Panta Pei

I see a person trying to find a positive mindset in a terribly uncompassionate world using vivid and imaginative descriptors that favor her concept of morality and ethics.

Not everyone finds solace by intensive debate and bland analytical study of universal reality...prose and metaphor are, for some, required ingredients in life ~ if only to inspire goodness and continuation.

Sabine Grant

I counted close to 60 testimonies....instead of focusing on the one disturbing ( second to the last)report of some intense spiritual experience, I paid attention to the overall betterment some of those teens experienced as a result of their faith. I was moved by the words of one who states that she experiences more compassion.. what a key word.
In my humble opinion there is real insanity in the mind of a teen who grabs a weapon and shoots his classmates than there might be in the mind of the young woman who experiences visions as part of the epiphany of her prayer. Unfortunatly we tend to evaluate her mind rather than concentrate on how her behavior will harm or not harm someone else.
A brave young woman in my country whose name was Jeanne ( Joan) was evaluated as a witch and burnt as a result of her faith... she too experienced visions...those visions led her to fight for her King and led already discouraged troops to a climax of victorious battles. Who is to say what kind of motivation will grab the heart of a person who experiences visions and how they will contribute to the course of history.
We tend to fear what we cannot understand or explain under the banner of rationalism. We simplify it under the cliche of " they are abnormal.... they need help".
Celestial visions are not uncommon among people of various faiths. How they behave and what actions they take ought to tell us if the "divine" is involved with such phenomenon.

lisarea

There is not just a single disturbing testimony in there. There's a lot of evidence of hatred and intolerance throughout. What about the student who gathered together a bunch of people to pray in front of an atheist student's locker? What about the 'conversion' aspects? How would you feel if you had Muslims, Hindus, or Satanists (yes, I know, but for these purposes...) publicly praying for their gods to 'touch' you? Threatened? Harassed?

I neither implied nor outright claimed that this girl was a threat equal to an angry student with a gun. (There is a long history of religious fanatics performing violent acts in the name of their gods, but I recognize that many do not go that far, and would not attempt to preemptively profile dangerous fanatics based solely on their beliefs.) In fact, I find the self-aggrandizing aspect to her claims more disturbing than what I assume is an awkward attempt at metaphor. But if this girl is genuinely having visions and hearing voices, and if she genuinely believes that she is to play such an active and central role in her god's plan, then yes, she needs psychological help, for her own sake.

I'll reiterate that I think this practice is fine. It doesn't really bother me if they want to do this, as long as they don't create a physical impediment to foot traffic, and as long as it remains purely voluntary. But the intent is clearly to put on a little show in order to harass, impede, and attempt to convert others via peer pressure. If it were genuinely just an attempt to appeal to their gods for intervention, they could do so silently and without disrupting others.

Coragyps

Like their book directs them to.....

Undercurrent

Hopefully, unlike Jeanne d'Arc, she won't see the visions as a call to bloody war in the name of a non-representative government.

m.

Captn Kidd

You beat me to it. You're exactly right.

GaryP

I, too, agree. But if, in the future, this becomes a large movement, and if, some christian teachers claim a right to pray with these kids; I would hope we would all speak out just as loudly for schools to remain neutral.

Arrowman

I take you mean that if the person's behaviour and actions as a result of the vision are compassionate and benign, then the vision was divine whereas if they act in some anti-social manner, the vision was not "divine".

Self-serving.

How do you know that all "genuine" visions are benign? How do you know that God (if it exists) is not in fact the God of the Old Testament?

Ab_Normal

Non-caffienated rambling ahead; you have been warned.

My high school was incredibly overcrowded. I can imagine the problems that would be caused by kids kneeling in the hallways. Now, if the school administration at an overcrowded school is forced to put a stop to this because of safety reasons, how will the participants, their parents, and the organizers react? "They're infringing our freedom of religion!" Yeah, so your precious spawn doesn't get STEPPED ON, you mooks.

And I can just see a circle of kneeling students blockading an atheist or minority religion student's locker, thus making them late to class. How many kids are going to say, "Sorry, teach, I couldn't get my books because some Xian loonies were in the way?" (Present company excepted, of course; our young Infidels are a lot braver than I was in high school).

However, I have to also agree with Alonzo Fyfe, in that they are perfectly within their rights to do this silly prayer thing, AS LONG AS it doesn't impair the ability of other students to get their educations. I'm just the Queen of the Worst Case Scenario.

4th Generation Atheist

Absolutely. And especially when you consider the real purpose of these exercises: to lay on the "conversion pressure" and to identify atheist and other non-Xn students so the Xn ones can beat them up. That's why they've targeted small towns first: "Hm, how quickly can we make this a big trend? Can we start making it a bad idea to not participate? Can we eventually get our students to ask classmates they know aren't going to join them, so they can be singled out? And if that doesn't work, can we act enough like fools in public to get the secularist kids to make fun of us, so we can claim 'victim' status?" The way to puncture this plan quickly is to pick up the fundies' cause, in the name of the First Amendment right to religious expression, while maintaining also the right to not participate. Approaching the whole thing as non-participant allies will deflate the whole idea. Then, if students really want to pray in front of their lockers, for its own sake, they will, but any other agenda will be defeated.