posted on February 23, 2004 08:22:58 PM new
KD - If you're pro-gay marriage, I wouldn't have thought you'd be for the bill clinton signed because it's against that on our Federal level.
---------------
Then we have the up-to-now front runner John Kerry [D].
What's his position on "Bibicial Marriage"?
hmmmm....that's a hard one to call. Kerry does profess to being a Catholic. But at different times, he's stated different positions on this issue of "Bibicial Marriage".
Last I read - most current statement is that he said he supports marriage as 'one man and one woman but does support gay civil unions'.
But....I do recognize one takes their life in their own hand when one counts on Kerry says to hold the same position for more than a few minutes.
posted on February 23, 2004 08:38:39 PM new
Pat did paint you into a corner, but I'll pretend I didn't see anything, Helen. I'll act normal and even share my slut soap with you.
posted on February 23, 2004 09:18:17 PM new
"Our nation is dedicated to the equal and undeniable worth of every person. We don't own the ideals of freedom and human dignity, and sometimes haven't always lived up to the them, but we do stand for those ideals and we will defend them."
Linda, being that every 2nd sentence to come out of his mouth sounds like a TV evangelist, it sure does appear as though he thinks that he’s on a mission from God, and taking the rest of America and most of the world along for the ride.
posted on February 23, 2004 09:35:10 PM new Austbounty, Now she is discussing school prayer on the Haiti thread. I considered suggesting a little voodoo.
posted on February 23, 2004 11:37:07 PM new
austbounty - Almost all our Presidents have been Christians. All have been quoted making religious statements of one kind or another, mentioning God, a faith based belief, etc.
They all, as Christians, pray to God for guidance [the same God] when making the decisions they are called on to make. It's a practice that all Christians do...not just some.
In clinton's library you can read where he said he prayed daily, asking for guidance too. His papers are full of his religious beliefs, statements, Bible quotes, how important he thinks our religious history has been/is to our country. And I have no doubt Carter made a lot more religious statements [etc] than clinton did too.
It's the religious intolerance, bashing here that so offends me. Even Lieberman was made fun of by those who found it funny he didn't want to campaign on his Sabbath. How sad.
posted on February 24, 2004 12:51:14 AM new
Of course presidents have had religious beliefs, prayed, etc. The "intolerance" you mention only comes in when a president (or anyone else for that matter) attempts tomake their religion, their religious beliefs the religious beliefs. When they try to remove the separation of church and state that this country held dear from the very beginning.
******
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there --Clare Booth Luce
posted on February 24, 2004 08:23:47 AM new
Mornin' bunni - "Only" comes in? I can't agree on that. I think more and more it's just plain hatred of religion. Not a debate of the issues some see differently. And I've seen it here before when we've discussed religions other than the Christian one.
All religious discussions turn into the same bashing that they complain is done to [say] gays.
When they try to remove the separation of church and state that this country held dear from the very beginning.
Or when the other side views it as some who are trying to remove all mention of everything religious from every public forum, and by doing so feel they are taking away their freedom to practice their religion, *much of which has been practiced since our Union was formed*.
That's why many of the church and state issues end up being decided in the the courts...even up to the USSC. Because there is much disagreement of whether that's happening or not. Whether or not, as we've argued here many times, "that's what our Founding Fathers really meant" when they wrote xxxxx. That's always been the way it has been and I believe that's healthy debate, not religion bashing.
posted on February 24, 2004 09:08:26 AM new
Our Founders understood that religious freedom was basically a coin with two sides. The Constitution protected the free exercise of religion, but prohibited the establishment of religion. It's a careful balance that's uniquely American. It is the genius of the First Amendment. It does not, as some people have implied, make us a religion-free country. It has made us the most religious country in the world...Clinton
In other word, linda...George Bush cannot declare that this is a Christian nation. Do you understand that?
Joe Lieberman would not be able to declare this is a Jewish Nation. Do you understand that?
In this country we tolerate all religions but in order to continue to do that, we must keep government out of religion
From Clinton....
"Don't you believe that if every kid in every difficult neighborhood in America were in a religious institution on the weekends, the synagogue on Saturday, a church on Sunday, a mosque on Friday, don't you really believe that the drug rate, the crime rate, the violence rate, the sense of self-destruction would go way down and the quality of the character of this country would go way up?"
"But don't you also believe that if for the last 200 years we had had a state governed religion, people would be bored with it, and they would think it had been compromised by politicians, shaved around the edges, imposed on them by people who didn't really conform to it, and we wouldn't have 250,000 houses of worship in America? I mean, we wouldn't. It may be imperfect, the First Amendment, but it is the nearest thing ever created in any human society for the promotion of religion and religious values."
posted on February 24, 2004 09:55:21 AM new
helen - I don't plan to respond to a long list of clinton statements today. But I will address this one.
It has made us the most religious country in the world...Clinton
I don't believe that's true. Look to any of the Muslim countries to find a larger percentage of their population practicing their religion. Maybe he was referring to our diversity?
In this country we tolerate all religions but in order to continue to do that, we must keep government out of religion I believe this is your statement not clinton's. If not, say so. Seeing that you use the word 'tolerate'.....like it's some perversion you just can't stand. It's been 'tolerated' since our nation began. This isn't something new. It's the ultra liberals and socialists in our country that work to change the way it has always been. YOU personally don't tolerate it at all, imo.
And we're NOT speaking to 'keeping it out' but rather 'TAKING it out' of areas of government, public life where it has been since our beginnings.
From Clinton....
"Don't you believe that if every kid in every difficult neighborhood in America were in a religious institution on the weekends, the synagogue on Saturday, a church on Sunday, a mosque on Friday, don't you really believe that the drug rate, the crime rate, the violence rate, the sense of self-destruction would go way down and the quality of the character of this country would go way up?"
I see this statement as **support** of promoting religious training. BUT I also see it as LIMITING when and where it can be done. That's were the argument lays. Many say, and I agree, that there were no limit is, of any kind, on when and where this 'could' take place in our Constitution. NO LIMITS at all. Just a right to practice religion. The **suggested limits** are HIS opinion only.
"But don't you also believe that if for the last 200 years we had had a state governed religion, people would be bored with it, and they would think it had been compromised by politicians, shaved around the edges, imposed on them by people who didn't really conform to it, and we wouldn't have 250,000 houses of worship in America? I mean, we wouldn't. It may be imperfect, the First Amendment, but it is the nearest thing ever created in any human society for the promotion of religion and religious values."
First of all NO one, including President Bush is suggesting a "state governed religion". If you know differently maybe you can show me where he's made that statement. It is being argued that they be ALLOWED to practice their religious beliefs.
It is being argued this nation was founded as a Christian nation. But that's not the same as suggesting he's pushing legislation to make this a 'state governed religion'. Rather acknowledging that fact and allowing Christians to practice their faith freely.
Second the part I bolded [which really made me laugh] is the way people **already feel*** about our government, but not because of religion. Because of self interests on both political party sides. The people have already lost interest and the proof of that is in how many people turn out to vote.
posted on February 24, 2004 01:14:51 PM newFirst of all NO one, including President Bush is suggesting a "state governed religion". If you know differently maybe you can show me where he's made that statement. It is being argued that they be ALLOWED to practice their religious beliefs.
Bush hasn't come right out & said that's what he wants to do, but in doing things like intimating a constitional amendment should bemade to tout a belief held by his religion, he is making a start at doing so.
See, Christians have no trouble practicing their relgion in this country--as long as they don't drag others into it with them. Wanna pray in school? You can--but you can't make the entire class participate. You can believe anything you want--but you can't foist your religion on others a la the recent pharmacist who refused to fill a prescription because "his religion" disapproved of it.
If any other religion tried topull some the stunts Christians have, you can bet there'd be a big uproar...from the Christians.
******
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there --Clare Booth Luce
posted on February 24, 2004 01:50:56 PM new
George W. Bush says his daily prayers. God saved him from alcohol, God guides his presidency. He's not the first of his kind in the United States. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), United States' president during the First World War, thought he was in direct communication with God. Sigmund Freud confessed he hated the politics of generous ambitions whose failures of consequence during the Versailles Treaty would promote the catastrophes to come. "Wilson," he wrote, "realizes practically the opposite of what he wanted to accomplish" and "his pretension of delivering the world from evil succeeds only in providing a supplementary proof of the danger to the public good a fanatic incurs." These lines are quoted from a curiosity, little to the taste of Freudian orthodoxy, an essay in political psychoanalysis, "Le Président T. W. Wilson" (Payot, 1990), co-authored by Freud and an admirable American diplomat, William Bullitt, who was notably ambassador to Paris. This is emergency required reading during the current American year....more
posted on February 24, 2004 02:44:30 PM new W.'s Christian Nation
How Bush promotes religion and erodes the separation of church and state
By Chris Mooney
In November of 1992, shortly after Bill Clinton was elected president, a telling controversy arose at a meeting of the Republican Governors Association. When a reporter asked the governors how their party could both satisfy the demands of Christian conservatives and also maintain a broad political coalition, Mississippi's Kirk Fordice took the opportunity to pronounce America a "Christian nation." "The less we emphasize the Christian religion," Fordice declared, "the further we fall into the abyss of poor character and chaos in the United States of America." Jewish groups immediately protested Fordice's remarks; on CNN's Crossfire, Michael Kinsley asked whether Fordice would also call America a "white nation" because whites, like Christians, enjoy a popular majority. The incident was widely seen as exposing a rift between the divisive Pat Robertson wing of the GOP and the more moderate camp represented by then-President George Herbert Walker Bush.
Fast-forward a decade. Republicans have solved their internal problems, and the party is united under our most prayerful of presidents, the born-again believer George W. Bush. Though not originally the favored candidate of the religious right -- John Ashcroft was -- Bush has played the part well. Virtually his first presidential act was to proclaim a National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving; soon he appointed Ashcroft to serve as attorney general. Since then the stream of religiosity from the White House has been continuous. With the help of evangelical speechwriter Michael Gerson, Bush lards his speeches with code words directed at Christian conservatives. In this year's State of the Union address, Bush mentioned the "wonder-working power" of the American people, an allusion to an evangelical Christian song whose lyrics cite the "power, wonder-working power, in the blood of the Lamb" -- i.e., Jesus.
Bush also uses his office to promote marriage, charitable choice and school vouchers as conservative Christian policy objectives. Yet he has never endorsed, at least not explicitly, the time-honored religious-right claim that the United States is a Christian nation. Nor has he seconded Pat Robertson's cry that the separation of church and state is "a lie of the left." "There are a lot of libertarian Republicans and business-oriented Republicans who would be really turned off by that sort of rhetoric," explains John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron who specializes in religion and politics. Bush strategist Karl Rove, a political-history buff, presumably remembers the Fordice debacle.
But could Rove and Bush, through their diligent courting of the Christian right, be moving us toward a form of Christian nationhood anyway? To see what's new and dangerous about Bush's approach to religion, you have to look beyond the president's copious prayers and exhortations, which are legally meaningless. Clinton also showed immense political sympathy for religion, but he didn't nominate a slate of right-wing judges who could give the law a decidedly majoritarian, pro-Christian bent. And Bush has gone further than that. From school-prayer guidelines issued by the Department of Education to faith-based initiatives to directives from virtually every federal agency, there's hardly a place where Bush hasn't increased both the presence and the potency of religion in American government. In the process, the Bush administration lavishly caters to the very religious-right groups that gave us the dubious Christian-nation concept to begin with.
Consider Bush's faith-based initiative. In October 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services doled out $30 million to 21 religious and community groups as part of the faith-based program. Sure enough, $500,000 went to Pat Robertson's religious charity Operation Blessing. In addition, according to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a grant of $700,000 went to the National Center for Faith-Based Initiative, founded by Bishop Harold Calvin Ray, who has declared church-state separation "a fiction." Another $2.2 million went to Dare Mighty Things, a group affiliated with Chuck Colson, a Watergate felon turned evangelist who tries to convert prison inmates to Christianity and has the ear of the Bush administration. All of the religious recipients of Health and Human Services grants were connected to Christian ministries, mostly evangelical ones.
These grant allocations suggest that while Bush may not say he's forging a Christian nation, at the very least he's blending church and state to fund Christianity. And Health and Human Services is just one government agency now engaged in promoting faith-based initiatives. Under Bush, notes Americans United Executive Director Barry Lynn, the departments of Justice, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services and Education all "are issuing regulations, guidelines and other directives that promote religion." Bush has also placed influential religious-right figures in his administration. Consider a few little-noticed examples. David Caprara, the head of AmeriCorps* VISTA, directed the American Family Coalition, a faith-based social-action group affiliated with Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Kay Coles James, a staunch anti-abortionist who was formerly a dean at Pat Robertson's Regent University and senior vice president of the Family Research Council, is now director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which monitors the federal workforce.
But the nexus of the religious right in the administration may be Ashcroft's Justice Department, which is well positioned to effect pro-Christian legal changes. Until recently, Carl Esbeck, who helped to draft the charitable-choice provisions of the 1996 welfare-reform legislation and directed the Center for Law and Religious Freedom at the conservative Christian Legal Society, headed the department's faith-based office. Over the years, Esbeck has been a leading lawyer and legal thinker involved in laying the intellectual groundwork for the Bush administration's current merging of church and state.
Something similar can be said of Eric Treene, formerly litigation director at the conservative Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, who was appointed in June 2002 to serve as the Justice Department's special counsel for religious discrimination, a newly created position. According to Yeshiva University law professor and church-state specialist Marci Hamilton, Treene has been "in the trenches of trying to get religious entities special privileges under the law." No wonder the conservative Christian group Faith and Action, which seeks to remind legislators about the "prominent role that the word of God played in the creation of our nation and its laws," celebrated Treene's appointment as "a new day for Christians in Washington."
So far Treene has proved responsive to groups seeking to amplify legal protections for Christians. For example, following a complaint by the archconservative Liberty Legal Institute of Plano, Texas, Treene headed an investigation of Texas Tech University biology professor Michael Dini, who had promulgated a policy requiring that students seeking medical-school letters of recommendation from him be able to "truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer" to the question, "How do you think the human species originated?" Despite the fact that recommendation writing is a voluntary activity, this was deemed discrimination against creationists. After Treene and the Justice Department opened their investigation, Dini changed his policy.
Treene also recently helped file a brief in a Massachusetts district court case arguing that a high school had engaged in "viewpoint discrimination" when it refused to allow Christian students to pass out candy canes distributed with religious messages. This time the Justice Department drew upon work by the Alliance Defense Fund, a "unique Christian legal organization" based in Scottsdale, Ariz., that was founded by Focus on the Family's James Dobson and other religious-right leaders. So forget about counting the mentions of God in Bush's speeches; it's legal coordination between the Bush administration and the religious right that could truly cause Thomas Jefferson's wall of separation between church and state to crumble.
Even when working in the federal government and responding to Christian-right legal groups, however, lawyers can only go so far to make America more hospitable to Christianity. To achieve their objectives, Christian conservatives have long realized they need sympathetic judges on the bench as well -- judges whose worldviews are suffused with religiosity. Judges, in short, such as Antonin Scalia.
In a January 2002 speech at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Scalia cited his religious views in order to defend the death penalty. He further argued that democracy has a tendency to "obscure the divine authority behind government" -- a situation that people of faith should approach with "the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible." As Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz wrote in a New York Times critique, Scalia "seeks to abandon the intent of the Constitution's framers and impose views about government and divinity that no previous justice, no matter how conservative, has ever embraced."
Bush has explicitly stated that he sees Scalia and Clarence Thomas as models for his judicial nominees. And most of them do fit the mold. On the church-state front, the most outrageous example is the nomination of Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor for a seat on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Pryor is notorious for his defense of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who has steadily fought to post the Ten Commandments in his courthouse. Almost as troubling is University of Utah law professor Michael McConnell, one of the intellectual giants behind the "accommodationist" approach to the First Amendment's religion clauses, who was confirmed for a post on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. McConnell's exaggerated notion of religious free exercise led him to criticize a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court ruling revoking Bob Jones University's tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, which he dubbed a failure "to intervene to protect religious freedom from the heavy hand of government."
Many of Bush's other judicial nominees, such as Miguel Estrada and Priscilla Owen, have also been resolutely championed by religious conservatives. "A few of [the nominees] have specific histories on religion issues," explains People for the American Way legal director Elliot Mincberg. But the religious right, he adds, is "smart enough" to realize that conservative legal positions tend to come together in one package.
Granted, in some sense the Bush administration is only building upon previous legal and social trends that have brought church and state closer. Despite our thoroughly "godless" Constitution, as Cornell University scholars Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore have put it, these aren't very good days for strict church-state separation. Over the past 15 years, explains Vanderbilt University law professor and First Amendment specialist Thomas McCoy, the Supreme Court has gradually modified its church-state jurisprudence, especially when it comes to whether government money can go to individuals who then choose whether to distribute it to religious organizations. Last term, the court used this "neutral aid" approach to uphold an Ohio voucher scheme, a ruling that would have been unthinkable three decades ago.
Simultaneously, religion has seeped into American political life, often on a bipartisan basis. Clinton, after all, signed into law a version of charitable choice as part of the 1996 welfare-reform bill. He held prayer meetings regularly and declared that an atheist could not be president of the United States (despite the Constitution's ban on religious tests for public office). Clinton's views on religion were shaped by Yale University law professor Stephen Carter's 1993 book, The Culture of Disbelief, which argued that American society had come to exclude the religious from public life, a wrong that required remedying. In a 2000 legal article, Yeshiva University's Marci Hamilton called Clinton "the most religiously activist President in history" -- up until that point, anyway -- and accused him of being "oblivious to [James] Madison's warnings that all entities, including religious entities, are likely to abuse their power in the political process."
Still, there were limits to Clinton's attempt to make government friendlier to religion. Consider Clinton's and Bush's starkly opposed approaches to the contentious issue of school prayer. In 1995, Clinton's Department of Education released a set of school-prayer guidelines based on a consensus document drafted by groups covering the political spectrum, from the liberal People for the American Way to the conservative Christian Legal Society. The guidelines sought a balance between the free exercise and establishment clauses of the First Amendment, noting that students may engage in private religious speech, including prayer, but cannot harass other students or direct speech at a captive audience. School employees, meanwhile, should neither discourage nor encourage such speech.
The Clinton guidelines were legally accurate and had a reputation for helping school districts. Nevertheless, this February the Bush Department of Education -- headed by Rod Paige, who recently stumbled into a Fordice-style church-state brouhaha when he suggested that Christian schools instill better values than public ones -- released a new set of school-prayer guidelines. This time liberal and moderate groups weren't consulted. But two leading religious-right figures, Jay Sekulow of Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice and Ken Connor of the Family Research Council, claimed involvement in the drafting process.
The new guidelines advance a skewed picture of the law that favors the religious right. As the American Jewish Congress' Marc Stern protested in a letter to Paige, the guidelines "make no concession whatsoever to the rights of the captive audience" when it comes to school prayer, in the process misrepresenting the state of court rulings on the question. When it comes to church and state, "The Clinton people reached out to all segments, and really did attempt to work on consensus issues," says People for the American Way's Mincberg, who was involved in drafting the consensus statement that led to the Clinton prayer guidelines. "The Bush people are reaching out to their political allies only."
How much damage could Bush do in the long term? When it comes to the separation of church and state, one is always dealing with a slippery slope -- the notion that government involvement with religion will make it easier for more government involvement with religion to occur. That is, after all, what the framers were trying to prevent. But provided that you're willing to think in these terms, the picture is fairly clear. "The goal here," says American United's Lynn, "is to erode the vitality of the church-state separation principle, to get a lot of judges in place who have trouble distinguishing between that which is illegal and that which is sinful, and to put in place regulations -- and perhaps later statutes -- that make it easier to require Americans to pay for the Christianization of the country."
That's the goal of Christian conservatives, anyway. Yet it may not be Bush's conscious objective. Although religiously devout, his highest calling is re-election. And as a source of fundraising, grass-roots manpower and sheer votes, the religious right is crucial to that push. Karl Rove has explicitly stated that when it comes to turning out the white, evangelical Republican base in 2000, "There should have been 19 million of them, and instead there were 15 million of them. So 4 million of them did not turn out to vote."
"I don't think Bush has set out to reshape church and state relationships, but by doing the kind of politics that he's been doing, there are some strong implications," says the University of Akron's Green. Those implications were summarized, in their most radical form, by Pat Robertson in his 1992 book, The New World Order. There, Robertson wrote, "There will never be world peace until God's house and God's people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world." America is certainly on top of the world, and with George W. Bush in the White House, religious conservatives are standing there with him.
posted on February 24, 2004 02:46:28 PM newBush hasn't come right out & said that's what he wants to do
Thank you, that was my point. He hasn't said it....but he's accused of saying it. Then opinions are formed of him on the basis of something he hasn't said. Might sound fair to some, but not to me.
but in doing things like intimating a constitional amendment should be made to tout a belief held by his religion, he is making a start at doing so.
I'm taking it we're talking about the marriage issue. While I can provide no stats at this time, [but would use the polls in reference to this issue] he's doing exactly what clinton did. Listening to what the majority of American's are saying they want done and making decisions based on representing those wishes.
See, Christians have no trouble practicing their relgion in this country--as long as they don't drag others into it with them. Sure they have had a lot of trouble, bunni. Both on the constant battle to freely enjoy the religious practices they always have and in being forced to take actions they are religiously opposed to. [Your pharmacist]. These are the issues we debate. They aren't spelled out anywhere.
In regards to someone who morally doesn't want to hand out these pills when it goes against their religion. I don't think they should be forced. There are other pharmacists that don't have this moral belief. They can go there and no one 'rights' are stepped on. The doctors I used to work for threatened to file suit when the hospital was going to force them to perform abortions. Most didn't want to. Why? Because of their moral convictions. I don't believe they should be forced to, the patients can find other docs who are willing. Agreed these are the more difficult issues of religion. But don't fall into what I was referring to as far as long, well established religious practices that Christians feel are being taken away from them.
If any other religion tried to pull [can I loan you ten bucks to buy a new keyboard? ] some the stunts Christians have, you can bet there'd be a big uproar...from the Christians. I agree. Right now 75-86% of American's say they're Christian. As our nation continues to grow and as more religions have more political influence we will see more changes in many areas. Just as we have in the gay community. AND there are Chistian democrats who vote and have opinions on these religious issues too.
posted on February 24, 2004 07:39:50 PM newReligion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most particularly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves
John Locke
The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most destructive to the peace of man since man began to exist..
Thomas Payne
I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That the the most acceptable Service we render to him is doing good to his other Children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its Conduct in this...
As to Jesus of Nazareth, I have some Doubts as to his Divinity....I see no harm, however, in its being believed.I do not perceive, that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the Unbelievers...with any peculiar Marks of his Displeasure.... The Infinite Father expects or requires no worship or praise from us. I conceive, then, that the Infinite has created many beings or gods vastly superior to man.It may be these created gods are immortals; or it may be that after many ages, they are changed, and others supply their places. Howbeit, I conceive that each of these is exceeding good and very powerful; and that each has made for himself one glorious sun, attended with a beautiful and admirable system of planets.
Benjamin Franklin
There are in this country, as in all others, a certain proportion of restless and turbulent spirits - poor, unoccupied, ambitious - who must always have something to quarrel about with their neighbors. These people are the authors of religious revivals
John Quincy Adams
Is the appointment of Cha;llains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom? In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative. The Constitution of the U.S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion. The law appointing Chaplains establishes a religious worship for the national representatives, to be performed by Ministers of religion, elected by a majority of them; and these are to be paid out of the national taqxes. The establishment of the chaplainship to Congress is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles: The tenets of the chaplains elected [by the majority] shut the door of worship against the members whose creeds & consciences forbid a participation in that of the majority. If Religion consist in voluntary acts of individuals, singly, or voluntarily associaated, and it be proper that public functionaries, as well as their Constituents should discharge their religious duties, let them like their Constituents, do so at t heir own expense..
James Madison, writing about the establishment of congressional chaplains
During almost fifteen centuries, the legal establishment of Christianity has been on trial. What have been the fruits of this trial? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; and in both, clergy and laity, superstition, bigotry and persecution
James Madison, in a speech to the General Assembly of Virginia, 1785
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.The serious enemies are the priests of the different religious sects to whose spells on the human mind its improvement is ominous... I join you [John Adams], therefore, in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a Protestant Popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character... In every country and in every age the priest [any and every clergyman] has been hostile to liberty; he is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own...I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies... His [Calvin's] religion was demonism. If ever man worshiped a false God, he did.Their [Presbyterian’s] ambition and tyranny would tolerate no rival if they had power... It is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist...It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.If by religion, we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your [John Adams’] exclamation on that hypothesis is just, ‘that this would be the best of worlds if there were no religion in it’.
Christianity neither is, nor ever was apart of the common law.
Christian creeds and doctrines, the clergy's own fatal inventions, through all the ages has made of Christendom a slaughterhouse, and divided it into sects of inextinguishable hatred for one another.
Thomas Jefferson
Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the Christians so that their [not our?] religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society.
George Washington
___________________________________
[ edited by profe51 on Feb 24, 2004 07:40 PM ]
posted on February 24, 2004 08:17:47 PM new
Yep, this issue has been argued/debated since the very beginning of our nation's history. Don't expect it will end anytime soon either.
-------
On a couple of threads here about who would you want to have dinner with, if you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive. It would be very interesting to hear the views from some of the about listed men on our current social issues.
posted on February 24, 2004 11:14:52 PM new
This information was taken from U.S. Constitution.com
Question 71: "I cannot find anywhere in the Constitution that refers to separation of church and state."
Answer: Though many people assume the 1st Amendment sets out some separation, the phrase does not appear in the Constitution.
The phrase "wall of separation" appears to have been coined by Jefferson, in speaking of the religious liberties granted by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Madison, however, said that there is a line between church and state, not a wall - the distinction may or may not be significant.
In practice the separation is more theoretical than actual. In a truly separate society, we would not invoke the name of God on our currency, nor would we speak so highly of our Judeo-Christian values. But we do - the fact of the matter is, completely separating religion and government is probably impossible, so long as religion is an important part of the lives of the citizenry.
The best we can hope for, and what I think the Constitution tries to protect, is to ensure that there is no discrimination on the basis of religious belief - that there be no religion litmus test.
] some the stunts Christians have, you can bet there'd be a big uproar...from the Christians. I agree. Right now 75-86% of American's say they're Christian. As our nation continues to grow and as more religions have more political influence we will see more changes in many areas. Just as we have in the gay community. AND there are Chistian democrats who vote and have opinions on these religious issues too. 
[ edited by profe51 on Feb 24, 2004 07:40 PM ]