Posted on 06/26/2002 11:25:21 AM PDT by Recovering_Democrat
To me, and many others, the pledge is not to be taken lightly or without consideration of the consequences. To me it is as close to an Oath as you can get. It is a public statement that I will sacrafice EVERYTHING to protect this great nation so that others might enjoy the fruits of liberty.
It is not an overstatment - it is a commitment of great consequence and importance. It is founded and rooted in a belief that liberty that we hold dear must be protected by ever vigalant patriots.
You are certainly entitled to feel that it is something less. But I would remind you that your right to that feeling is protected by those who feel otherwise.
And exactly how does God make the Constitution meaningful? Replacing "God" with "BillyBob" would achieve the same result. The Constitution doesn't have any intrinsic meaning beyond that which people are willing to enforce with guns. I think the Constitution is a fine, well-written protocol that can stand on its own merits. Its existence doesn't need to be justified.
Absent any evidence to support this belief, it becomes a religious concept. The consequences of your logic is that I could believe that Al Gore invented the universe and rationally use that as a premise for everything I do.
The power of natural law comes from the fact that it's given to man by a higher power than man. Man didn't create natural law, otherwise man could change it.All rights come from natural law. That's why they're inalienable---because they don't come from man (who can take them away), they come from a higher power: God.
That's what makes the Constitution waterproof. It appeals to a reason higher than man's for validity. It only succeeds in its appeal if you believe in natural law. If you believe in natural law, you believe in God. Case closed.
That is part of my point. Making school children mindlessly repeat that "oath" with or without even understanding what they are saying dilutes any value it might have on its own. An oath is a type of contract, and as such, should only be entered into voluntarily by a person of age who understands the contract they have agreed to enter in to. It should never be a reflexive activity if you want it to be socially binding. Contrast the Pledge of Allegiance with the oath that you have to take when you join the military for example. The military oath carries far more weight because it hasn't been watered down into what amounts to a ritual.
I think the phrase, "establishment of religion" means something different to you in the modern era than it meant at the time it was written. The phrase originally meant ecclesiastical control over Christian institutions, doctrines, disciplines or practices, NOT religious SPEECH by agents of the state. Additionally the words used by Jefferson, "religious institutions, doctrines, disciplines or practices" were imbued with the specific theological meaning of the Christian context and millieu at the time, and it is mistaken eisegesis to simply read into them the modern, more generic meaning. In other words, the phrase "under God" would NOT have been considered by the founders as establishing ecclesiastical control over Christian institutions (intermeddling), doctrines, disciplines or practices, favoring one denomination practice over another, because all Christian denominations believe they are under God. So to answer the question, it is unimaginable that the Founders would have considered a state teacher requiring her pupils to recite the words "under God" in the PoA as unconstitutional, if for no other reason than they thought the national government had no jurisdiction in such matters, not to mention the previously mentioned mistake of interpreting an historical text by mere reading into it of one's own, modern ideas.
I think the States are, under the Constitution as it was written, free to establish State Churches. I don't think it's a good idea, but if they want to amend their State Constitutions, they are, or should be free to do so. I personally would not like my State government to establish ecclesiastical control over churces, church doctrines, church discipline, or church practices. And I am absolutely affirmed in my belief every time I have to go to the state license bureau. But that is a completely different matter than a government school teacher uttering the phrase, "under God" or requiring her pupils to do so.
I think it very ironic that the 9th Circuit, which is part of a branch of the national government, has twisted the meaning of the First Amendment into its exact opposite by in effect proclaming that they have secret theological knowledge about what is "religious" and what is not, and that they, the national governnent, not we of the several states, will arogate to themselves the jurisdiction explicitly denied to them in the Amendment to act as infallible national school and theology board, determining what speech we and our children and state teachers can utter, and what speech is forbidden.
Which is why I included the quote from T.J.:
""The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in . . . the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body (for impeachment is merely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States."
Cordially,
Natural law has no power. Man does routinely ignore "natural law", if for no other reason than the umbrella of natural law is essentially arbitrary. The strongest reason any law exists is because someone has the firepower to support it, for better or worse. Natural law is kind of the phlogiston theory of law. It works pretty well things, but if you want to be rigorous it is an empty suit.
Systems of law need intrinsic teeth to be safe and stable over the long haul e.g. theories of law that understand basic underlying properties of interaction such as game theory. Natural Law has the fortunate property of reflecting solid game theoretic principles most of the time, but this is largely the consequence of a time-honored design, not as a foundation for the law itself and it occasionally strays from these principles to its own detriment.
What we need is an inherently stable theory of law (i.e. one that has real world consequences if you deviate from it) or you end up with what he have now, where laws are subverted in strange but theoretically consistent ways.
Simpler still would be to look up the word respecting in the dictionary before putting your own spin on the meaning of the First Amendment.
Try again, doc. Laws do not "respect" things in the sense you tried to imply above; though they might "concern" things. (and that's the only hint you get).
If people are going to wave the First Amendment around, I do wish they'd really read the thing first.
Ron,
Someone must have forgotten to tell God about CFR.
People over the ages have been so sure that God was on their side that they committed atrocities on those who believed otherwise. (Witness the current terrorists.) Our Founders did wish to return to those times and wisely put restrictions on religion into the Constitution.
During the French Wars of Religion, a French king ordered a town wiped out and its Protestant inhabitants killed because they did not believe as he did. On another occasion at Vassy, France, armed Catholics attacked unarmed Protestants simply for worshipping in town rather than out in the fields where they had been grudgingly permitted to worship. The atrocities weren't all on the Catholic side. Once Protestants got control of a region, they outlawed Catholics.
Unfortunately, even today, well-meaning people still push their beliefs on others, like in the Pledge. Admittedly, the Pledge is not forcing someone to worship in a field, but the ghost of intolerance is there just the same.
Come now. That has all the artificial drama of ABC daytime television. The stuff you quoted was intolerance. The Pledge? Hardly.
That of course would have been a religious assertion. The belief that Jesus is God is a religion, but the belief that there IS a God is not.The belief that there is a God most certainly is religion. The belief that the state is subordinate to that God is even moreso, since one can believe that while there is a God, it does not directly intervene in human affairs.
-Eric
If the religious references in the Pledge are so inconsequential, then taking them out should not bother you.
Americans should.
I think the major problem is that another portion of our national narrative has dissapeared.
Soon Jefferson, Washington and Madison will also be edited out of textbooks.
The pledge was a choice before.
Now its illegal. The 9th district has not wiped out the words "under God" out, they have wiped out the word choice from the national vocabulary.
NO, no, no, no, NO!
The Founders put restrictions on Congress. ON CONGRESS. Get it?
I have yet to hear anyone explain how the spoken or written inclusion of the three-letter word GOD "establishes religion". It establishes nothing. No 1st-Amendment problem that I can see. The ruling was insane.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.