Did the Founders want us to be faithful to their faith?
http://tinyurl.com/5kwuho
Did the Founders want us to be faithful to their
faith?
---excerpt---
On the subject of religious liberty in America, there
are four indispensable, foundational texts:
Jefferson’s 1786 statute (“Our civil rights have no
dependence on our religious opinions, any more than
our opinions in physics or geometry”); Madison’s 1785
“Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious
*****sments” (“The Religion of every man must be left
to the conviction and conscience of every man”);
Article VI of the Constitution (“No religious Test
shall ever be required as a Qualification to any
Office or public Trust under the United States”); and
the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof”). These are at
once statements of political philosophy and legal
do***ents; philosophers argue about them within a
specific intellectual tradition, and legal scholars
read them to trace precedent. Martha Nussbaum takes
both of these approaches in “Liberty of Conscience: In
Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality”
(Basic; $28.95). But because these do***ents long ago
rose to the status of American scripture, another way
to read them is to conduct an exegesis, which is more
or less what Garry Wills does in “Head and Heart:
American Christianities” (Penguin; $29.95).
Politicians tend to use them genealogically, naming
their authors as forebears or, as the case may be,
glaringly omitting them. (“My faith is the faith of my
fathers,” Mitt Romney declared in a speech last
December, skipping over Jefferson and Madison in favor
of Brigham Young, John and Samuel Adams, and the
seventeenth-century Puritan dissenter Roger Williams.)
The legal, the exegetical, the genealogical—each
centers on the Founding Fathers: What did they intend?
What did they mean? What would they make of us?
“History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on
the dead,” Voltaire once quipped. The Founding Fathers
had their own pack of tricks: they turned their backs
on the past. If they had meekly inherited the faith of
their fathers, they would have written a constitution
establi****ng Christianity as the national religion.
They did not. Nearly every American colony was settled
with an established religion; Connecticut’s 1639
founding do***ent explained that the whole purpose of
government was “to mayntayne and presearve the liberty
and purity of the gospell of our Lord Jesus.” In the
century and a half between that charter and the 1787
meeting of the Constitutional Convention lies an
entire revolution, not just a political revolution but
also a religious revolution, as Frank Lambert, a
historian at Purdue, argued in his 2003 study, “The
Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in
America.” Far from establi****ng a religion, the
Constitution doesn’t even mention God. At a time when
all but two states required religious tests for
office, the Constitution prohibited them. At a time
when most states still had an official religion, the
Bill of Rights forbade the federal government from
establi****ng one.
***************************************************************
You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Historical Reality SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
***************************************************************
.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why
"a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v.
Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
****************************************************************
USAF LT. COL (Ret) Buffman (Glen P. Goffin) wrote
"You pilot always into an unknown future;
facts are your only clue. Get the facts!"
That philosophy 'snipit' helped to get me, and my crew, through a good
many combat missions and far too many scary, inflight, emergencies.
It has also played a significant role in helping me to expose the
plethora of radical Christian propaganda and lies that we find at
almost every media turn.
*****************************************************************
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
****************************************************************
|
