Quote:
Originally Posted by blueash
Those who have posted about the Constitution and endowed by their creator are wrong. That phrase is in the Declaration of Independence. It is not a legal document, it is a political statement directed specifically at King George who if you remember your history was not just the King of England but ruled by divine right (although some diminution of the divine right had already come to England by 1776). Thus when beseeching the King it is important to go over his head if you wish to act in opposition to his edicts. It was therefore in a political sense that the authors invoked rights from the Creator (never was the word God Lord Jesus Christian or any other specific creator mentioned). Prior to that phrase the terms Laws of Nature and Nature's God are used. Never the term mankind's God or anything similar. It is a very specific use of language invoking the arguments of Locke and others. I have always been amused that among the grievances against the King was that he encouraged the Merciless Indian Savages to attack the American frontiersmen.
The DOI is an important document. It is not however the Constitution. The Constitution was meant to guide the new nation when the Articles of Confederation were failing. Religion appears twice.
The first Amendment mentions religion and of course firmly states that there shall be no establishment of religion (which of course meant Christianity as it was the only possible religion that could have been chosen)
article 6 states :
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
No religious test means what it says. The wording about Oath or affirmation is also important. The difference is that an oath is typically taken on a religious object eg Bible, whereas an affirmation is simply a statement agreeing to a set of conditions.
Whereas the phrase so help me God has been used in swearing in ceremonies, in fact that phrase is not part of the Constitutional Oath.
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1. Please state the source of amusement for you in the reference to Indian attacks on frontier settlers. I thought people were killed.
2. You are mistaken about the word 'religion' as used and intended within the First Amendment as it came into being in the 1780's. If you will re-read any decent colonial history text, you will remember that certain colonies had established religions, Anglicanism, Congregationalism etc. The idea was to not allow Congress to make any law respecting the establishment of religion,(which means setting up a national religion favored over all others) such as those or any others, be they Methodism, Lutheranism or Dutch Reformed, or Judaism or Quakerism.
That was what was meant by the First Amendment's language - not the hoped for attack on Christianity so much desired by moderns. It meant specific religions, and not just Christianity. It meant the US government could not have a national religion. Nothing else. And anything else is intellectual dishonesty and sociological baseless hype.
Do people ever stop to consider how stupid it is to say that a group of highly educated, largely Christian patriots (of various religious affiliations) set down a law only about their general religious persuasion and only to deter its free practice in the US? Please think.
Why, I wonder, are the enemies of religion, and of Christianity more specifically, so afraid of religious people? Are we dangerous like Pol Pot, and Hitler and Stalin and Kim Jung Il? Are we fanatics who behead people? Have we ever tried to establish any one religion as the 'national' religion? And please remember, Christianity is not a monolith, one size fits all religious persuasion. The facts do not support it, no matter how strident and vicious the attackers get, the facts are just not there - only boring baseless anti-religious fears taught by intellectually dishonest persons in books, carefully choreographed television segments etc. Fears borne of osmosis, and not thought.