Our Constitution holds that all religions are equal, and must be treated equally. None may be favoured, none supressed.
In reality, they are not all equal ...
This is disgraceful!
Fine, so “Congress shall make no law”, but it doesn’t way anything about private organizations or other forms of government.
I don’t see that every governmental agency is required to treat all religions equally. So let the jails and prisons ban islam if they’ve become a hotbed of terrorist recruiting.
lawyers will be the death of this country.
This, like all discussions of religion and the founding of this country, proves how well the enemy of God, Satan, has distorted the truth.
The first and biggest lie is that the founders came here to practice freedom of religion. Our country was not founded on freedom of religion. Nothing is further from the truth. There was not a ship full of Christians, a ship full of Jews, a ship full of Muslims, a ship full of Buddhists, etc. They were all, for the most part, Protestant Christians who had came to the new world to practice what they felt was Biblical Christianity.
The country they envisioned was a group of individual States allied together under a limited Federal Government which was only to act in the best interest of those States and provide services the States couldn’t do better by themselves. That is why the Senate had equal (2) members from each State chosen by the State legislators.
They were supposed to protect the interest of their State and not let the people or the Federal Government limit their State’s rights. The founders would run our current crop of Senators out of town on a rail if they didn’t hang them for treason.
Because they were predominately Christians, they thought their offspring would be as well. In their wildest dreams they could not have imagined how the country would progress into what we have today, 200 years later. If they had, I am certain the amendment would have been written differently.
If you look at the original State Constitutions you find how Christian they were and how they thought religion would take care of it’s self on the State level.
This is a typical oath a person had to take to hold any public office from the Delaware Constitution.
Constitution of Delaware; 1776
ART. 22. Every person who shall be chosen a member of either house, or appointed to any office or place of trust, before taking his seat, or entering upon the execution of his office, shall take the following oath, or affirmation, if conscientiously scrupulous of taking an oath, to wit:
” I, A B. will bear true allegiance to the Delaware State, submit to its constitution and laws, and do no act wittingly whereby the freedom thereof may be prejudiced.”
And also make and subscribe the following declaration, to wit:
” I, A B. do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.”
And all officers shall also take an oath of office.
ART. 29. There shall be no establishment of any one religious sect in this State in preference to another; and no clergyman or preacher of the gospel, of any denomination, shall be capable of holding any civil once in this State, or of being a member of either of the branches of the legislature, while they continue in the exercise of the pastorial function.
I found the restrictions on pastors puzzling until I found this in the New York Constitution.
XXXIX. And whereas the ministers of the gospel are, by their profession, dedicated to the service of God and the care of souls, and ought not to be diverted from the great duties of their function; therefore, no minister of the gospel, or priest of any denomination whatsoever, shall, at any time hereafter, under any presence or description whatever, be eligible to, or capable of holding, any civil or military office or place within this State.
It never ceases to amaze me that no one mentions the State Constitutions to show the mood of the people at our founding but only want to argue whether Jefferson was a deist or not. I did find it funny that a leftist group web page I found, uses these Religious test not to show they were Christians but to show how intolerant of religious freedom the founders were.
The only thing the founders feared, was one Christian sect or denomination being placed above another. They had no fear of individual Protestant Christians of any sect and their beliefs effecting policy in the country. They understood that those beliefs had to be maintained for the government bodies not to become corrupt.
As to this topic, the founders would have allowed any religious books as long as they taught or reinforced Protestant Christian beliefs of any of the sects of that time..
BVB