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To: Vindiciae Contra TyrannoSCOTUS
I'm not religious - I do support Moore. Just remember history - the last time the Christians lost was not a pretty picture. It's no doubt in my mind that the anti-Christians think they are so superior to the Christians. My advice is to RESPECT HISTORY!
46 posted on 08/21/2003 7:38:09 PM PDT by Alissa
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To: Alissa

I'm not religious - I do support Moore. Just remember history - the last time the Christians lost was not a pretty picture. It's no doubt in my mind that the anti-Christians think they are so superior to the Christians. My advice is to RESPECT HISTORY!

Yours is the 3rd comment made by people who are not religious, yet support Federalism. The Founders accommodated those with your view.

FT April 2003: The Faith of the Founding

It is important to pause here and take in Madison’s point. The relation of an individual to his Creator is precedent to his entering into civil society; it arises from nature itself. Yet this view of nature is in fact derivative from an expressly Christian view of the world expressed in philosophical rather than in exclusively theological or scriptural terms. In Madison’s view, by nature an individual is "a subject of the Governor of the Universe." On that fact, deep and inviolable, his natural right is grounded.

Continuing to quote from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Madison attempts to ground the fundamental equality of all individuals, considered as subjects of the Governor of the Universe.

If "all men are by nature equally free and independent," all men are to be considered as entering into society on equal conditions; as relinquishing no more, and therefore retaining no less, one than another, of their natural rights. Above all, are they to be considered as retaining an "equal title to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience." Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe the religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offense against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered.

[…]

Only Judaism and Christianity have a doctrine of God as Spirit and Truth, Who created the world in order to invite these creatures endowed with intelligence and conscience to enter into friendship with Him. Only the Jewish and Christian God made human beings free, halts the power of Caesar at the boundaries of the human soul, and has commissioned human beings to build civilizations worthy of the liberty He has endowed in them. So high is this God’s valuation of human liberty of conscience that, even though He has launched a divinely commissioned religion in history (in two Covenants, Jewish and Christian), He would not have either of these religions imposed by force on anyone. So devoted were the American founders to this understanding of religious liberty that, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Autobiography (1821), the authors of the Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom refrained from mentioning the exact name of the "holy author of our religion." Here is Jefferson’s explanation for the omission:

Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the words "Jesus Christ," so that it should read, "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion"; the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.

53 posted on 08/21/2003 7:55:17 PM PDT by Vindiciae Contra TyrannoSCOTUS
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