight and whether/how a person (not necessarily human) could really do it. And he fell between sofas and bumped his head and learned that dressing the part only goes so far..... And they discussed Krypronite and rocks that look like it. He's second grade. there's a lot to be said for Open Schooling.....

OK, planned day for everyone, that's cool.

@Monster. They discussed "Krypronite" padlocks or pot?

It'd be against the uniform policy for him to wear it on normal school days. ;o)

Green crystalline structures, as far as I can tell. He came home interested in geology and in next time making sure that the underpants he wears on the outside are bigger than the pants. Works for me. I take him to pot class on Sundays.

Green crystalline? I thought kryptonite was a fictitious comic book invention, but I Googled it in case some scientist was also a Superman freak and used it for something discovered or created in the lab.

I tried both my spelling and yours and came up with padlocks and slang for a type of black pot. Therefore, I have no idea what the kids were being taught was kryptonite. Jello?

Ya know, I just don't care that much as long as they come home with real information and an excitement about it. The kids in Hector's class see Kryptonite as a green version of the crystal caves in IOTD as far as I can tell, I am not au fait with superman, I may have used the wrong spelling -pah! He went to school with his underpants outside his trousers and came home talking about the properties of quartz and aerodynamics and lift. Works for me.

Well said. It is just that stupid rebellious stage. He is just doing this for attention so if the school's put it down quietly, he will go away.

No, I advocate the complete separation of church and state.
If you want your kid exposed to religion in school, send them to a private school of your religious background.
But, if one is allowed into the schools, all must be equally.
I don't care what someone believes, I only care how they act upon their beliefs.

I don't get it.
Specifically "proving" and "six more millenia"

I assume this is the resurrection?
As his return wouldn't mention the tomb.

Good, now let's get rid of all vestiges of faith from the courts.

I read nothing into it, I never mentioned "all concepts of the afterlife"--you said that teaching a child that sinning leads to hell is child abuse. But the fact remains that other people teaching their children such things in the privacy of their homes does not influence your life at all, so you should be leaving them and the topic well enough alone. You said,

yet you apparently feel that you should go around telling religious people that what they believe is child abuse? That's a pretty serious charge, and implies that you think their children should be taken away from them, which is equivalent to telling them they can't believe what they want in my book.

I said nothing of the sort... I said if they did certain things it was child abuse, not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.
If you cannot reconcile what is in your head and what you do, there is no hope.

Every time man creates a new religion, the universe creates a new reality.

And every time man creates a new scientific theory, the universe creates a new reality.

This is the problem with a multi-threaded universe.

But I still think that religion is primarily a means by which the few at the top can control the masses crawling through the mud at their feet. And god, any god, is an adult version of Santa Claus.

There is no faith. Do YOU have faith in the courts?