My Reflection

I have really enjoyed writing this blog about separation of church and state. When I first encountered this topic, I never imagined that I would learn so much about it and see how other topics can be related. The debate over abortion is one such debate. Everyone knows about this debate and it's two sides, but I never thought about how it tied into separation of church and state. Through my later blogs, I have acknowledeged the fact that they are related and provided evidence to support this. Another such topic would be the debate over gay marriage. This is a very heated debate that is mostly rooted in religious beliefs. Like the abortion debate, the more I researched, I saw the connection and began to show that in my posts. The final subject that I found to be related to this would be over embryonic stem cell research. Like the other two subjects, this one is also debated over because of many religious beliefs and can be tied into this one large debate. Basically, one thing that I have learned throughout this debate is that church and state is not just one broad subject but actually a complex debate with a lot of different sub-topics. This website is one that is opinionated, but it does bring up good points about the subject and presents essays that you can read about this debate.

With my continued research over this subject, I found some interesting facts about things that I thought I knew all about already. One thing would be the issue of religion in public schools. One thing I didn't know was when the actual court decision was that took prayer out of schools. I had always heard my mom talk about it but never really got all the facts concerning it. I also didn't know that there could be some religious references still in public schools, but it just can't be regulated and the teachers can't try to persuade their students a certain way. This was very interesting to me when I found this out. Learning about the history behind "In God We Trust" being on the coins was also interesting to me. This was one thing that got me wanting to know more about separation of church and state so it was nice to find about the facts about it. Also, the fact that "under God" is in the pledge sparked my interest in this. The reason it did was that the pledge is usually required to be stated by school children and I often questioned this. All of these things that I found out about concerning the subject allowed me to acquire more knowledge over the issue.

In brief, I want to say thank you for taking your time to read over my blog and my several points, it is very appreciated. I have learned so much about this subject that I did not know at the start of my blogs. Also, I think that this has taught me how to express myself casually, but at the same time intellectually. Overall, I think that this blog has allowed me to grow as a thinker and a writer.

My thoughts on the polls

I wanted to take this time to thank you guys for being very responsive on the various polls that I have. This blog is going to go over the different results and is basically asking for your feedback as to why you think that the polls may have a specific outcome. On my first poll, I asked you to vote on whether you think church and state is really separated. The results, surprisingly, were that the majority of you thought that church and state was really NOT seperated. This was surprising to me because I thought that many people would think that these two things were seperated considering the growing diversity in our country. The second poll was whether prayer should be allowed in public schools. Although most of you chose the answer I thought you would choose which was no it shouldn't be, a number of you still chose that it should be in public schools. I thought that this was also surprising considering how people fought to get it out of schools. I would have thought it would have been a big difference between the two results. My question to you, my reader, is why do you think I received these results?