Prayer should not have been removed from public schools.

Yes, I actually, I did read the court case you provided. However, NOWHERE in your post or argument do you refer in any way to mandatory prayer in schools. Even when you say, "...as was done by Abington School District v. Schempp," you do not specify that mandatory prayer is the issue here. As I said before, you may have meant to say it, but it is NOT IN YOUR ARGUMENT. You are free to insert it now, but frankly I agree with you: Mandatory school prayer is unconstitutional. However, we are arguing the resolution that, "Prayer should not have been removed from public schools," not that "Mandatory prayer should not have been removed from public schools." I have not conceded this debate out of "some kind of bewildering misapprehension." Allow me to advise you in the future to clearly state the exact issue under discussion in your argument. I read the Wiki article you provided, but you apparently expected me to ASSUME that you meant specifically the kind of school prayer under review in Abington School District v. Schempp. You don't mention this at all in your post. Your job as instigator of this debate was to clearly define the terms and the issue at hand. You did not do so. This debate site is set up so that we argue the resolution of the debate. You make points, I respond to them and make my own. You failed to make any points during your first argument, so I was left to argue the resolution. You may contest this now, but if you have failed to fully illustrate the resolution under debate, that is hardly my fault, and I say all we can do is carry on. I will begin to argue with Justice Douglas' majority opinion from Zorach v. Clauson (343 U.S. 306, 1952.) "We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. We guarantee the freedom to worship as one chooses. We make room for as wide a variety of beliefs and creeds as the spiritual needs of man deem necessary. We sponsor an attitude on the part of government that shows no partiality to any one group and that lets each flourish according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma. When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows the best of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe." Justice Douglas says that America is a religious country. That is true today as it was true in 1952. This is not an unreasonably concept, nor does it contradict the Constitutional amendments under consideration. Free exercise of a religion or lack thereof is guaranteed; and though the majority may be Christian, Jewish, atheist, or Muslim, it cannot exert undue influence on the minority. However, the majority should not be penalized because it is the majority, solely because the minority believes it should be the majority. You, Tatarize, believe that all people should be atheists. That's a natural thing for someone with a certain set of beliefs to say; I wish everyone were a Christian. When the student body of a majority of schools in the nation professes a religion that requires no prayer, i.e. atheism, that will be the time to remove it from the public schools, sanctioned by the government or not. If a majority of school students are religious, then in the schools where they spend at least seven hours of every week day, there should be provisions for their religion; prayer, free speech about religious activities, etc. But are the majority of American children religious? Figures for grade school children are nonexistent, but according to Gallup and the National Study of Youth and Religion, (http://findarticles.com...) and (http://www.researchforum.org...), the vast majority of students are in fact religious. From Gallup: "The Gallup survey showed that 92 percent of teens consider their religious beliefs important to them. A third say faith is the most important influence in their lives. That number goes up to 52 percent for African-American teens. Close to four in ten say they pray alone frequently (42 percent) and read the Bible at least weekly (36 percent). Teens report a higher or comparable degree of Christian orthodoxy and confidence in the church when compared to their parents or other adults. Ninety-five percent express belief in God, and 67 percent have confidence in organized religion. Over half (55 percent) call themselves "religious," with an additional 39 percent referring to themselves as 'spiritual but not religious.'" We can clearly see from these figures that teens, who would probably be affected most by the re-institution of school prayer, are overwhelmingly religious and/or spiritual. Prayer is an integral part of religion and most spirituality; whether these students would pray to God, Allah, or Mother Earth is immaterial. The fact is that the courts have, by making school prayer a covert activity, alienated a far greater group of students than they have enfranchised with these laws, meant to protect the "religious freedom" of our youth. Youths hostile to religion are the only kind disadvantaged in any way by school prayer; and they are few and far between. At a women's institution, which bathroom has more depositories, the women's or the men's? Though there are laws mandating that a public institution have both, it would be foolish to make them the same size because men just don't go to the women's institution very often. In the same way, if a high school was a perfect cross-section of the ethnic and religious and political makeup of the United States, the majority, as I have shown, would be religious and so, like the women at the Women's Institution, the religious students should be served in proportion to their makeup of society. By the way, Abington SD v. Schempp was not actually about school prayer, but mandatory Bible-reading, which was done by the teacher or over the PA system. There is a serious difference between these two things, which seems to have escaped you. The Bible is the book of only two religions; prayer is nearly universal among them. School Prayer is to mandatory Bible reading and by extension Abington v. Schempp, what sheet metal is to a car; many, many things use it, the car is only one example. Bible-reading alienates anyone who does not believe in the Inspiration of that book; school prayer alienates those who have never prayed; few indeed. "Mandatory school prayer" was never the issue here, according to your resolution. Perhaps because you seem to have a poor understanding of religious customs, the difference between prayer and Bible-reading has escaped you. The phrase "a wall of separation between church and state" comes from, as I assume you know, a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to a concerned church group, which had heard rumors that another denomination had been selected as the National Church of the infant United States. Jefferson was clearly referring to the absence of a national religion in the republic, not a ban on religious activity within government-funded institutions as some have ludicrously suggested, or that religious people should leave all their religious convictions behind when they make the oath of office, go to work, or step into a public school. And to top that all off, it's not even in the Constitution. By prohibiting school prayer in any form--making it a covert activity--has clearly violated that troublesome part of the First Amendment about prohibiting the free exercise of religion, and this remains true despite all the half-hearted attempts of modern jurisprudence to nullify i