Where I disagree with the President
President Bush spoke at a Prayer Breakfast Thursday morning. He had some good things to say and I didn't catch them all. But one thing he said that I have to differ with him on is his statement about Atheists. He said that people who choose no Faith at all are just as American as those of Faith. I cannot agree.
Now, don't get me wrong, an Atheist can be a patriotic American, although all too many are nothing of the kind. An Atheist can have the best of intentions for America in his heart. But then again, I am sure that another Atheist, Pol Pot, had the best of intentions for Cambodia in his heart when he first became a Communist.
An Atheist American, while quite possibly a very loyal one, lacks the capacity to fully appreciate America and its origins. Part of America's bedrock principles are those of John Locke. For the uninitiated, John Locke was a hard core Calvinist who was a part of the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688. This revolution had Calvinism as its driving force. Locke and his fellow revolutionaries would be called Right Wing religious extremists by the modern Secular Left.
In his treatises on government, Locke destroyed arguments for the Divine Right of Kings. He used nothing but Scripture as his source. If one could put his beliefs into a nutshell they would be "God makes men free, other men make men slaves."
This is reflected in our Declaration of Independence when it talks about how we are endowed certain rights by our Creator. From the very beginning, America acknowledges that our freedoms are Gifts bestowed on us from God. They are not priviliges begrudgingly allowed by Left Wing bureaucrats or jurists. The self-appointed, unelected Soviet Kommissars of the ACLU tried to ban Steve Williams from teaching about the Declaration of Independence in Cupertino, California in 2004. This is my point. An Atheist who wants to tell a teacher he can't teach the Declaration of Independence because it mentions God is no American, does not have the foggiest idea of what America is about.
When God led the children of Israel out of Egypt, he set them up under a group of judges, led by the Holy Spirit, who ruled with a light hand. The people were free, had free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to live life in whatever lawful manner they chose. But in the days of Samuel, the Israelites clamored for a King. They saw how the Canaanites and the Philistines had Kings and wanted one too. God warned them that the king would draft their sons into the Army, would levy heavy taxes and corvee upon them and demand unquestioned obedience. The people didn't care. They rejected the God-given freedom for the stylish ways of pagan peoples. After three kings, Saul, David and then Solomon, the people had had enough. They demanded that the new King, Rehoboam, lighten their burdens. But he responded that his thumb would be thicker than his father's(Solomon's) thigh and that where his father had chastised them with whips, he would chastise them with scorpions.
And so it is with our Secularist Left today. They reject the God given freedoms of our US Constitution. They look longingly and lovingly on Socialist Dictatorships and Oligarchies in Eurasia and Africa, and that is their heart's desire. Not to be free, but to be slaves of someone who hates freedom.
The Founding Fathers knew that God was the real author of our freedom. They did not lead the French Revolution, which was secular and created a tyranny that made the Bourbon Kingship look like a rosy paradise by comparison. They feared the rise of a big bureaucracy and people who put their Party Line over God's Will.
In the Preamble to the Constitution, it says that its purpose is to "Secure the BLESSINGS of Liberty." In 1789, the term "Blessing" meant one thing only- a Gift from God. It did not have the more generic meaning it does today. They left referrences to the Almighty rather vague, so as not favor one denomination over another, but that did not mean America was ever godless. Article III of the Northwest Ordinance, written in the same month as the Constitution and enforced under the same, said "Religion and Morality would be forever encouraged." So much for "separation of Church and State" a phrase from the Soviet Constitution, nowhere to be found in the American.
No, the Athiest cannot appreciate these elementary basics of the US Constitution. And Atheist Activists twist America's Constitution into downright Marxism, the exact opposite of what it was intended to be. To be Atheist prevents someone from fully appreciating America and what it is to be American. I disagree with the president.
Now, don't get me wrong, an Atheist can be a patriotic American, although all too many are nothing of the kind. An Atheist can have the best of intentions for America in his heart. But then again, I am sure that another Atheist, Pol Pot, had the best of intentions for Cambodia in his heart when he first became a Communist.
An Atheist American, while quite possibly a very loyal one, lacks the capacity to fully appreciate America and its origins. Part of America's bedrock principles are those of John Locke. For the uninitiated, John Locke was a hard core Calvinist who was a part of the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688. This revolution had Calvinism as its driving force. Locke and his fellow revolutionaries would be called Right Wing religious extremists by the modern Secular Left.
In his treatises on government, Locke destroyed arguments for the Divine Right of Kings. He used nothing but Scripture as his source. If one could put his beliefs into a nutshell they would be "God makes men free, other men make men slaves."
This is reflected in our Declaration of Independence when it talks about how we are endowed certain rights by our Creator. From the very beginning, America acknowledges that our freedoms are Gifts bestowed on us from God. They are not priviliges begrudgingly allowed by Left Wing bureaucrats or jurists. The self-appointed, unelected Soviet Kommissars of the ACLU tried to ban Steve Williams from teaching about the Declaration of Independence in Cupertino, California in 2004. This is my point. An Atheist who wants to tell a teacher he can't teach the Declaration of Independence because it mentions God is no American, does not have the foggiest idea of what America is about.
When God led the children of Israel out of Egypt, he set them up under a group of judges, led by the Holy Spirit, who ruled with a light hand. The people were free, had free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to live life in whatever lawful manner they chose. But in the days of Samuel, the Israelites clamored for a King. They saw how the Canaanites and the Philistines had Kings and wanted one too. God warned them that the king would draft their sons into the Army, would levy heavy taxes and corvee upon them and demand unquestioned obedience. The people didn't care. They rejected the God-given freedom for the stylish ways of pagan peoples. After three kings, Saul, David and then Solomon, the people had had enough. They demanded that the new King, Rehoboam, lighten their burdens. But he responded that his thumb would be thicker than his father's(Solomon's) thigh and that where his father had chastised them with whips, he would chastise them with scorpions.
And so it is with our Secularist Left today. They reject the God given freedoms of our US Constitution. They look longingly and lovingly on Socialist Dictatorships and Oligarchies in Eurasia and Africa, and that is their heart's desire. Not to be free, but to be slaves of someone who hates freedom.
The Founding Fathers knew that God was the real author of our freedom. They did not lead the French Revolution, which was secular and created a tyranny that made the Bourbon Kingship look like a rosy paradise by comparison. They feared the rise of a big bureaucracy and people who put their Party Line over God's Will.
In the Preamble to the Constitution, it says that its purpose is to "Secure the BLESSINGS of Liberty." In 1789, the term "Blessing" meant one thing only- a Gift from God. It did not have the more generic meaning it does today. They left referrences to the Almighty rather vague, so as not favor one denomination over another, but that did not mean America was ever godless. Article III of the Northwest Ordinance, written in the same month as the Constitution and enforced under the same, said "Religion and Morality would be forever encouraged." So much for "separation of Church and State" a phrase from the Soviet Constitution, nowhere to be found in the American.
No, the Athiest cannot appreciate these elementary basics of the US Constitution. And Atheist Activists twist America's Constitution into downright Marxism, the exact opposite of what it was intended to be. To be Atheist prevents someone from fully appreciating America and what it is to be American. I disagree with the president.
posted by Cato Uticensis at 10:32 PM
4 Comments:
They were Deists, for the most part. They counted the Church as one of the institutions which needed checks and balances to keep it from growing too powerful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
As for separation of Church and State:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state
In the United States, separation of church and state is sometimes believed to be in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and by legal precedents interpreting that clause, some extremely controversial. The Establishment Clause states that, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." However, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendment (one of the Reconstruction Amendments) makes the Establishment Clause and other portions of the Bill of Rights binding on state and local governments as well, although it is arguable that this restriction on state and local government existed in Article VI of the unamended Constitution and that the Fourteenth Amendment was a clarification on the limitation of government power. Many other democratic governments around the world have similar clauses in their respective constitutions.
The phrase "separation of church and state" does not appear in the Constitution, but rather derive from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to a group identifying themselves as the Danbury Baptists. In that letter, Jefferson referred to a "wall of separation between church and state."
James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, wrote in the early 1800s, "Strongly guarded . . . is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States." Ulysses S. Grant also called for Americans to "Keep the church and state forever separate."
As for the phrase "separation of Church and State" being from the Soviet "Constitution" (cite for that one?):
After the October Revolution and bolshevik coup, the government of the Soviet Union was quite active in religious affairs, even though it was theoretically atheist and purely secular. Between 1917 and 1922, Soviet authorities executed 28 Orthodox Bishops and over 1,000 priests. A government-sponsored "renovation" known as the Living Church was instigated in May of 1922 as a replacement for the Russian Orthodox Church. It was eliminated in 1943 during the Second World War, but state intervention in religious affairs did not end, and religion was highly regulated and controlled until the end of the Soviet Union.
On October 9 and November 10 of 1990, the Russian Parliament passed two freedom of conscience laws that formally disestablished the Russian Orthodox Church as the state church of Russia (this step had never actually been explicitly taken in the Soviet Union)...
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I don't think so.
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