You are probably aware of the move afoot to secularize American society. We have all heard of the battle to remove "In God We Trust" from our currency as well as the demonic effect that having the 10 Commandments in a courtroom or classroom causes. Refusal to say "One nation, under God" in our pledge of allegiance, the misused and misrepresented arguments about the separation of Church and State as well as the horrors of Christmas displays on government property.
There is a segment of American society that is bound and determined to make sure that God is never mentioned in anything governmental. They believe that God and government do not mix. But is that viewpoint correct? Is that what our Founding Fathers believed?
The men that founded this country and who authored the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were well studied in what does and does not work in governments throughout history. One thing they discovered in their studies was that a Federal Republic was the wisest form of government for this nation to have. However, in order to make it work properly and to maintain it's longevity, they also realized that it would be necessary for the leaders running the government to be moral and virtuous.
And what produces moral and virtuous leaders? A moral and virtuous people. And what creates moral and virtuous people? Well, W. Cleon Skousen has part of the answer in the 2nd principle that our Founding Fathers held to in creating this nation. Ben Franklin said it best, "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."
George Washington then finished the thought for him in his Farewell Address, "Let it simply be asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with cauthion indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education ... reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in the exclusion of religious principle."
Yes, religion is critical in maintaining a moral and virtuous people. The churches in our nation play a vital role in making our government work as it should. Without religion, and God, our leaders become "corrupt and vicious". And we are seeing that played out in Washington today. Imagine if God was removed from government altogether. We're pretty close to that happening.
The other reason why God can never be removed from American society lies in the Declaration of Independence. It reads, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." No God, no unalienable rights. It's that simple. And if God does not grant us our rights, who does? The government. If the government grants rights, it can easily take them away. Can you say "Hugo Chavez?"
When the government is totally in control of your life you are either living in a Dictatorship or an Oligarchy (rule by the few) or the like. You are definitely not living in a constitutional republic. Suspend God from society and government and you suspend the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Without these documents, we are not America.
The lame argument of separation of church and state is used to justify this action of removing God and all religious references from our government. But this is a ruse. First off, the words "separation of church and state" do not appear anywhere in any any of our founding documents. Second, it is a perversion of a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to someone explaining why there should never be a State-run church. However, our Founding Fathers, as you have already read, fully intended for the church to influence the government and for God to be the authority that people could appeal to when the government was out of control. The people's authority to run this country comes from God alone. Not from law, not from the government. God grants the people the rights to govern themselves and government is subject to the will of the people in executing their duties in governing.
There is a natural order to this and it is not for our government or anyone else to violate that natural order.
So it breaks down simply to this: No God, no America. Therefore, we can never be a secular society. God must remain in our government to remind the governing that they serve the people only by God's grace. Thus the term Public Servant.
Then what is the goal of those who would secularize America. It can only be to destroy this nation and what it stands for so that our God-given rights and form of government can be replaced with something that does not include God such as Socialism or Communism or a Dictatorship or an Oligarchy or a Monarchy.
We need to push back. The Ten Commandments need to be restored to all courts in America. People should have to swear on a Bible prior to giving testimony. "One nation, under God" needs to remain in our pledge and our money should continue to read "In God We Trust".
Now I realize that all this causes a problem for Agnostics (people who don't know what they believe) and Atheists who do not believe in God. They will just have to work this out if they want to live in this country. There are plenty of places in this world they can live that do not involve God in their system of government. America is not one of them and should never be.
This November, go behind the candidates into their private lives. Make sure they are moral and virtuous people before committing your powerful vote to them.
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1st amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
ReplyDeleteJefferson said that this erected a "wall of separation" between church and state. Madison figured that it "drew a line."
I believe that Lincoln considered the basis of our government to derive not particularly from a deity, but rather from the people.... "of the people, by the people, for the people."
I think that rather than the existence of some deity, more likely what the existence of the U.S. was initially dependent on was the prior existence of John Locke.
I suspect that your characterization of atheists and agnostics is not terribly accurate. It is difficult to define terms in "negative" ways. Maybe a similar but more apt description of atheists is that they actively believe in the non-existence of gods. That is pretty much on par logically with the belief in gods, i.e., either approach is an act of faith. As an aside, whether one believes in no gods, in a multitude of gods, in a single god, largely depends on what philosophical tradition your ancestors were associated with. And then of course, there are the Buddhists, who seem to have a religion without deities, though even that is kind of fuzzy (depends which Buddhists are being referred to).
When T.H. Huxley coined "agnostic", I believe he was thinking that some metaphysical questions are not open to any kind of verification, in essence they are unknowable. Of course many years after Huxley, this was proven by Godel's Theorem. David Hilbert's desire to find a complete set of axioms for all of mathematics is impossible as shown by Godel, and by extension is true for all complex systems in the universe.