Posted on 04/15/2005 5:09:20 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The Freedom from Religion Foundation issued a press release Sept. 13, 2001, calling the September 11 attacks by Islamist terrorists "the ultimate faith-based initiative."
The release went on: "Religion is not the answer, it is probably the problem."
And: "Prayer had its chance on September 11 and it failed."
September 11 "should have clinched the idea this is a naturalistic universe," group leader Mr. Barker says. "To stand by and do nothing makes God an accomplice. If He exists, why are we worshipping this monster?"
The fight against God and for abortion rights appear intertwined for Mr. Barker's mother-in-law, Mrs. Gaylor. She was born in 1926 in Tomah, Wis. A biography posted at the group's Web site, www.ffrf.org, says her mother died when she was 2 and her father, a farmer, found religion "embarrassing." She graduated as an English major from University of Wisconsin in 1949 and was married the same year.
After raising four children, Mrs. Gaylor, in 1972, founded the Women's Medical Fund, which has helped 14,000 poor women obtain abortions. In 1975, she published a book "Abortion Is a Blessing."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
"Nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
My beef is not with the lack of Christian requirements for leaders, my beef is with revisionist history. I also once believed what you state until I researched it and found I was misled.
We don't know where we are or where we are going unless we know where we have been. Stay lost if you like, just don't give directions to others.
When the majority of states had a requirement that leaders had to be Christian, how can you conclude these same states wanted Christianity separated from government?
All the States accepted the Constitution as written, to form the union; -- although many individuals in those States did not agree with every provision. Eventually we had to fight a civil war to establish that the US Constitution is the 'Law of the Land'.
My beef is not with the lack of Christian requirements for leaders, my beef is with revisionist history.
My posts here have no "revisionist history".
I also once believed what you state until I researched it and found I was misled. We don't know where we are or where we are going unless we know where we have been. Stay lost if you like, just don't give directions to others.
You're confused. I'm not lost, I'm just quoting the clear words of our Constitution, as written. Read them to find your own direction.
No, these arguments are sophisticated. Well-intentioned people are quite vulnerable to the disinformation being purveyed by the theocracy machinery.
You bring up marriage. I think that's very interesting. Like abortion, marriage is one of those issues that people desperate to save America feel they absolutely must have Christian doctrines in order to protect. It's just not true. You can protect marriage, the family, babies, the whole 9 yards with nonsectarian arguments. You're free to maintain your opinions about history, of course. Outside the cocoon of your own beliefs, others aren't convinced. If you demand that they pass and uphold laws based on criteria that don't make sense to them, you'll find both valid constitutional arguments against it, and you'll find resistance.
The theocracy machinery appeals to our fears: marriage, babies, traditional values -- none of it can be saved without Christian law, right? That's just a shortcut for getting political power. The ACLU and the Democrats are using their own shortcuts. Why do we have to use shortcuts to fight them? Shortcuts just leave us trapped in unprincipled positions, vulnerable to manipulation.
You made some interesting observations that contradicted some of my earlier comments, but you fell far short of "proving" anything at all regarding this particular assertion of yours.
I recall pointing out to you that Virginia was the model for religious freedom, as it was where Thomas Jefferson lived, and it was where he could influence the proceedings most effectively. Virginia uses the same language that Madison offered in a quote about the state having no power to enforce religious beliefs. In the following quote of the original Virginia state constitution, we should interpret the word Christian in the cultural sense; it by no means suggests that residents of the state have to be Christian:
SEC. 16. That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.Let's look at that paragraph carefully. The word most reviled by the Christian right is reason. If man must rely on reason, so it is said by men among the Christian right, why then we'd become like the communists and begin murdering millions. I've heard that said right here, many times, on this very forum. Yet Virginia demands that reason be the approach to dealing with issues of religious freedom.
Conviction is another word that leaves no doubt that citizens are on their own, may choose their own free will with respect to religious practices, and are not obligated to observe or practice any particular religious dogmas, doctrines, ceremonies, or other observances that fall outside the description of Christian love and forbearance. That phrase even suggests that Christians themselves use restraint and patience when dealing with nonbelievers!
One could never honestly construe the arguments that the Christian right makes about religion and government from that paragraph. It's too far fetched to suggest that, for example, a judge could pontificate that his translation of the all 10 commandments were "the foundation" of state law, or that the government had to take a particular diplomatic action in a foreign land because Christian "prophecy warned us."
Jefferson continued to badger his fellow citizens regarding religious freedom, however. He was not satisfied with the existing amendment. He knew that unscrupulous Christian zealots would try to overwhelm the state with their civic entanglements. So he proposed and James Madison won passage of Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786, which said among other things: that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible... and that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind... and ...that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public... and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy.
Jefferson is not just saying that no religious tests can be conducted for political appointments; he's not just saying that the state should not finance churches. He's also saying that the state has no power to assert religious dogma in defense of legislation. Why? Because men are falible, and their interpretations of doctrines are often false. Reason and logic are the only tools the state has for dealing with legislative issues.
The problems can all agree on regarding morals and values permeates our society. However, it's a big lie that the most learned and intelligent of our founding fathers believed that government had any role to play in sustaining or supporting religion.
Why would contemporary political leaders try to trick us into believing that? For power, and for convenience. It's difficult to fight the leftist scourge without an iron implement of religious morality, one held by the government itself. But that difficulty is one we must undertake, because to do anything more with religion in government would be to invite tyranny.
In other words, you can claim anything is God's will and if by some twist of logic you can produce it from a reading of any ambiguous text in the Bible, you think you can impose it by governmental fiat. What about visions? If you have a vision that you believe came from God, can you impose that, as well?
The question is why? Why would we want to open ourselves up to the tyranny of religious misinterpretation in the hands of a few unscrupulous men who could twist doctrines and dogma around to their own personal aims? You ask me not to mistrust religiously aggressive political leaders, but I know enough history to recognize the naivete in that argument. There is no advantage in providing a union of church and state, and there is everything to lose by it. We can argue what the founding fathers of this or that state wanted all we like, but you still have to prove that church and state ought to be joined at all. I would disagree with you, and many others would, as well.
It says right in the first amendment that congress shall pass no law regarding an establishment of religion. You can twist that around to mean whatever you like, but to those of us who can read English it guides us all to avoid religious entanglements in government of any kind. Oh sure, states rights, yada yada yada. But the very best states like Virginia also required reason and conviction above all else in respect to religious issues.
You're very well programmed by the theocracy machinery if you think that the first amendment enables states to oppress their citizens with religious laws. But there are many who claim it would be a good idea every day right here on this forum. Why? It's so convenient! All of your moral concerns are neatly handled if you can just use religion in government. It ties everything up in a neat bow. But it's fatally flawed: religion is subjective, and its interpretation is subject to the fallacies of mortal men who are incapable of being impartial.
...the MSM, who has been on a crusade to demonize Christians, particularly Evangelicals, for the last 40 years.
There are two issues here:
The devout are quite vulnerable to the faulty reasoning used by the theocracy machinery because we can all look around ourselves and see the results of spiritual decline. But the same machinery that wishes to bring to bear Christian law refuses to defend our borders. They refuse to limit immigration such that our culture can defend its Christian traditions. They refuse to limit trade with China, a nation this minute arming itself to attack Taiwan and/or Japan, two of our more important allies in the far east. They refuse to recognize that demand for abortion is almost directly proportionate to a sense of economic optimism. In other words, these right wing Christians are interested in the appearance of mercy and love and forbearance, but when it comes to business, they'll look the other way no matter how serious the implications are.
All this is happening while the federal government is paying our tax dollars to mosques and other Islamic entities for "faith based ministries." Why? Because the Republican party knows that to prefer Christians would violate a sense of fairness in an already Constitutionally questionable policy of financing religious entities. It's a shambles of a policy.
Cool. These atheists tithe to their religion of nothingness.
It's not nothingness, it's cultural decay they're supporting. That's the annoying thing about both extremes of this argument. The right thinks it's America's shining knight in armor, and the left thinks it's the very same thing. The right is breaking down our religious freedom while the left breaks down our cultural freedom. It's absurd. It's wrong. They're two peas in a pod as far as I'm concerned. America deserves better, more principled activism.
Moreover, I would argue that this conclusion has merit. Religious freedom is best defended when the government remains neutral toward religion, and laws are enacted and upheld using reason and persuasion alone.
Other positions might sound good, but they're fraught with danger. The Christian right argues that these documents mean such and such, so they're positions are valid. I would ask why we should believe that their positions have any merit.
I'm concerned with the reaction to the injustice. The reaction shouldn't put us in an equal or worse situation of another kind. It's important to defend freedom without undermining it in other ways.
Lies, lies, lies. No one want the state and the government to be joined, we want to undo leftist revisionism that denies our nations heritage and the true original intent of our Constitution! We want our STOLEN religious freedom back, and we won't stop until the EVIL, Unconstitutional, tyrannical ruling of the Activist Judicial oligarchy are NULLIFIED, for good! Anyone who stands in our way is the ENEMY of freedom and will be tossed into the trash bin of history with all the other ignorant lies of the past!
All of your moral concerns are neatly handled if you can just use religion in government.
The opposite is the lack of all morality in government, which has brought us precisely to the place we are today! An Abortionist's grist mill! People can't even oppose abortion because BIGOTS LIKE YOU accuse them of being theocrats if they dare argue that life is a SACRED INALIENABLE GOD GIVEN RIGHT! Your refusal to even allow this question to be considered as the basis of law proves you have NOTHING in common with ANY of the founders and places you squarely in the camp of the scum-sucking ACLU COMMUNISTS!
"I noticed that all people for abortion happen to be already born."
I wish I'd said that. Good response.
Because spiritually blind people do not understand the merits of Christian faith and practice.
Now, in order to qualify that you understand the Christian faith, I'd really like to know if you meet the spiritual qualification of being alive in Christ.
This is a classic theocratic argument. It is the antithesis of America's foundation on freedom of conscience. You can't claim to have spiritual superiority without explaining why rationally. That's what religious tyrants have always tried to do. King Henry the 8th burned more than a hundred Catholic monasteries and abbeys while spurring his troops on with the promise of superior spirituality.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.