If you read the paper with any regularity you would realize that our football team, despite its best efforts, sometimes comes up short.

Despite gigantic wins against those Iowa City liberals, the shadows of blowouts and fourth quarter upsets cast a pall gloom over our campus. Not only are we denied a chance at a Tostitos-Sony-Pokemon Bowl game, but we suffer the humiliation of not being very devout Christians.

How can I say this when we live in the bastion of Fundamentalist Christian America? It’s quite simple, really. We just don’t pray enough.

Though you may laugh, many people take the idea of divine football intervention quite seriously. In Texas, it seems that no game is complete without assistance from The Big Man.

Apparently, the issue is important enough that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case from Sante Fe where there was a student-led prayer before a high school game. While calculus professors will tell you that students praying in silence before a test is nothing new, it seems the social conservatives in Texas brilliantly decided to use the public address system.

Even though the students circumvented the laws banning clergy-led prayers at public institutions, they ought to have had the intelligence to realize that using school equipment that subjected everyone at the game to their views was a no-no.

In all the lower court rulings, the school has lost with more stringent restrictions placed the more they tested the court’s patience. In the appeals court ruling, it was said that “football games are hardly a sober type of annual event that can be appropriately solemnized with prayer (CNN).”

But despite that, their lawyers persevere because they are paid by the hour.

Why else would someone push a situation that is so utterly hopeless? Do you really think the tobacco lawyers thought smoking was good for you?

In their appeal to the Supreme Court, lawyers for the Santa Fe School District said the Constitution’s treatment of religion is “better honored through the neutral accommodation of student viewpoints, whether they sectarian, ecumenical or religion — rather than through government censorship of the content of student prayers (CNN, 11/15/99).”

Unfortunately, that peasant thinking doesn’t cut it unless you are narrow-minded enough to ignore the viewpoints of other students who don’t share your views.

The public utterance of prayer will assuredly make some students feel like outsiders in their own community because of their religious views.

The parents who brought the suit put it more eloquently, saying that “the fact that graduation prayer or prayer before football games is led by students does not diminish the pressure to religious conformity. If anything, it may increase it.”

Anybody who disagrees with that statement is blindly ignoring the concept of peer pressure and its effects. No person can argue that peer pressure does not exist, and surely it must be recognized that at impressionable ages the need to conform is great.

To avoid segregating a non-religious minority, the school must refuse student-led prayer.

To do otherwise would be to hearken back to the days of separate water fountains and poll taxes. Separate but equal is what the fundamentalists would say, as they did only decades ago to civil rights advocates. Funny how these things repeat themselves.

The truth is, prayer before football games, or anything for that matter, sells yourself and your abilities short. Obviously, both sides are praying before the game, and not just so that players avoid injury but instead to see their team win.

By setting up a nebulous belief in divine intervention you must accept that the other team won not because their players were better, but because a greater power deemed you lose.

If everything is in someone else’s hands, what impetus is there to strive to do better? Obviously everything will happen despite your efforts.

Maybe JFK should have thrown up his hands during the Cuban Missile Crisis and pushed The Button, entrusting everyone’s life to divine intervention.

Why worry about a nuclear war when all the good Christians would go to Heaven anyway?

This underscores an important point: Religion is a crutch intended to provide comfort in times of pain. However, many people use it everyday for things that are so inconsequential as to be humorous.

The best example is a fundamentalist who asked an atheist how he got through his day without God.

“Just fine,” was the reply. Obviously, the idea that things were within one’s control was alien to someone brought up to believe he was powerless to do anything but pray for salvation.

If any person ever felt that powerless to affect the course of their life, they should have avoided a church and instead seen a therapist.

Unfortunately, many fundamentalists preach the belief that no matter how happy you may be in this life without faith, you’ll regret it in the next one. Thus, they ensure obedience based on a future fear that can never be proven.

To borrow a phrase from Dilbert, religion is like nuclear power. It can be used for both good and evil, but you never want to get any on you.

Using it from time to time poses no harm, but immersing yourself in it is dangerous.

Not only did the students violate federal law by using the public address system at a public institution, but by praying before something as petty as a football game, those students cheapened whatever symbolism religion still hold for the vast majority of non-fundamentalists that constitute this country. I may as well pray to find my car keys.

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Aaron Woell is a senior in political science from Bolingbrook, Ill.