Posted on 10/15/2001 11:26:22 PM PDT by VinnyTex
Edited on 07/12/2004 3:47:49 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
First things first. Let us get the myth about "separation of church and state" out of the way. A thousand dollars in cash to anyone who can find such a provision in the U.S. Constitution.
Two thousand dollars to anyone who can establish a rational connection between "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," and the American Civil Liberties Union's assertion that writing "God bless America" on a high school marquee is unconstitutional.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
Anarchy is defined as the complete absence of government or law. [Webster's] I know of no one of my philosophical bent who advocates that. I for one advocate much more government. Much, much, more government. Self government.
The government of men over other men should be small, consistent, and focused on defending the rights of those subject to it's power. Having no government whatsoever leads to chaos. A poorly focused and inconsistent government which becomes so large that it usurps rights instead of defending them leads to what we have now in many cases. Namely chaos.
I hope this little essay has helped you to understand the concepts being discussed.
I was right. You areridiculous!
Before I answer your question, can you show me, please, where the posted article advocates compulsory religious education?
I'm sorry, but I simply don't believe you.
If that is the intent, then why isn't written that way?
This type of reasoning was almost used to determine votes by liberals losing another argument. Unless you have telepathic powers, "determining intention" is really you making it up for your own benifit.
You're young.
I suggest you read a little American history before making such stupid comments.
Roger Clegg raises another question, which he puts delicately by writing that "the milieu of Commies is overwhelmingly Jewish and intellectual," which leads him to ask why so many Jewish intellectuals were enamored of the hard Left? It is a very good question, and he gently chastises me for ignoring it in my book. I did so because actually it is a question that others have taken up in many different places, and one that I did not feel was pertinent to discuss in a memoir, which was in fact a recollection of my life which, for better or worse, was lived in that Jewish milieu. Now, however, I wish to attempt a partial and incomplete answer.
My parents’ generation – who came to this country between the turn of the 19th Century and the years before and after the First World War – were recent immigrants who landed in the teeming Jewish ghettos like New York City’s now famous and non-existent Jewish Lower East Side. Now the single memory of those years is the Tenement House Museum, which studiously recreates the typical apartment lived in by immigrant Jews during the 1920s and early ‘30s. Poor and working-class, they made their living in the garment trades. The famed Triangle Fire of 1911, marked as a milestone in American labor history to this day, took the lives of largely female Jewish workers in the teens and 20’s. Moreover, they came to this country as fervent believers in the ideologies that shaped them in the Old World, Communism, socialism, anarchism, Bundism, labor Zionism and the like. One of the most usual conflicts the young immigrants had was with those of their parents who were deeply religious and pious, and whom they rebelled against by breaking away from what they saw as the religion of the village shtetl, which they unfavorably compared with the modern life of the emancipated and secular Jew of cities like Warsaw. Exploited and alienated, they turned in the New World for hope to both trade unionism and socialism.
Irving Howe, of course, discussed all this in his classic book The World of Our Fathers, which sympathetically and wistfully recalled the old struggles and attitudes. When their children emerged as the New Left of the 1960’s, they automatically carried on the tradition. In fact, their parents had already moved out of the early ghettoes and into the middle and even upper middle class. No longer did they live on Orchard Street, but more likely, in Scarsdale, White Plains or Great Neck in Long Island. But in politics, they carried on their parents’ commitments by moving en masse into the New Left. As Kenneth J. Heineman writes (in a book which I will soon review in these pages,) at a time when Jews represented three percent of the US population and ten percent of American college students, 23 percent of young people from Jewish families "embraced the New Left."
In elite institutions like the University of Chicago, a large 63 percent of student radicals were Jewish; Tom Hayden may have been the most famous name in the University of Michigan SDS, but "90 percent of the student left [in that school] came from Jewish backgrounds," and nationally, 60 percent of SDS members were Jewish. As my once-friend Paul Breines wrote about my own alma mater the University of Wisconsin, "the real yeast in the whole scene had been the New York Jewish students in Madison." And he went on to note what he called the "rootless cosmopolitanism" of the Wisconsin New Left.
Heineman attributes this to these Jewish students absorbing a "propensity to social activism" from their Eastern European backgrounds, despite the obvious assimilation of their parents and their own rejection of Judaism as a religion. Confronting what he calls a "culturally ambiguous environment" in this country, Heineman writes that attaining a higher economic status did not make them forsake their view of what a better society should look like. As late as 1946, one-third of America’s Jews held a favorable view of the Soviet Union, which they foolishly thought was progressive because of the Soviet role in the defeat of Hitler, a fact which made them look the other way when Stalin was preparing his own pogrom against the Jews.
I'm young, but I'm not naive.
Because of this clause in the First Amendment, I cannot say that denying a student's or anyone's constitutional right to prayer would the correct thing to do. I firmly believe in liberty, which means freedom from government restraint. I have never understood why many Libertarians such as Bill Maher, oppose the idea of student-lead school prayer. They claim that they believe in personal liberty, but are then inconsistent with this belief when it comes to school prayer or any religious activity in the public sphere. Preventing prayer in school and the public sphere is the antithesis of one's freedom from government restraint and something that Libertarians are said to abhore...but sometimes I wonder about that one.
When it comes to Constitutional Law, I adhere more to the Non-Preferential Approach, which simply means that government shouldn't prefer one religion over another, or establish an official church or state religion. Renquist, O'Conner, Thomas, and Scalia would most likely agree with me on this one.
I tend to not agree with the High-Wall of Separation Approach, which is self-explainatory...and in my opinion extremely flawed because this Supreme Court Precedent was not taken out of the U.S. Constitution, but from words taken out of context in a letter from Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association. Because of this letter, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Establishment Clause in the Constitution to mean something that it does not. The Founding Fathers incorporated the Establishment Clause so that America federally would not adopt an official state religion, although it has been argued in the past on whether or not the Establishment Clause was even to be made applicable to the states by the 14th Amendment. But through selective incorporation, the Supreme Court has applied the Bill of Rights in the Constitution to the states to conform to a national standard, at least the rights that are considered to be implicit in the concept of ordered liberty. But anyway I keep droning on and back to the subject, I tend to worry when the Supreme Court makes rulings based on flawed hermanutic and ideas that are not specifically stated in the Constitution in regards to their idea of the separation between church and state means.
The full context of that letter, along with other previously cited quotes by Washington, Madison,
Jefferson and Adams belie your claim.
And Bill Maher is no more a libertarian than Jim Jeffords is a conservative.
Who - by name - advocates government "spreading the Gospel".
Who - by name - is working to turn the United States into a theocracy?
Who - by name - is attempting to circumvent or change the Constitution of the United States, so that only Christianity is allowed expression in this nation?
How are these people (the ones you named in response to the previous questions) doing what you say they're doing?
Do they represent any political party?
Which particular branch of Christianity are they from?
What specific actions have they taken/are they taking now to effect these changes you're so afraid of?
I said I didn't believe you. You introduced the term "liar". Assertions are cheap and easy, especially on the Internet. Offer some proof of what you claim.
The word "Trinity" is not in the New Testament.
Is it a part of the Christian religion? If so, how?
God is not served by a "pragmatic" Consequentialist adherence to that which men say is "realistic".
God is served by a principled Deontological adherence to that which is Biblical.
If the abolition of the Government system of organized Theft called "public schooling" is what Biblical Principle demands of the Christian (and it is), then that political objective is the duty demanded of Christians -- period. No ifs, ands, buts, or "be realistic" about it.
QED.
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