Despite what some want you to believe, there's a difference between #Buddhist meditation & #Christian meditation. They are not the same, and there is no reason why our children should be forced to participate in Buddhist-based mindfulness in the classroom. https://t.co/YMRKDR84rN— Jay Sekulow (@JaySekulow) January 11, 2020
First, this is gonna surprise the hell out of Thomas Merton and other Christians:
Some of our clients have been told that school mindfulness programs can mesh with Christianity, or any religion, but this is simply false. Christianity and Buddhism have opposing worldviews which influence how they both practice meditation.
Of course, Merton was a Catholic monk, so he's not the kind of Christian ALCJ is aiming itself at. Boundaries abound.
Second, unless children are forced to participate in Buddhist meditation classes, this doesn't violate the First Amendment (arguments about Buddhism being a philosophy and not a religion, aside). Children can pray in schools, too. They just can't do it at the direction of the school, a teacher, and administrator, any school employee at all. Nor can they do it in school settings, although they can use school facilities to read the Bible, pray, etc., so long as the function is not school sanctioned, merely permitted.
I don't know how much further this goes, and I don't care. Except for this:
— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) January 12, 2020
The President can't make any decision on "constitutional prayer in public schools." Unless it's to pray to the government that the Constitution be enforced. Because the Constitution is a secular and non-sectarian document, with no mention of "God" in it whatsoever (nor of Yahweh, Allah, or the Tao. Yes, I know Buddhism doesn't follow the Tao; kind of the point of it not being a religion, eh?)
Besides, God is obviously a Texans fan. Why else are they beating Kansas City like a drum? (so far; maybe I shouldn't even say that, huh?)
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. would probably be surprised. When he nominated the mindfulness meditation master Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967, among other things, he said, "I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than this gentle Buddhist monk from Vietnam… His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.”
ReplyDeleteAnyone who would hold that the phony grifter-huckster Sekulow would be a better judge of that than the Martyr, MLK is lying. By their fruits you will know them, I think it's a good way to figure out who the phonies are.