Posted on 09/24/2003 2:36:26 PM PDT by jmc813
That's more like it.
If our rights do come
from God and can't be taken
by a government,
then why the whining
that the government's taken
away all our rights?
William Linn, elected unanimously as the first Chaplain of the U.S. House, May 1, 1789, stated: "Let my neighbor once persuade himself that there is no God, and he will soon pick my pocket, and break not only my leg but my neck. If there be no God, there is no law, no future account; government then is the ordinance of man only, and we cannot be subject for conscience sake."Jefferson rebutted this fallacy quite eloquently:
... If we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say, as some do, that no such thing exists. We have the same evidence of the fact as of most of those we act on, to wit: their own affirmations, and their reasonings in support of them. I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in Protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than love of God.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814
He also, in Notes on the State of Virginia, affirmed the converse:
"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
-Eric
I'm curious, may I respectfully inquire what that means?
- Ronald Reagan, Speech, 8 March 1983
The Declaration states "all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men"
In other words, rights come from God and government's job is to protect your rights.
In his Inaugural Address, 1961, President John F. Kennedy put it this way:
"The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God."
But if there is no God, where can the rights come from except from the "generosity of the State." The State, then, becomes the new god. And what the State "giveth," the State can "taketh awayeth."
To a liberal ... democracy is consentual slavery to the state --- tyranny - social engineering (( evolution )) !
All done through brainwashing - indoctrination ... ' voluntary ' --- robots (( dumb )) !
< / snip >
"There is nothing so absurd but if you repeat it often enough people will believe it."
This statement precisely describes the tact utilized by the Court in the years following its 1947 announcement. The Court began regularly to speak of a "separation of church and state," broadly explaining that, "This is what the Founders wanted—separation of church and state. This is their great intent." The Court failed to quote the Founders; it just generically asserted that this is what the Founders wanted.
The courts continued on this track so steadily that, in 1958, in a case called Baer v. Kolmorgen, one of the judges was tired of hearing the phrase and wrote a dissent warning that if the court did not stop talking about the "separation of church and state," people were going to start thinking it was part of the Constitution. That warning was in 1958!
Nevertheless, the Court continued to talk about separation until June 25th, 1962, when, in the case Engle v. Vitale, the Court delivered the first ever ruling which completely separated Christian principles from education.
Secular Humanism
With that case, a whole new trend was established and secular humanism became the religion of America. In 1992 the Supreme Court stated the unthinkable. "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. In 1997, 40 prominent Catholic and Protestant scholars wrote a position paper entitled, "We Hold These Truths," in which they stated, "This is the very ... antithesis --- of the ordered liberty affirmed by the Founders. Liberty in this debased sense is utterly disengaged from the concept of responsibility and community and is pitted against the ‘laws of nature and the laws of nature’s God. Such liberty degenerates into license and throws into question the very possibility of the rule of law itself.
Correction: Slaves, (which happened to be negros, not negros per se) had been declared, informally since the beginning, offically since Dred Scott, as property - not as an inferior order of human beings. In the US, the idea of the negro being somehow inferior (quickly)evolved by the fact that they were,in fact, property.
In short, the tail does not wag the dog.
All threads on this topic are the same. I'm not going to get into this one.
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