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Athiest Says Recent Supreme Court Case Convinced Him to Be Heard

Dan Courtney
examiner.com
Dan Courtney

Officials in the Town of Greece have said they are open to having people of varying faiths and beliefs deliver the prayer at the start of their government meetings.

A Rochester atheist has taken the town up on that invitation.

Dan Courtney will be giving the invocation before the July 15 Greece Town Board meeting.  Courtney is an engineer for a manufacturing firm who says he knew around the age of 15 that he was a non-believer.

He says a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing the Town of Greece to continue the tradition of pre-meeting prayers convinced him he should take part in the process. "Now that the Supreme Court has ruled and said sectarian prayers at these invocations are permissible, what they're saying is that it's permissible to divide us based upon religious lines. If that's the case, then as a non-believer, I think it's important to participate in the process."

Courtney says it was a rhetorical question posed to a town attorney by Justice Antonin Scalia, asking what an atheist would say if he delivered a prayer that got his attention. "Even the idea of a non-theistic invocation was beyond the realm of Justice Scalia's imagination. And I saw that as problematic, because 20-percent of the country is non-affiliated when it comes to religion."

Courtney says his invocation, which he prefers to the term "prayer",  will be a message of inclusion.

Greece residents Linda Stephens and Susan Galloway argued in their lawsuit that the town excluded them by offering mostly Christian prayers before government meetings. Courtney says he is friends with Galloway and Stephens but is not sure whether they'll be at the July 15 meeting.

Beth Adams joined WXXI as host of Morning Edition in 2012 after a more than two-decade radio career. She was the longtime host of the WHAM Morning News in Rochester. Her career also took her from radio stations in Elmira, New York, to Miami, Florida.