Establishment Clause
"There is far too much God talk; the world is sick with it. There is too little awareness, too little love, too little happiness, but let's not use those words either. There's too little dropping of illusions, dropping of errors, dropping of attachments and cruelty, too little awareness. That's what the whole world is suffering from, not from a lack of religion. Religion is supposed to be about a lack of awareness." ~ Anthony DeMello, S.J.
THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN This is admittedly a sermon. For those in the back who are prone to nod, I will make it short. The subject is faith. Belief and unbelief In something behind and beyond this life Are contrary kinds of faith. Each assumes what cannot be known- Not the way science knows- Which is why the religions of the world Are called not "knowledges" but "faiths." Existence is confoundingly complex. Faith is the great simplifier- Believer, unbeliever, Beware it doesn't make you a simpleton. --Jene Erick Beardsley January 9, 2006
The establishment clause in the U.S. Constitution is that passage which forbids Congress from establishing any state religion. This same clause also prohibits the prohibition of any non-violent religious expression. In the United States, you can be a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, even a Satanist, or belong to any other religion. You can belong to any denomination or sect of any religion, too, as well as having the freedom to completely ignore all religious observance or belief. You just cannot use your religion as an excuse to violate anyAmerican's Constitutional rights or to break the law.
But, there is something very important about the establishment clause needs to get established in the minds of Americans today: the Constitution doesn't say that America is a secular nation. In fact, America's founders wanted this to be the most spiritual, perhaps even the most religious, nation in the world.
The Founding Fathers wanted this nation to be a spiritual republic. Yet today, the Left insists that we are supposed to be a totally secular democracy.Although there are actually quite a few Christians on the Left, the Leftist Liberals insist that anyone who adheres to any religion, most especially Judeo -Christianity, is some kind of moron. This prejudiced belief of theirs flies in the face of their defense of radical (terrorist) Islam; but even more than that, it flies in the face of their own religions: atheism and Socialism. While not all Leftists are atheists, they are all Socialists, even if they don't intend to be. As F.A.Hayek correctly pointed out, Socialism is a religion.
Socialism is a religion that does exactly all of the negative things that its adherents claim all other religions (mainly Judeo-Christianity, or at least "white" Judeo-Christianity) do: it irrationally defies real-world experience in the name of its ideology; it bases all of its claims on fantasy rather than experience or history; it is exclusionary and prejudiced; it tells stories about things that have never happened and which never shall happen; its followers become indignant or enraged at the slightest doubting of their faith by outsiders regardless of how rationally formulated or politely spoken those doubts are; it seeks to consolidate power and people's property in the hands of a relative few self-proclaimed elite; it is utopian rather than sapiential; its adherents possess irrational beliefs in certain magical events (i.e. Socialists obviously believe that spoken words have supernatural powers, and they obviously believe that their faith is more powerful than the natural laws of economics); and they are prone to having total faith in self-proclaimed Messiahs whose abilities remain unproven at best. If Leftists want all religious expression banned from public life in the United States, they must do away entirely with their entire belief system.
The Founding Fathers repeatedly wrote of the importance of religion or God or the acknowledgement of the Creator of All to the mental and emotional health of the citizens of the nation. This matter was so important, in fact, that they wanted to keep it away from all of the potential tyrants in government, and leave it entirely in the hands of individuals. But they certainly did not want to leave it entirely!
Those on the Left today invoke the idea of "separation of church and state" to support their oppression of all non-Socialist religious belief or expression. They say that they are are being Constitutional when they invoke the idea of the separation of church and state (which is quite a hypocritical statement, given that they don't give a damn about the Constitution at any other time). The trouble is, the phrase "separation of church and state" does not exist in the Constitution. It is actually taken from a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in reply to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut in 1802. That Association appreciated Jefferson's defense of the freedom of religious expression. Jefferson responded to their gratitude by writing: "Believing with you that religion is a matter that lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State." Jefferson in turn was paraphrasing the words of the religious leader and founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams.
What progressivism really wants is for us to live in a spiritually dead world--not just a non-Christian world, but a world in which there is no authentic concept or feeling of spirituality. Spirituality gets in their way, you see. It gets in the way of their hypocrisy; their lies; their self-centeredness; their unprincipled sex; their thievery; their superficiality.
No matter what your personal spiritual philosophy or religious beliefs, it is a fact, a fact that even the Library of Congress documents, that the United States was founded on principles of "a non-polemical Christianity". Whether you are a believer or an unbeliever, honesty and intelligence should compel you to respect the facts of history, and the facts behind the establishment clause. And whether you are a believer or an unbeliever, you should have enough sense of personal responsibility that you don't let yourself be a simpleton. Those simpletons on the Left just don't get it.
Establishment Clause