Prayer in school

The Toronto Star asks if students should be required to recite the lord's prayer in public schools. (I have no idea why they're asking this and can't seem to find the associated news story.)

We actually did say the lord's prayer when I was in school, up to about grade 3. This was a source of a great moral dilemma for me. You see, I was raised Catholic (which I'm capitalizing only because it changes the meaning if you don't) but I went to public school because my mother's experience as a teacher in our local Catholic board led her to decide that she didn't want her kids going to school in that environment. (To answer the inevitable question, going to public school isn't what drove me away from the church - it was my experience with other Catholics and with the church's teachings themselves.)

Thing is, in the Catholic church, the our father ends with the line "Deliver us from evil." The version we had to say in school had more lines after that: "For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen." (Here's a theological explanation of why from a Catholic perspective, but I didn't have access to that information at the time.)

Now I knew that, to be good, I had to do what my teachers told me to in school. And my teachers in school were telling me to recite the lord's prayer complete with those last few lines. And I knew that if I didn't do what my teachers told me, I'd go to hell for being bad. But I also knew that, to be good, I had to do what the church told me. And the church told me stop at "deliver us from evil." And I knew that if I didn't do what the church told me, I'd go to hell for being bad.

So there I was, a good, virtuous child who wanted very much to do the right thing, (seriously, this is actually what I was like at that age) utterly convinced that I was automatically going to burn in hell for all time because the prayer script my school gave me varied slightly from the prayer script my church gave me. I was between the ages of 4 and 8 at the time.

And the thing is, I was just coming from a different sect of the same religion! All this distress was being caused by a slight variance in how to articulate the exact same sentiment! Imagine the kind of confusion and cognitive dissonance it would cause for students from religions with completely different deities! And remember, this includes elementary school students, who are still young enough that they genuinely want to be good by obeying the grownups around them! What on earth do they think reciting the lord's prayer will do (and why this one prayer specifically?) that it's worth putting all the students who, through no fault of their own, were born into a different religion or no religion at all in a catch-22 where they cannot possibly be good?