Posted on 08/29/2004 10:42:44 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
I agree with everything you said, Risk. Believe me, I am not a Christian basher - and I believe NO organ funded by the Government should slam Christians. These programs and/or agencies should be abolished anyway.
However, I am not going to be trashed because I don't share the beliefs of any one Religion - even if the trashing is cloaked in the best of intentions. It simply astounds me that (apparently) so many Christians believe it is a given that America must - MUST - reflect their interpretations of Christianity.
Simple as all get-out, NC. Read AF's posts...to him and others like him, their version of Christianity is the "One Truth". However, they don't like the fact that others do not recognize this...it hurts their egos or something. Thus, they want the government to FORCE those others to recognize their "superiority".
Like AF said, they'll start small if they have to. Part of it is wishing, hoping, and rationalizing America as a "Christian Nation", in the desire that someday, somehow, a court or a legislature will agree. Then, unfettered, they can begin to shape all laws thusly.
Of course, they'll have the fun of pointing their gnarled fingers at the rest of us and saying, "UNBELIEVERS! We're BETTER than you!"
Do you want to "punish" Jews as well as Muslims and atheists? What about Buddhists?
Should only certain sects of Christianity be allowed to practice?
So did Free Masonry play a HUGE part in our founding;yet there's a group here,that attacks Masons and all they stood/stand for,all the time,posting lies,calumny,drivel,and tinfoil garbage about them.
What a long-shot. They wrote the equivalent of "A.D." when describing the date, and you're saying that justifies dogmatic laws in this country?
Every time anyone writes a Gregorian date he's doing exactly the same thing. With comments by our Founding Fathers abounding that indicate their deep and well-reasoned concern about keeping religion and government separate, such as the following two, I find no basis for an argument that depends on a Gregorian representation of a date as proof that they intended our Constitution to be Christian in nature.
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for is faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties. --Thomas Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury BaptistsAnd
The civil Government, though bereft of everything like an associated hierarchy, possesses the requisite stability, and performs its functions with complete success, whilst the number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people, have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the State.(1819). --James MadisonThe revisionists are the ones who would either divest our culture of Christianity with laws, or who would (re)Christianize it. Both are in fierce violation of our Constitution. There are partisans on both sides who exaggerate the fears of their constituents based on either camp's wishes.
It's only all too unfortunate that we can't ask our Founding Fathers to help us resolve these conflicts.
We have to think them through for ourselves. Christianizing our government is such an obvious mistake to any student of the reformation and the enlightenment, and yet we must confinually defend the notions of John Locke, John Milton, and Jean Rousseau -- all three of whom were passionate defenders of government without the power to impart religious establishment on their people.
Freedom in government is all about representation. That is where it always goes awry. A Christian government would exclude a massive segment of the population from true representation. Any taxes for them would suddenly be onerous. The intercessions of their clergy/officials would susdenly be tedious and oppressive. Furthermore, many Christians would suddenly disagree about dogmas represented in the government. Europe's history is of one religiously motivated war after another. All of that was made obsolete when we finished our American revolution against the English crown and its onerous championship of Anglicanism against Catholicism.
>> That's a very long piece of nothing. If it were as important as you say it is, then it would have been there. Instead they were very concerned about religious civil war, and knew better than to include anything about a particular religion.
You see my dilemma. I either believe you, or I believe a long history of founding father letters and activities, congressional resolutions, and supreme court rulings, from the beginning of our nation until 1947. It is a tough decision.
You sir, are the revisionist. Read Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists. Read the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment, on whose thought our government was built, in letter after letter espousing the ideas of Locke, Milton, and Rousseau. The reformation and the enlightenment set us free from men who would use government as a tool to push their religious agendas. We're not going back to the dark days before all of those changes moved us toward the freedoms we enjoy now. I'm defending the status quo, and I'm not about to let it go. Neither are millions of other Americans of all faiths who understand why our government's protections for their religious practices is so brilliant.
You just can't live without your religion being taught to other people's kids, or using their tax money to pay for it, can you, Phil?
If states were using public monies to fund the teaching of ONE religion in schools which were supported by EVERYONE's tax dollars, then stopping that was a GOOD thing.
huh? Have you bothered reading the Bible? Our laws (were) based on Judeo-Christian principles.
A large percentage (pretty soon a majority) of this country is not Protestant. Following your logic, once another religion (say, Catholicism) becomes the majority, we should enshrine their religious principles into law.
I have a better idea: Let's keep government out of religion, and vice versa.
Forget it. Irony is lost on some people.
(Still licking my wounds from the Bush Twins/Texas Women thread)
My biggest frustration with these religionists is that they frighten the electorate away from good politicians like Senator Frist and George W. Bush who have a solid understanding of our constitutional separation of religion and state.
The televangelists and the other nabobs of Christian revisionism play right into the hands of leftist propagandists. See, they cry, the religious right wants to undo two hundred years of religious freedoms in our country! They do, but our current crop of Christian politicians is more interested in protecting all Americans than in pushing for a religious agenda in government.
Every time a PF or a T7 gets online and chants about Christ in our government, it probably turns of 1,000 voters, some of them Christians who fear religious oppression that would come through dogma's encroachment on government neutrality.
We end up with judges like the 5th and 9th circuit courts who are confused about the second amendment because they were appointed by politicians who appeased the fears of the people who worried about the Christianists. And so it goes. What a destructive lot.
You'll, of course, have to leave out the areas. like representative government and democratic elections, as those were Greek and Roman in origin.
And he's absolutely right about the Constitution not having any reference to Christianity or the Bible in its laws and the BOR's.
It DOES mention religion, if only to proscribe a state-sponsored one.
Show me where the Constitution of your state or the Federal government's laws were based on the bible (and not just inspired). You've been watching too much 700 club, haven't you?
right to bear arms
Luke 22:36
http://www.gunowners.org/fs9902.htm
I do like a challenge;^)
Must read later bump. :-)
You don't have to tolerate deviant behavior. However, so long as such behavior does not injure your person or property, you have no right to demand that government ban it.
Yes it does bother me if a muslim moves in next door to me, .
Too bad. Unless it is your property, you have no say as to who lives there.
Everyone insists on their right to define their own morals and "life my life as I choose so long as I don't interfere with my neighbor's right to do the same."
And you have a problem with this why?
What about our right to live in a country free from pagans and terrorists?
Terrorists are one thing, but you have no more "right" to live in a pagan-free country than you do to live in a judenfrei nation.
Actually the Founding Fathers were all Aesir worshipers. The honored the Gods of the Aesir by the names they used for weekdays. (Okay, perhaps a few were Sun, Moon, or Saturn worshipers.)
Your logic is short-circuited. The bible is a well-reasoned commentary that many agree came from God's own hand. Our laws sometimes agree with the bible. That doesn't make our laws bibilcal. It makes them resonate with bibilical teaching. To make our laws comply with bibilical teaching would require a theocracy, and a doomed attempt to build a heavenly kingdom on earth. We are better of explaining ourselves and persuading each other why laws are good and have merit using the tools of reason and logic than we are in applying a biblical template. Our founding fathers understood that few would be able to agree on dogmatic templates anyway. Europe's history proved that!
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