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HELLO tpaine!!! So good you see you -- it's been a long while, my friend! I hope all is well with you.

Of course, you and I have never, ever agreed about this issue! I don't suppose we're going to start doing that today. :^)

But follow the logic here. We have founding documents, principally the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with a Bill of Rights. The Constitution itself has a Preamble, which is We the People's "chartering" of the federal government to carry out certain enumerated limited functions on the People's behalf, and on behalf of the future generations of We the People. This is a covenant between the People and the State, an arrangement in which the People are sovereign -- as befits their divinely constituted nature and dignity -- and not the State.

To my way of thinking, the Declaration of Independence is the "Preamble to the Preamble": It identifies who the "We the People" are. The DoI says that We the People are all equally creatures of God, created by Him; and that is the very reason we have unalienable rights: The human nature that God created requires life, liberty, property in order to come into its full human potential; and these the government may never infringe without just cause.

Of course, the gummint infringes away all the time, and especially so in more recent times, when increasingly God has been made to recede from the Public Square.... Go figure!

The fact that the "Golden Rule" is evidently a cross-cultural, universal moral code only testifies to me that there is a certain uniformity to the human nature that God made. We seemingly have an in-built recognition of moral imperatives: But this ability to discern and recognize is in-built into our nature by God.

Another thing to bear in mind is that the Word of the beginning which God spoke to make a universe and all the things in it is the Logos, another Name for which among Christians is the Son of God. The Logos is the alpha and the omega -- the beginning and the end. It is the foundation of universal order, the order of the human person, and the order of society. It was already in the world LONG BEFORE the Incarnation of Christ. It structures reality -- including its moral component. Humans seem to have an innate sense of it somehow. It is called the Golden Rule: It is God's universal rule, God's measure; for the Rule emerges from the nature of God Himself. All men everywhere can recognize it with little or no effort.

So I don't think you can really argue that there isn't something divine about the Golden Rule. And anyway, we are not trying to erect a theocracy in America here, for goodness sake. Further, this isn't really a question about organized religion at all. So your point about a "particular god" to me is moot. (There is only the One God, even though He is worshipped in different ways by different people(s).)

To say that God, Man, World, and Society constitute the reality we experience is not to declare a "particular god," or too give preeminence to any particular religious sect or creed, but to affirm God the Creator Who fathered "We the People" and gave them their liberty -- just as the Framers affirmed the Creator God in the DoI. The logical inference to draw here is that Americans (at least originally) understood themselves to be a people "under God."

Thank you so much for writing, tpaine!