One NatioN.. UndeR WhO?
Faith and Culture.
Can we have one without the other?..or should I say..Can a culture maintain its integrity without Faith?
Secularists and many liberals would have us have us drift more and more from our religious roots-insisting on a dramatic separation of Church and State which only serves to sharpen the already existing divide.
Perceptions lead to policies and that may in part explain the dramatic tensions and differences between some Faith based Conservatives and their secular liberal opponents.
Citing past religious contributions to the very formation of the United States oftentimes enrages secularists, who choose to divorce their idealolgies from that of their faith based forefathers.
And yet even the Civil Rights Movement was religiously motivated.
The Judeo-Christian tradition maintains that all people have dignity and intrinsic worth because they are created in the image of God. Secularists would have God eliminated from our collective consciousness.
There's only one hitch: our entire moral code derives from religious based teachings.
With what have secularists replaced it?
Secularists fight to ban prayer in schools, are fighting to redefine traditional marriage to include homosexual unions, take offense when God's name is invoked in our Pledge of Allegiance", and practically tried to hijack the holiday season by trying to eliminate all religious symbols from the public sphere.
What next?..Will athletes be silenced if they pray before a game or invoke God's name after a triumph?
And yet we see the liberal's widely perceived failure to respond effectively to moral questions of the day..responding with moral ambiguity at best. "Do the right thing."..Well, what is right?
Hundreds of illegitimate children born out of wedlock, to uneducated teenagers who are routinely abandoned by thier "biological fathers."
Aids and rampant sexually transmitted diseases resulting from new found 'freedoms' from sexual restraint.
The media, typifying the spirit of decadence and violence with no constraints.
The grudging suspicion with which all matters of Faith are dealt with.
"Self interest"becoming the supreme human value in the new Godless order.
The gang wars in which violent resolutions are glorified.
Material prosperity becoming the sole source of meaning in one's life???
Two diametrically opposed world views. Can they ever be reconciled. Is there a common ground to even meet on?
Remember - American civilization was born of religion.
By trying to purge the country of all things sacred and religious
secularists don't show neutrality toward religion..what they show is - hostility.
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posted by WomanHonorThyself @ 5:43 PM
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11 Comments:
At 9:14 PM,
Beth said…
You've made some great points. It's time for the pendulum to start swinging back in the other direction.
At 9:47 AM,
Peter V. Bella said…
It is the on going attempt to turn us into a society of no class dsitinction or culture. There will only be one class and one belief. The secular humanists have transformed liberal into libertine.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is a liberal.
At 10:37 AM,
Unknown said…
Very well said.
At 2:13 PM,
Timmah420 said…
Yeah, because if god wasn't there to tell us not to rape and murder, what would we do?
Become a nation of common sense laws and equality?
Nahhhhhhh...
At 5:59 PM,
Lady Jane said…
Amen, Angel! Great post!
At 10:38 PM,
Timmah420 said…
Karl: Your comment was not exactly easy to read, you might want to start using ms word or something that has a spell and syntax checker, it helps your point if someone can understand what you're saying.
If I understand your point correctly (and again I'm not at all sure that I do)but I think that your contention is that the presence of or the belief in God keeps a society behaving in a moral fashion.
Your problem here is your inability to seperate religion from morality, while the two are certainly not mutually exclusive, to imply that the 15% of americans that call themselves athiests have no moral code is both ignorant and insulting.
One only needs to read the works of great humanist and athiest authors to realize that contrary to that point of view, athiests and agnostics tend to agonize about and analyse issues of morality in a more intellectually honest sense than other groups of people.
And if you want a example of the opposite effect, one only needs to take a good look at the horrifying priest abuse scandals rocking the catholic church presently.
I should clarify that I'm not saying that one group of people is good, and another bad, rather that athiests are a notoriously difficult group of people to classify, but on the whole they are a very intelligent and moral kind of person.
I mean, I'd rather live my life doing good things and preventing bad things because I thought it was the right thing to do, than do it becuase some invisible entity in the sky promises some sort of spiritual reward for it, wouldn't you?
At 2:15 PM,
Unknown said…
Timmah420-
You have some interesting ideas there. It's refreshing to see someone with opposing views express themselves in a rational and polite manner without delving into insults and mudslinging.
I'm not sure I agree with your stance. I can respect it though. I'll admit right from the start my views might be a bit biased based on my own Christian upbringing (Southern Baptist) and my experience as a Police Officer.
From the time man started recording history our laws have been based (however loosly) on the original Ten Commandments. Those laws are what has kept society from destroying itself.
I'll agree MOST people are generally fairly moral regardless of their religious beliefs. Most of 'em have learned from their parents and neighbors who have grown up in faith-based communities.
Even tribal communities in the deepest jungle have some form of religious belief to base their community standards by.
Last time I read a copy of the US Constitution it read "....shall have freedom of religion". It did not say "freedom FROM religion".
Just because athiests don't believe in God shouldn't mean the rest of us have to stop as well. Whether we like it or not, this country was founded by Christians and the majority of her citizens are still Christian.
I've also noticed the folks who scream the loudest about tolerance have none for those who think differently than they do.
At 3:05 PM,
Timmah420 said…
lawman: You can try to characterize my view however you want, but if you're talking about my lack of tolerance for other people's views, you are sadly mistaken.
Humanity existed in much the same state it does today (sans the technology) for a long time before the ten commandments without everyone tearing their neighbor limb from limb and eating their brains for sustinance. Just because law often finds it's first roots in religious teachings doesen't mean it has a place in modern-age lawmaking.
As a matter of fact, the differences of religion between different populations is often the wedge that war seeking rulers will employ as a catalyst to the start of war. We only need to look as far as the current Iraq war to see this in action.
Freedom of religion is just that, the freedom to believe in anything from Allah to the flying spaghetti monster. However, I am also of the opinion that no sort of god or deity or supernatural force (or the people behind it) have a right to make their religion a part of government. Contrary to your statement about the nation being founded on christianity, The men who lead the United States in its revolution against England, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and put together the Constitution were not Christians by any stretch of the imagination. A belief in a single god does not necessarily place you in any sort of religion.
In fact, I think a few quotes from the founders of your country are in order, shall we?
Thomas Jefferson created his own version of the gospels; he was uncomfortable with any reference to miracles, so with two copies of the New Testament, he cut and pasted them together, excising all references to miracles, from turning water to wine, to the resurrection. He said "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury to my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer whose manifestoes encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided materially in winning the War of Independence. But he was a Deist:" I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church."
John Adams, the second U.S. President rejected the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and became a Unitarian. It was during Adams' presidency that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli, which states in Article XI that:
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion - as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, - and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arrising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
Benjamin Franklin was the only one of them that could seriously be called Christian in any sense of the word. Even he only attempted to introduce clergyman to pray for the success of their discussions when the convention was on the verge of destruction.
Even then that motion was voted down.
At 3:10 PM,
Timmah420 said…
One parting point, to clarify:
I don't want the Christian right to have any say on our sex-education and foreign policy matters any more than I want Islam fundamentalists to have any say on our equality with women.
I think if government ignored the pressure of religious leaders and began to make decisions solely on good information and sound law, the word would be a much nicer place for everyone.
At 9:00 PM,
Timmah420 said…
Really Karl? You seem to consider your unproven and unsourced assertions as the gospel truth, i'd like some hard data rather than a bunch of sweeping generalizations.
You seem to have no grasp on the concept of environment in the devolpment of a personality, family and religion belong in the same category, and personal choices, perception and life events are the other half.
Either you aren't being a very honest debater here,or you haven't read my previous comments, because they address what you are talking about.
At 7:31 AM,
Timmah420 said…
Erm, funny how no one is saying anything about how the nation was founded on christianity now...
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