My wife’s experience was somewhat different. Same for friends and activities, except that hers was nearly the only Protestant family on the street, and most of the neighbor kids went to Catholic school. (They were Catholic and went to Catholic school, so she figured she was a Public.)

I agree that changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II have made a lot of difference, and I’m all for this difference.

BTW, the same principle applies to the present issue as to all issues of group versus group: If we’d only look at each other as persons, so many problems would be solved!

Guns have been all around us since forever. In fact, getting a gun now is way harder than it was even a half-century ago. There were even times and places where a student might carry a gun to school and it was neither unusual nor undesirable. But when in history was there ever a school massacre such as Columbine before recent times? “It’s the culture, Stupid!” (Finn, don’t write–it’s an expression, not personal. [Always gotta think like a lawyer nowadays.])

As far as the availability, we can see the same degree of change even without the technology. We didn’t see the amount of female flesh on TV even a few years ago, let alone in the 1950s. (I was musing just yesterday as I saw an ad for a TV show on a bus, that I couldn’t have seen that much in “men’s magazines” when I was a teen.)

So I don’t see how technology can take the blame; it’s all in how it’s used. Yes, you’re right that some of the technology makes “indulgence” easier and more anonymous, but the desire needs to be there.

An observation on a slightly different note: There are those who blame “Calvinism” for the oppression of women. Well, “Calvinism” has lost influence in our culture; are women treated less as sex objects now?

You can substitute “New Testament” with any number of books and make sense of it, such as

Where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the Harry Potter and Philosophers Stone?”

Religious instruction is not needed in public school. Let the parents take responsibility for this, it is really their job.

More separation of church and state is pretty much the only reason why Catholic, Christian parents can feel at all comfortable sending their kids to public school, without fear that their children will be preyed upon. This (combined with other changes inside the Catholic Church in America) is exactly why the parochial school system has gone into decay in most parishes.

The more schools cease to be neutral ground, and become positively godless, the more Catholic parents homeschool, or find a parochial school that’s not in decay.

Really? Double Really?

Here’s a quote from the Supreme Court on the subject:

“Why may not the Bible, and especially the New Testament…be read and taught as divine revelation in the school–its general precepts expounded…and its glorious principles of morality inculcated? …Where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament?”

Sure, it is from 1844, but that should answer the question as to whether times have changed somewhat!

You need only look at what can be found by the young on the internet and know that evil has become more intense, and with a wider reach. It’s harder now to shield against that.

Yes in the past there was racism and a certain amount of repression and conformity. But that always exists in one guise or another. (The conformity of not being gay has been replaced by a conformity about not speaking out against homosexuality). But now things are darker, and it’s easier to indulge the darkness.

Let’s take porn. I am sure in the 1950′s and earlier, people found ways, via Sears catolog, or literature to indulge the desire for some erotica. And if you wanted to see something on screen though, you had to go to the theatre. So you pretty much didn’t. Eventually there was Playboy and you might get to see a little flick at a bachelor party or something.

I remember in my town in NYC, and on a pleasant street, out there in Queens, there was one theatre with a really bad reputation. You never saw anyway walking in and out of there though. It was in walking distance of our junior high and on a rather beautiful street actually. We would pass by, wide eyed, wondering if pervs might appear.

Then along came the VCR and it all changed. What happened? It became easy to indugle with less stigma. So thousands of people who would not have exposed themselves to pornography in the past were now able to easily engage the curiosity.

The internet and Mp3 devices and Youtube and Youporn today only make that easier. Which is why you have a generation of young people (flip through Myspace for a while) who present themselves in guises that used to be associated with porn actresses. It’s also why a huge number of young people now (mainly the females) indulge in bisexuality. They have been conditioned by their young male friends to titilate in that fashion. And it’s considered normative behavior.

So, yea if you dropped the internet down in the 1950′s, your grandfather and mine might have been the horny toads that we are. But they didn’t have that, so some impulses remained untapped.

Today nothing is unchecked, and that is disturbing. We may not have been Rockwell then, but we are much farther from any possible Rockwell now.

Well, actually, Francois, Christianity moved into “Western” (Greco-Roman) civilization starting at least by about 40 AD. By about 80 AD, there came considerable official opposition. Despite this, Christianity survived to become the State religion under Caesar Constantine about 300 AD. (Please excuse any wrong dates; I’m too lazy to look them up. They’re pretty close, anyway.) So Christianity was a major influence in Europe/the West well before the Middle Ages, in point of fact.

BWDB http://thecwexperience.wordpress.com

“Christianity was more than a faith. It was a way of life. (On a grander scale, it’s the foundation of Western Civilization.”

Well, actually it was the Greeks and Romans – both pagans. But, Chritianity was a core element from the Middle Ages until the early 20th century.

La Shawn Barber has a post on Christians in St. Louis opposing the distribution of Bibles in the public schools. This prompts me to put down (or put up, I guess) my thoughts and recollections on the whole “prayer in schools” area of things….

The history of the United States, clear back to a number of the original colonies (most notably Plymouth, but also Maryland and Pennsylvania come to mind) is religious freedom. We haven’t always practiced it; we discriminated against Jews, for instance, but it has been our ideal. I believe it has now become “freedom from religion”, pushed by people and groups who are opposed to God and religion and want to get rid of it or at least marginalize it.

Having said all that, I want to move to more recent historical sociology. Perhaps we never had a “Norman Rockwell setting”, but I can tell you from personal experience (somewhat similar to yours, La Shawn) that we used to allow religion in schools and our society, and both school and society were much better than today, much less: drugs, crime, hate (with notable exceptions, e.g. racism), broken families, welfare, to name a few.

At age 14, I ran my father’s gas station by myself 5-10 PM. I wasn’t in a bulletproof booth, either. (In fact, the cash register was out in the open and required no key or password.) Try that today! (We also pumped gas for all customers–served the customers–find that today!)

In school (where in those pre-Murray v. Board of Education days, we prayed and pledged allegiance to the Flag every morning), the most difficult behavior problems had to do with talking in class, passing notes, or chewing gum. There were a few occasional truants. Even the roughest kids wouldn’t have dreamed of talking back to the principal (I’m talking high school here, but in recent years I’ve seen elementary students read the riot act to the principal [who was, btw, an ex-football player]!).

Do I think that the changing view of the place of religion in the public sphere has had an effect on our American way of life? Is Bin Laden a Muslim?

This is only a comment on La Shawn’s post, so I’ve tried to keep it short (this is short?), but I’ve climbed on the soapbox at Dooz-O-Sphere.

Christians who send their children into the arms of the State should hardly be surprised when these things happen.

What this story really tells us is that we need a voucher system. Then everyone will be able to choose a school that meets their own particular priorities. People who want religious training can have it. Those who are offended will have a way to avoid it.

Is dead.

Fixed. Thanks! – Admin