There are a lot of people who get up in arms about prayer in school. Personally, I don’t have a problem with it, and I think people who do are just a bunch of atheists who want to stop the rest of us from getting the advantages faith brings.

Praying helped me countless times in high school. I know for a fact that my prayers were answered on at least one occasion when, after studying diligently for a week, I finally passed a trigonometry test.

Before the test, I closed my eyes, put my head down and prayed just as hard as I could: “Satan,” I said, “if you help me get at least a D on this test, I will be your obedient servant for the rest of senior year.”

It worked, too! And, oh, what a year it was. We sure danced on the blood-dipped tide that year, my friends … and how! Abe Lynx football rules!

Don’t judge me. We’ve all sold our souls for something. Mammon seems to be the god of choice these days, ask your average administrator.

This week the Supreme Court reaffirmed that prayer in school must be private. The only time people complain is when they think they’ve got the upperhand and are about to lose it.

They like to be able to shove their particular brand of dogma down the throats of anyone who doesn’t goose step in line.

There are still more than a few scattered communities in this country where just about everybody is all the same denomination. It’s called “The Sticks.”

And whether 95 percent of your hick town is Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian or Mormon, one thing remains true: As long as there are teen-agers, agnostics, atheists and undecideds will always make up at least 5 percent of every town.

Not to date myself too much, but when I started school, we were still forced to say grace before we could drink our milk. This was particularly offensive since my home town of 300 commuters was founded by Mormons, co-opted by no other religious group after their departure and settled by a mish-mash of faiths so diverse that there were never enough of any one group to warrant building another church.

It was the kind of townpeople slept in and nothing else. A couple of housing additions, a trailer court and a herd of country folk. We didn’t even have a convenience store until 1989, let alone a unified system of community-wide belief.

We had a class of about 20 kids: two Indians, a smattering of Lutherans, one or two Mormons hold-outs, a Unitarian, a couple of kids whose parents cared so little for organized religion that they didn’t even have a clue who Jesus was, one Presbyterian, a Methodist with a pronounced limp and five or six non-denominationals.

Our teacher was from Omaha and was probably the first Catholic any of us had ever seen (those were different times) so why should any of us give a special thanks to the Virgin Mary and the good people at Roberts for our 2 percent?

You can’t answer THAT one can you? Maybe for chocolate milk, but that was still a big maybe.

One day, our teacher came in, slammed the milk down on the table, told us to start drinking and that our principal didn’t care if we went to hell or not. What did she care? Hell was listening to her read “Curious George” in that disturbing falsetto.

The fact is, keeping religion out of the schools is the only sensible way to protect everybody’s right to practice whatever variety of religion they want to without interference from the state.

No teacher, no superintendent, no school board, no honorable senator from Wisconsin should be determining what is and is not an acceptable expression of religious faith for an entire community, even if that community is homogeneous in its faith.

Let’s say you are born a Scientologist in a town full of them, like Hollywood or Keokuk. Maybe the mayor is one, all the families, the PTA is full to the brim with Scientologist.

Do they have the right to decide that since such a large portion of their community believes in the same set of moral principles and ethical guidelines that an official school prayer should be said before football games and chess club meetings?

Of course not.

You might move there unwittingly and your kids would get hooked on “Dianetics” telling you over Thanksgiving dinner that your bad memory engrams are what make you such a prick.

What if that town was all Satanists or Church of Elvis? How would you like to move to that town? What if you are a child growing up in that town?

Do children not have the same right ultimately to decide the fate of their own souls without having the matter fore-ordained by others?

Let’s face it, in any community where religion is so important that administrators look for ways around the separation of church and state caveat, church attendance is already high enough that everyone’s getting their dose of dogma.

Praying in schools amounts to little more than a method to indoctrinate children where their friends can sit around reinforcing the process.

It’s the next best thing to brainwashing and if you insist on forcing your beliefs on anyone who happens by in this fashion, you are a brain-washer.

Just because it is a white wash doesn’t make it OK.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.