Posted on 07/24/2006 11:08:37 AM PDT by Mobile Vulgus
Secularists today have a catch phrase that they use like a club against religion in America. That club is named "The Separation of Church and State."
So many Americans have heard the phrase that they think it is one actually written right into the Constitution of the United States. Those who are more learned on the subject realize it is not. In fact, those who are learned on the subject know that it wasn't mentioned in any law, or even in the halls of Congress, until long after the Constitution was written. In fact, there was not much attention paid to the phrase at all until after Thomas Jefferson, the originator of the phrase, was long dead.
Not even the Supreme Court paid it much attention until the 1940s, so this "wall of separation" issue is not one that hails from the early Republic with the same meaning as it does today. Our Founders had very different ideas about religion and government, ideas that were not nearly as simple as the stark black or white assumptions of the activists of today.
The man who initially wrote the phrase, Thomas Jefferson, wrote it in an 1802 letter to a congregation of Baptist churchmen from Danbury, Connecticut. Only elected president of the United States but two years preciously, (1800–1808) Jefferson was responding to a letter sent him by the Danbury church members who were attempting to get his support for their struggle against the state's somewhat oppressive religious requirements for certain rights in that state — not an unusual practice in the states at that time. While Jefferson's letter only obliquely addressed the Baptist's concerns, more importantly it addressed the Federal position on establishing a national religion because Jefferson's reply was focused on the Federal issue, not that of the states.
(Excerpt) Read more at renewamerica.us ...
We no longer have "separation of church and state".
Secular Humanism is a religion and through the leftist activists in the Judiciary Secular Humanism is rapidly becoming the official, orthodox state religion of the United States.
Principles of the Securlar Humanist religion are dominent in and enforced at all levels of education, and they dominate on issues of the public displays of religion and the recognition of religion in public life.
The "cardinals" of the Secular Humanism religion reside in the ACLU. Their "popes" are the friends and associates of those "cardinals". The Secular Humanism "popes" are placed in the Judiciary with the support of their leftist and liberal friends in the legislatures (they deliver the recommendations to the liberals/leftists in the executive branch).
The Secular Humanism "popes" now sit and dominate at our highest Judicial positions and they continually change the meaning of "separation of church and state" to obliterate any historical or traditional understanding of that phrase in their agenda to impose the value system of Secular Humanism on the population.
No it does not exist because evolution is a religion.
freedom of religion bump
What I like, what you like, what I want, and what you are are beside the point.
The fact is that the First Amendment does not impose any sort of "separation of church and state."
You find a misspelling and that invalidates the whole thing for you?
Sad.
Because the only thing that has legal authority is the First Amendment...right?
No. But, that is the only legal authority invoked by those who wish to impose the "separation of church and state is in the Constitution" fallacy.
Are there voices in your head? : )
I guess I'm just aging ...
What about those who believe "seperation of church and state" is a valid legal interpretation of the Constitution? Can they point to Supreme Court rulings and be justified? Anyone who thinks that phrase is in the Constitution needs to get pushed back to Civics 101.
Since the misspelling was ALL you commented upon, was it not a logical conclusion to reach that the misspelling WAS all you cared about?
Anyway, the voices in my head are telling me to go get some donuts, now. Gotta go.
Great find, thank you
I guess I am just a lucky one but I never experienced this separation of church and state. I went to Catholic School and Catholic Church all through school and adulthood. The Navy has us pray during ceremonies and even every night before taps. I just don't see everyones nervousness over this. I think it is an issue that causes some folks to have an ulcer.
To be more precise:
... three extreme types about which all the other colonies may be grouped with more or less of similarity to their several patterns.In the one group with Massachusetts are Plymouth, New Haven, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, with their Congregational establishments. Among these it will be observed that theocratic Massachusetts and New Haven were more closely akin in the strictness of their religious requirements; that Plymouth and Connecticut were more liberal in spirit and enactments; while New Hampshire was organized so long after the period of severity had waned that it furnishes few illustrations of our theme.
In another group are Virginia and the two Carolinas, in which the Church of England was established at their foundation and continued the State-Church until into the era of the Revolution, displaying at times strong and bitter feeling against all forms of dissent.
A third group is composed of New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Georgia, in which occurred changes of attitude toward the Church. Maryland began with religious freedom, under Roman Catholic auspices, and was afterward dragooned into establishing the Church of England. In New York and New Jersey, the violence of English officials endeavored to force the same Church on a Dutch Reformed foundation, but never secured for it a legal establishment.
The charter of Georgia declared liberty of worship, but on its abrogation the Church of England was established by royal edict and legislative enactment, a few years before the Revolution.
The fourth group comprises Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The last-named, however, was for so long a time a part of Pennsylvania that its history on the religious question is merged with that of the larger colony. In these colonies no Church was ever established. More than that, the impropriety of a religious establishment was explicitly declared. Of the two, Rhode Island was far broader than Pennsylvania. The Quaker, notwithstanding his voice for liberty of conscience, could yet make no civic room for the infidel, and insisted on certain religious restrictions. Strangely enough, even to-day, Pennsylvania, by terms of its constitution, is unique among the United States, in that it restricts its civic privileges to believers in “an Almighty and Eternal God.” Rhode Island from the beginning imposed no religious restrictions whatever upon its citizenship, ...
The Rise of Religious Liberty in America: A History by Sanford H. Cobb
I wouldn't want liberals and atheists to soil their hands using money that conflicts with their values.
Just tell them you want the same kind of separation between church and state that they maintain between interstate and intrate commerce.
Karl Marx wrote in his Manifesto, “the bourgeois clap trap about family and education, about the co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting…. The fact that children are raised in families means there is no equality. In order to raise children in equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.”
Marx must have wished someone would communally raise his children for him since he let two of his six children starve to death. Two others later committed suicide perhaps because of their family life.
Marx was an alcoholic who frequently went on drinking sprees. On one occasion after receiving 160 pounds from a rich uncle he went on a 2 month drinking spree and his penniless wife and infant children were evicted from their apartment.
Communists know they have to break up the family to rule society becuase the family is a mini-society itself.
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