It was this infatuation with the forbidden pleasures of pagan Roman philosophers that led to our structure of government and its iconography. When such philosophers were speaking of "God" it certainly wasn't that as defined in Torah, but varied from atheism to a confused sort of pantheism. Many of their references to "God" were out of reticence to attack Christianity directly in of fear of reprisal. Many of their parallel references to morality were, instead, cleverly built upon the Roman idea of manly virtue, leaving the listener to believe that they were talking specifically about Christian virtue. That ambiguity has led to a huge number of what are effectively 'God and Country' misquotes.
Preach it, brother! The "enlightenment" is/was/shall ever be nothing but sheer unadulterated poison, and unfortunately many of our nation's founders were infected with it.
There is a very common fault on the Right to (as it were) "deify" the founders of a country. While more ancient nations have primal blood-and-soil mythologies, Americans have only the eighteenth century the the likes of Thomas Jefferson. The "nature's 'gxd'" Thomas Jefferson invoked in the Declaration of Independence is not the Biblical G-d but the "gxd" of deism--the notion that a "gxd" of some sort created the world but then did nothing more, which meant all revealed religions were frauds (deism was popular because prior to Darwin outright atheism didn't quite make any sense). If the eighteenth century deists had had something like "natural selection" to work with they would have been atheists--period.
By making our rights come from "nature's 'gxd'" rather than from the Biblical G-d Jefferson was laying the groundwork for the atheistic concept of "rights" that was to come after Comte and Darwin. Thus the poison was in our system from the very beginning.
It is only natural and laudable to applaud our founders and acknowledge their greatness. But they weren't perfect, and it is not wrong or unpatriotic to point out the flaws in their philosophy.
(Methinks you are also a reader of Rabbi Antelman? He's goes a little far out sometimes, but he's certainly interesting!)
With the Constitution as its graven image. Yep.
While more ancient nations have primal blood-and-soil mythologies, Americans have only the eighteenth century the the likes of Thomas Jefferson.
When I was in Holland on our honeymoon, I had to explain to one Dutchman why Americans bought and restored old buildings, "We don't have any 'old.'"
TJ was neck deep in that Enlightenment "philosope" crowd (to use Peter Gay's word). So was Franklin. Adams less so. Washington the politician. Henry, now there was a Christian patriot.
Methinks you are also a reader of Rabbi Antelman? He's goes a little far out sometimes, but he's certainly interesting!
Yup, Gershom Scholem is another. Rabbi Antelman filled in a lot of gaps in the ol' History of Western Civ narrative, didn't he? Especially helpful to me was providing a motive for the evils of Marxism in his citation to Sanhedrin 98a. I think there's a lot more to his research into colloidal silver than the desire to make money. The man is a Jew's Jew, a true humanitarian.
We live in a world run by eschatological maniacs. We do what we can to stem that toxic red tide.
The study of associations from without will always have its uncertainties. Rabbi Antelman did better than most at digging out the source documents to prove his point. There are leaps in his case, but that's just part of that type of work. You can't know what to look for without a hypothesis, but you won't have the passion to get there without believing it. It's the honesty to reconsider when one runs into outliers that is the difference between good and bad researchers.
It is only natural and laudable to applaud our founders and acknowledge their greatness. But they weren't perfect, and it is not wrong or unpatriotic to point out the flaws in their philosophy.
True. Nor is it a bad thing to point out critical flaws in the Constitution, which I have done here from time to time.
Similarly, IMHO it's not a bad thing to point out discord within Judaism. By virtue of its (understandably) monolithic defensiveness and by not acknowledging or informing the Christian world of its internal divisions, the Jewish people get treated like a monolith when the acts of reprisal are rendered evil: without justice, compassion, or intelligence.
Nothing makes me angrier than to realize that the NAZI war machine was provided startup cash with (culturally) Jewish money (the Sabbatean bund). Yet is was Jewish doctors, scientists, artists, and shopkeepers, decent people who loved the Lord with all their hearts, who suffered and died unspeakably while the atheist thieves of the world laughed up their sleeves and gorged on depravity.
It has been on my heart to help, and I think I have found something Israel truly needs to understand. The last few years is centered on the almost mechanical logic of the year of Shemitta. By translating tishm'tena un'tashtah in Ex:23:11 literally, as 'release it and abandon it' (the land not the crop), I can explain every single blessing and curse in Lev. 26 by normal military, economic, social, and environmental metrics. There's no mystery to it at all and there is very good reason why the practice during the Second Temple Period as described in the Talmud Yerushalmi Tractate Shvi'it was circumscribed from the original intent in Exodus. BTW, the founding verse for the Sabbath for the Land is not mentioned, at all, in the entire two volumes of Tractate Shvi'it, for which there was VERY good reason. Had the rabbis been teaching the true extent of Ex. 23:11 under Persian, Greek, or Roman rule, it would have been suicidal. The rabbis would have been arrested and killed, and the Torah would have been lost.
IMO, Isreal's survival depends upon understanding the long lost meaning of this ancient law. The partial measures prescribed in the Talmud won't cut it. If that causes you any distress, I am truly sorry.
I've since gone back to re-translate Genesis 4 and, yes, it does make clear the rationale for the Sabbath year. But before we continue this conversation further, I should inform you that I am a Torah-observant Christian (although my grandfather was probably a full-blooded Jew). I wouldn't want you consulting my work without knowing that.
Baruch HaShem.