Pray or Else

An employee has been fired after refusing to attend company’s Christian prayer meetings.

A home repair company’s mandatory daily Christian prayer sessions for its employees were becoming “less tolerable” for an atheist construction manager who refused to continue attending — as a result, he was fired.

His boss told him “he did not have to believe in God, and he did not have to like the prayer meetings, but he had to participate” before the worker was fired.

This came after his pay was cut in half. 

The worker was asked to lead a prayer session on one occasion, despite making his beliefs known, prior to losing his job with Aurora Pro Services.

Now the company is being sued for religious discrimination and is accused of punishing workers who did not want to attend the meetings, which also involved Bible readings and roll call.

The meetings were mandatory from at least June 2020. This comes after another worker, a customer service representative, was fired in January 2021 after she felt the meetings, which went on for nearly an hour, were becoming “cult-like” and stopped attending due to her agnostic beliefs, according to the lawsuit.

The company’s owner, who was known for his “short-tempered and confrontational” nature, held the prayer meetings as part of the “business model,” according to a complaint. This was a basis to remain employed. However, the requirement is not advertised on the company website’s career page that lists what is expected of those applying to work there.

The daily prayer sessions involved workers gathering in a circle as the company’s owner or another individual would pray, the complaint said. Occasionally, the leader of the session would ask for prayer requests. 

Sometimes, these requests were “offered for poor performing employees” who were called out for mistakes in front of their colleagues.

When it came to the meeting’s Bible readings, the former customer service representative said it came off as “ranting” and eventually, her boss began having everyone chant “the Catholic version of the Lord’s Prayer in unison,” the complaint said. 

Before the former construction manager refused to attend the meetings entirely, he had offered to attend portions of them.

However, his boss said “it would be in his ‘best interest’” to attend the sessions in their entirety, the complaint states.

The atheist worker’s objections led to his base pay getting cut in half on Sept. 3, 2020 — from $800 to $400 per week — ahead of his firing.

Paula White and the Election Prayer

 

We watched this and kept thinking about those who say Pagans have strange rituals.

Kentucky House Passes Prayer Bill

The Kentucky House voted 83-5 in support of HB 40, for the last Wednesday in September as “A Day of Prayer for Kentucky’s Students.” The bill is now headed to the Senate.

Republican State Rep. Regina Huff, who sponsored the legislation, says this respects everybody’s beliefs… even though the fastest growing “religious” are teenagers, more than a third of whom don’t belong to any organized faith.

Huff said that HB 40 is respectful of all faiths by asking that Kentuckians spend the day praying, meditating or reflecting “in accordance with their own faith and consciences.” Students would be allowed to participate in the event at school before the start of the instructional day.

Students can already pray and meditate and reflect if they want to, that has never been an issue. But Huff maintains that this will be useful for religious students because now they’ll know their legislators support them, too.

“Given all that our students are facing … Our students need to know that we are standing with them,” she said. “We all need to embrace this and be united in an effort of support in each individual’s manner of prayer for our schools, students and administrators.”

Unfortunately, Huff’s bill will do next to nothing, it's pretty much worthless.

But it will alienate the growing number of students who want nothing to do with religion.

Christian radio host Bryan Fischer claims school prayer would have prevented the Florida school shooting

UPDATE: on the heels of blaming the lack of prayer for gun violence the Alabama Senate has voted 23-3 to amend the state’s constitution in order to allow the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools and in other government buildings.

Sen. Gerald Dial, the bill’s sponsor, said, “I believe that if you had the Ten Commandments posted in a prominent place in school, it has the possibility to prohibit some student from taking action to kill other students."

Our view? It won’t stop any school shootings.

Students know that killing is wrong, and it’s incredibly condescending for a legislator to pretend that shooters don't know about the Ten Commandments.

Christian radio host Bryan Fischer says that God allows school shootings like the one that claimed 17 lives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, because there is not enough prayer in public schools. Fischer writes: 

"I suggest we have mass school shootings because we don’t have enough God on our campuses… When tragic school shootings happen, like the one in Florida, everyone sends their “thoughts and prayers” to the families of the victims. But why don’t we pray before these shootings happen instead of waiting until somebody’s dead?

Everyone understands that prayer in school is appropriate in the wake of a tragedy like this. But if it’s appropriate after, there’s no reason it’s not appropriate before.

We have spent the last 60 years telling God to get lost from our public schools. It should come as no surprise that he’s not around when we need him. We can’t very well blame God for not coming to our aid if we fail to use the tools He has graciously given to us."

So, Fischer claims that school prayer could have stopped the Florida school shooting. 

Perhaps Fischer forgets that students are free to pray in school anytime they want. The 1963 Supreme Court decision does not prevent anybody from praying in public schools, it only prevents school officials from leading and ultimately coercing prayer as part of the public school curriculum.

The Movie Contradiction

Watch The Trailer

We have no problem with people who believe in prayer, it's their business.

But there is a movie encouraging people to take their heads out of the sand.

The movie is Contradiction, a documentary, written and directed by Jeremiah Camara.

This film examines the correlation between the all the churches that are out there and the poverty in African American communities across the United States.

As Camara asks Martin Luther King III how can there be so many social problems in black communities when there is a church on every corner, he is left speechless. 

Camara also points out that the most common prayer postures are in fact slave postures—hands together when shackled, kneeling, begging for mercy from a master who controls everything.

In the documentary we hear a preacher say, “Self-sufficiency will never work!”

“Depend on Jesus for everything."

It even says so it the good book, "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9).