For the "I could not make this shit up even if I tried" files, a judge in Delaware has asked:
"Is the Lord's Prayer Christian?"
Just...go ahead and let that sink in for a minute. Read the question again if you need to. I'll wait.
We are talking here about the Lord's Prayer, one of the most recognizable of the standard-issue Christian prayers, shared in some form or other across nearly all denominations, one of the first prayers Christian children learn - both Ozz, raised Catholic, and I, raised Methodist, can rattle it off without thinking, even now, a decade out of our respective Christian upbringings. And they are asking if it is specifically a Christian prayer, or if it could be considered "generic" and "not advancing a specific faith".
Are. You. Fucking. Kidding me?
How is this even a question?
The context of it, if you don't want to click through, is a case on whether the legislative prayer used to open sessions of Sussex County Council meetings is Constitutional or not. They apparently open their sessions with a recitation of the Lord's Prayer. Legislative prayer has been certified by the Supreme Court as Constitutional so long as it does not advance any particular faith; Sussex County's lawyers are arguing that the Lord's Prayer is "generic", so therefore, it should be considered Constitutional.
More specifically, when questioned on whether the Lord's Prayer is specifically Christian, one of the attorneys for Sussex County replied that "[Jesus] was not offering a Christian prayer in the Christian tradition because no Christian tradition existed."
...
...............
Whut.
So you're talking about a very specific prayer, laid out by the founder of your religion, lifted word-for-word from passages in the holy book of your religion (Matthew 6:9-13; Luke 11:2-4)...but you want to claim it's "not a Christian prayer" because at the time that your founder uttered it the religion had not actually been formed yet?
I just can't even believe they're arguing this with a straight face in a court of law. Nor can I believe that the judge has said it might be "a difficult case" because there is no mention of Jesus by name, as if that's the final arbiter of whether or not a prayer is Christian in nature. If it's taken from your scriptures, used in your churches (and only in your churches, as I can't think of any other religious group that uses the Lord's Prayer, ever), I don't care if it explicitly names a deity or not, it's a Christian prayer.
But hey, if that's the logic we're using here, perhaps I should see if I can get my local City Council to start opening legislative sessions with the Charge of the Goddess. It names, like, ten deities - that's more inclusive than the Lord's Prayer! - and obviously that means it's not advancing any one deity and therefore should be totally cool as a "generic" prayer that "doesn't advance any particular religion", amirite?
