Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [1-12] of 12 Prayer quotesPrayer QuotesPrayer If you really want to compete with Russia and China to prevent the 21st Century from being dominated by a new axis of evil, you must first defeat the Church of Global Warming. As long as that’s the official state religion of the Western world, we haven’t got a prayer.~ John Hayward [Communist Goals for America:] - Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.” - Control schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. - Soften curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put party line in textbooks. Control student newspapers. - Infiltrate churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion (i.e. “social justice,” “liberation theology”). - Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.” - Discredit American culture. - Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and divorce. - Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.~ Albert S. Herlong, Jr. Respondents argue, in effect, that legislative prayer may be addressed only to a generic God. The law and the Court could not draw this line for each specific prayer or seek to require ministers to set aside their nuanced and deeply personal beliefs for vague and artificial ones. There is doubt, in any event, that consensus might be reached as to what qualifies as generic or nonsectarian.~ Justice Anthony Kennedy The decidedly Christian nature of these prayers must not be dismissed as the relic of a time when our Nation was less pluralistic than it is today. Congress continues to permit its appointed and visiting chaplains to express themselves in a religious idiom. … To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures … and the courts … to act as … censors of religious speech. … Government may not mandate a civic religion that stifles any but the most generic reference to the sacred any more than it may prescribe a religious orthodoxy …~ Justice Anthony Kennedy From the earliest days of the Nation, these invocations have been addressed to assemblies comprising many different creeds. … Our tradition assumes that adult citizens, firm in their own beliefs, can tolerate and perhaps appreciate a ceremonial prayer delivered by a person of a different faith.~ Justice Anthony Kennedy Respondents maintain that prayer must be nonsectarian … and they fault the town for permitting guest chaplains to deliver prayers that ‘use overtly Christian terms’ or ‘invoke specifics of Christian theology.’ … An insistence on nonsectarian or ecumenical prayer as a single, fixed standard is not consistent with the tradition of legislative prayer. … The Congress that drafted the First Amendment would have been accustomed to invocations containing explicitly religious themes of the sort respondents find objectionable. One of the Senate’s first chaplains, the Rev. William White, gave prayers in a series that included the Lord’s Prayer, the Collect for Ash Wednesday, prayers for peace and grace, a general thanksgiving, St. Chrysostom’s Prayer, and a prayer seeking ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, &c …'~ Justice Anthony Kennedy While these prayers vary in their degree of religiosity, they often seek peace for the Nation, wisdom for its lawmakers, and justice for its people, values that count as universal and that are embodied not only in religious traditions, but in our founding documents and laws. … The first prayer delivered to the Continental Congress by the Rev. Jacob Duché on Sept. 7, 1774, provides an example: ‘Be Thou present O God of Wisdom and direct the counsel of this Honorable Assembly; enable them to settle all things on the best and surest foundations; that the scene of blood may be speedily closed; that Order, Harmony, and Peace be effectually restored, and the Truth and Justice, Religion and Piety, prevail and flourish among the people. Preserve the health of their bodies, and the vigor of their minds, shower down on them, and the millions they here represent, such temporal Blessings as Thou seest expedient for them in this world, and crown them with everlasting Glory in the world to come. All this we ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son and our Saviour, Amen.~ Justice Anthony Kennedy We even had to pass a special law in the Congress just a few weeks ago to allow student prayer groups the same access to school rooms after classes that a Young Marxist Society … would already enjoy.~ Ronald Reagan As we struggle to teach our children … we dare not forget that our civilization was built by men and women who placed their faith in a loving God. If Congress can begin each day with a moment of prayer … so then can our sons and daughters.~ Ronald Reagan We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca You are doing an excellent thing, one which will be wholesome for you, if, as you write me, you are persisting in your effort to attain sound understanding; it is foolish to pray for this when you can acquire it from yourself. We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. A god is near you, with you, and in you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: there sits a holy spirit within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our a guardian.~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca We must be a people who dare, dare to take responsibility for our hatred and fears and ask God to heal us from within. And we must be a people of prayer, a people who pray as if the strength of our nation depended on it, because it does.~ J. C. Watts, Jr. Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print