No there are a few individuals , several politicians, media outlets etc. that manipulate issues to gain political power and/or monetary gain. The media in particular manipulates issues often blowing them way out of proportion.  There are way too many varieties of religion in this country to accommodate them all in schools in a way that adheres to the constitution and doesn't overburden the taxpayer. Religion is best taught in Church and at home .Overall most people are tolerant and the incidents you speak about are rather isolated and as I stated before many are one religious sect vs. another.

You claim that so many problems with teens these days are due to the lack of religious prayer in school. Show me the statistics that you stated exist to back up your claim. The statistics, books, documentaries, etc. that I have seen over the years tend to make me believe that these problems are ones that start at home. In households where there is domestic violence, and/or broken marriages, and /or drug abuse and/or households where children are not given the necessary amount of attention and/or guidance, Some of the problems are to varying degrees statistically tied to income levels.

Show me where the lack of religion being taught in public schools has more to do with your list of societal problems than parenting.

Calling it a holiday tree sounds like tolerance to me not war. Personally I'd rather see my local tax dollars spent on things that truly benefit my local community however I (who you may choose to label as a morally corrupt atheist) am tolerant of the many religious folk in my community and don't plan on knocking at the front door of the town hall demanding that the Christmas tree be taken down. Hopefully the local Jehovah's Witness clan is just as tolerant.

BTW: Christmas is not going to disappear any time soon in this country. Toys R Us and Walmart will make sure that doesn't happen! 

Smoothseas, I can't say it better than George Kendall has in this article.....

The War Against The Light

By GEORGE A. KENDALL
 

 We elderly and semi-elderly people can still remember a time when nothing was less controversial than the words “Merry Christmas.”

In my childhood, in the 1940s and 1950s, I used to go about town, at Christmastime, and wish everyone I saw a Merry Christmas, without having an anxiety attack over the possibility that I might be offending a Buddhist, or a Muslim, or an atheist. Everyone responded in kind. On one occasion, I ran into my Jewish uncle (by marriage) and, in all innocence, wished him a Merry Christmas. Amazingly, he did not report me to B’nai B’rith or to the ACLU for anti-Semitism or “hate speech,” but wished me a Merry Christmas back.

Well, the world has spent the last 40 years or so descending more and more deeply into insanity, one of the symptoms of which is the increasingly common phenomenon of people wanting to ban even the use of the word Christmas. Major department stores are telling their employees to wish everyone happy holidays or something of the sort and to absolutely eschew the word Christmas. It used to be that the big battles this time of year involved Christmas displays on government property.
Now the thing is extending more and more into the private sector. Companies are sending out Christmas catalogs that, oddly enough, studiously omit the word Christmas, as just one example.

What is this all about, anyway? St. John’s Gospel, with its constant emphasis on the struggle between light and darkness, may give us some clues. Christmas has always been about light. We light up Christmas trees. We put multicolored lights on our houses, millions of them if we are highly competitive types and heavily into conspicuous consumption.
We celebrate Christmas at the time of the winter solstice, the turning point of the year, when the light of day is at its lowest level and the night is longest. That is also the point where the light begins to return and the days grow longer, imperceptibly at first but then more noticeably. When we celebrate Christmas we celebrate the return of the light after the world’s long descent into darkness. Of course, the experience of the cosmic alternation of light and darkness is universal, and every religion in the world has some kind of celebration at the time of the winter solstice.

But for Christians, this means the coming of Christ, the Light of the World, to end the long reign of darkness that sin has brought into the world. Hence, in St. John’s Prologue, we are told that “in Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4-5). But, in a perverse world, the renewal of the light does not take place without opposition. The light becomes the sign of contradiction. And so, St. John tells us that “He was the true light, that enlightens every man who comes into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not” (1:9-11).

Receiving the light, letting the light shine on us with all its intensity, would force us to see ourselves as we really are, to see the darkness and sin in ourselves as the horror that they really are, and to change, always a terrifying prospect. So many of us would rather stay in the darkness, we would rather go on sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death, than let the light in. And so instead of welcoming the light with joy, we hate it and try to shut it out, and persecute those who stubbornly refuse to hide it under a bushel but insist on letting it shine everywhere.

St. John sums this up brilliantly in a passage a few chapters further along: “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed” (John 3:19-20).
The war on Christmas, as it is now called, is really the war against the light. Christmas, more than any other religious observance, reminds people of the light, and those who do not wish to be reminded of the light are willing to go to greater and greater lengths to stop people from reminding them. So the very words, “Merry Christmas,” become to them an occasion to become mightily offended.

Ebenezer Scrooge, before his re-education at the hands of some spirits, epitomized this attitude: “‘If I could work my will,’ said Scrooge indignantly, ‘every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!’”
Scrooge is determined to live in his dark little world of joyless greed and loneliness, and can’t just live and let live when his nephew uses an expression like “Merry Christmas,” because that means reminding him of the light which he chooses not to see, let alone live in. “Merry Christmas” is a real threat to him, and so it is too for all those today who keep on waging the war against Merry Christmas. The words, even coming from people of no particular faith who just say them out of force of habit, are still a threat to them.
Scrooge might have been able to tolerate “happy holidays” or “season’s greetings,” though perhaps even those phrases might have made him a bit irritable, but “Merry Christmas” definitely called for that stake of holly.
And how do we respond during the Christmas season? Putting aside whatever we are doing year round to wage the spiritual war, we ought at the very least to make sure, at Christmastime, that we, like Scrooge’s nephew, wish a hearty Merry Christmas to everyone, especially to those who are so obsessed with trying to ban the expression.

Members of the ACLU, People for the American Way, NOW, NARAL, and comparable groups need to receive our Christmas greetings with special vehemence, keeping in mind what St. Paul said: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
And, of course, we need to make sure that the wage-slaves at certain enterprises, who don’t dare wish us a Merry Christmas because they need their jobs, get a very warm Merry Christmas from us. It may seem like a small thing, but keeping this greeting alive is part of letting our light shine before men, and we need to do that even if it means defying the people who want us to hide it under a bushel.

And so, a Merry Christmas to all!

+ + +

(© 2005 George A. Kendall)

Oh, that you were correct, unfortunately, you're mistaken.

In actuality, the few secular and atheistic individuals are the many. The secular and atheistic many are the ones bent on accelerating the cultural and sexual reforms in the media, politics, academia and social arenas.The secular and atheistic humanists many are the ones who have precipitated the major moral shift in moral attitudes and mores and reshaped the culture into a secular and atheistic humanist one in which faith in God shifted to faith in man, science and education.

Standards, constraints and morality are still necessary, just not those imposed by an unseen God, the Holy Bible or by Christ's Church and His revealed religion, Christianity. Secular and atheistic Humanists supplied their own. "No deity will save us; we must save ourselves." is a quote from Humanist Manifesto II. Following the philosophy and goals of Humanist Manifesto I, it wasn't long before Secular and Atheistic humanists brought about this widespread radical change in the way of life by taking control of the educational system. 

Check out the American Humanist Association. They are the ones behind the Godless holiday campaign. They are the ones who say morality doesn't come from God's revealed religion, but that it comes from individuals. They are the ones who claim the only moral benchmark is what men and women posit to be right and wrong. In reality, all good comes from our Creator God and our codes of morality have always come from and been grounded in His revealed holy, Judeo-Christian religion.

Tolerant?

Ever since the secularists and atheistic humanists became the many, there has been a non-stop, slow but steady onslaought of kicking God and Christianity out of the public sqaure and our nation's way of life.

The secularists and Atheists in academia and government are ever working to get what is left of our Judeo-Christian heritage OUT and their own "progressive" "enlightened" ideas of life IN.  

I would submit that it won't be long before the Holy Bible is considered "hate speech" and the teachings of Jesus Christ as taught by the Church will be deemed irrational. GOvernment schools will be dedicated to freeing our children from their Judeo-Christian  beliefs.

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Calling it Christmas or holiday season doesn't matter. These stores number one interest is in pushing consumerism. 

First, these pathologies happened since Almighty God, Christian prayer and principles were removed from schools and AMerican public life.

Documentation goes to empirical knowledge. Ask anyone who is 60 years and older what were the problems in the schools of their day. They will not claim any of those pathologies on the list existed then. They all went up dramatically after 1962. 

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As far as the SAT scores, the combined Math and Verbal scores, check out any college entrance exam boards in the 50's. Then check them in the late 60s and onward, and you'll find that even on tests made easier they dropped. Just a couple weeks ago, we learned about the vast cheating scam going on.

For teen suicide amongst the 15-19 year olds, check out the National Center for Health Statistics. In Maine, suicide is now the second leading cause of death for 15-24 year olds, second to motor vehicle deaths. It is the 3rd cause nationwide. From the 50s to 2000, teen suicide went up 450%.

Illegal drugs...check out the National Institute on Drug Abuse. From the 50s to 2000, it went up 6,000%.

For Criminal arrests of teens, check out the US dept. Bureau of the Census, Historical statistics of the US.

Same thing for births to unmarried girls. 

Google statistics on any of these things and you'll find these appalling facts.

That is correct. However, the problem is faith in God alone does not and never will solve most of the problems that have faced mankind throughout history. Problems are not solved and moral questions are not answered by submitting ones self to some supernatural being. Problem are solved through man's understanding of the reality that surrounds him.

They are a business who represent at best a few people in this world of 7 billion and counting. A lobbying business to be exact and no where near as powerful as the Jewish or Catholic Lobbies that litter K Street. Why do you fear them so much? They are rather inconsequential in the scheme of things.

Smoothseas, 

Go back and examine that list. That surely tells what putting man in God's place and practicing the tenets, principles and values of secular and atheistic humanism has done for us! 

What has kicking Almighty God out of public, academic and political life done for us? What has mocking God and His laws and casting out the culture of life for a culture of death done for us? What is the secular and atheistic humanist society progressing towards? Confusion, chaos, unhappiness, in short, the sewers. 

Spoken like a true, blue secular or atheistic humanist. Man is so loaded with pride and his own hubris that he thinks he can do and solve everything without God. Like Satan, instead of giving glory to God from whom we have received all things, instead Humanists pridefully claim "we will be as God."

The ultimate failure of Secular and Atheistic Humanism is in the fact that by its very nature it promises what it cannot fulfill. It encourages people to put their trust and faith in men and in earthly happiness  which is just a program for disillusionment.  

The statistics do show facts. They do not however prove that taking religious prayer out of school causes these problems. That is an assumption that you make based solely on your personal ideology. There is plenty of information in the public domain that disputes your claim.

SAT scores is the easiest topic to dispute. SAT's do not measure morals, or one's belief in God, or an individuals level of religious submission. Where do you draw any relationship between believing in God and understanding the math and verbal skills tested by SAT's?

This is short sightedness.

The American Humanist Association are workers of the new world order. Their persistance that believing in God and following His laws is an obstacle to progress is far from being inconsequential. While I don't fear them, I do fear their work supporting the systematic assault on the basic principles of traditional morality. 

Powerful as the Jewish and Catholic lobbies? Care to explain "powerful"? 

Which new world order are you taking about? The fictitious one espoused by Propagandists like Glenn Beck or The same old world order that is pulling the puppet strings of both major political parties as we speak.

A good example would be AIPAC.

There is only one New World Order forming, but it has many different factions contributing,  working toward its main goal which is world socialist dictatorship.  The American Humanist Association is but one of these factions. Besides militant Secular and Atheistic Humanists, other factions working towards a NWO are Radical Feminism and Radical Environmentalism

What Glenn Beck is doing is not ficticious. He' s very busy pushing Zionism which is another faction connected to the NWO.

I agree, all these factions are indeed pulling the puppet strings of both major political parties as we speak.The Democrat Party is totally sunk in the muck, however, there are still some Republicans, not many, who understand what we are up against and are willing to keep America from falling into the domination and tyranny of a one world government.