As I’m sure you all know, today is Cinco de Mayo, the statutorily mandated National Day of Prayer (NDP), and the National Day of Reason for us dissenters. I met up with the group at a coffee shop at 11:00 and we got to the sidewalk across the street from the steps of the state capital around 11:45.

My sign read, “Why do you need the government to tell you to pray?” Not surprisingly, a few of the believers who came across the street to talk to us actually agreed with my sign. After all, the NDP is completely pointless. If you’re going to pray it should be without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17), not just reserved for the first Thursday of May.

One member of the group had a sign that referenced Matt 6:6 which reads, “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you (ESV).” When I saw that he didn’t have any text from the verse on the sign I finally figured out the perfect way of putting it, “Keep your prayers in the closet – Matt 6:6,” oh well there’s always next year.

As far as the NDP Rally on the capital steps, it was pretty pretty standard. They started off with two messianic Jewish teenagers playing the Shofar (Ram’s horn), a US Army color guard, the national anthem, and the pledge of allegiance, then came the numerous, long winded prayers where they proceeded to “heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do (Matt 6:7 ESV).” To close they marched around the capital. Fortunately they only went around once, otherwise the walls may have come down.

A few passersby gave us thumbs up and words of encouragement. Even a few Christians agreed with us. We had a few people take an extra sign and join in for a few minutes. One woman who was definitely on our side wondered why the 40 school aged kids there weren’t in school, very good point.

There were others, such as a few clearly insane women who were cured of their drug addictions by the power of God. One even went into great detail for far too long about her hallucinations…uh, I mean visions. I’ll go into these in more detail tomorrow. There were a few people who argued with us, offered us blessings (just what every atheist wants), and some who just wanted to chat. In one of the arguments I actually had to give a short Bible lesson to one of the Christians who thought that David was Saul’s son. I can’t imagine the embarrassment for to Christian to be corrected Biblical details by one of the atheists he’s arguing with, of course to be fair he isn’t the one with the degree in Theology.

We even had a youth pastor with some of the youth from his church come across the street to chat with a few from our group for a while. He then joined us for lunch, and picked up the $200 tab over our objections. I have to say, this is the first time that a pastor has bought me a beer.

In all it was a fun time, this was also good practice for the Idaho Atheists and West Valley Freethinkers in protesting church/state separation violations.