God And Government

The Newsweek item linked below can be both informative and instructive provided one is willing to wade into the whole thing with an open mind and not try to seize upon one portion, or quote for flame bait to attract attention to oneself. Like many on the Right, I always saw the so-called "Christian Right" as fatally flawed in political terms. It appears as though Cal Thomas understood that.

The columnist Cal Thomas was an early figure in the Moral Majority who came to see the Christian American movement as fatally flawed in theological terms. "No country can be truly 'Christian'," Thomas says. "Only people can. God is above all nations, and, in fact, Isaiah says that 'All nations are to him a drop in the bucket and less than nothing'." Thinking back across the decades, Thomas recalls the hope—and the failure. "We were going through organizing like-minded people to 'return' America to a time of greater morality. Of course, this was to be done through politicians who had a difficult time imposing morality on themselves!"

I'm less concerned about what's happened in the past, than I am about where the Right and center-Right go next.

Certain elements on the Right need to make up their mind as to whether they want to have primarily a political discussion, or a religious one. Certainly they can have both. But they are not the same thing. The "Christian Right" over-stepped in instances where it failed to realize that. Still, that doesn't mean one's faith can't, or shouldn't influence one's politics at all.

For me, the only real issue is this: in what force or power do you want to source your sense of "rights." The Founders understood the importance of that question, which is why they sourced them to Nature's God in the Declaration of Independence, and acknowledged them as blessings in the Constitution itself. They never invested them in any Church, Christian or otherwise.

But there's a baby with the bath water problem in a mostly juvenile over-reaction against whatever the Christian Right is, or was. The Founders had enough sense to not simply invest our rights in our political processes alone. Processes, as with most anything of man, can be corrupted and co-opted. It happens all the time.

Bottom line, if you want to tear down anything and everything beyond man, then man is the only concept you have left in which to invest your rights. And once you do that, rest assured, one day some man is going to come along and take them away.

The End Christian America

"What we are seeing now is the evidence of a pattern that began a very long time ago of intellectual and cultural and political changes in thought and mind. The conditions have changed. Hard to pinpoint where, but whatever came after the Enlightenment was going to be very different than what came before." And what comes next here, with the ranks of professing Christians in decline, is going to be different, too.

Different, perhaps. But I wouldn't quite call it the end of anything. It's simply another chapter in a discussion that has been on going for over two hundred years.

Comments

[Reggie]

No.

Multi-culturalism will never work no matter what laws and promotion you put into it.

While many Americans are suppressing the spread of its version of Christianity around the world and now inside the country, other Religions are gaining ground. Note that No Religion at all is a religion too.

Look at France, the most advanced country in denying Christianity and multi-culturalism. Don't you know how oppressed the so-called Christians in that country? Don't you know how problematic the growing Muslim population in that country? Don't you know that many "nihilists" in that country are throwing their country in sewage?

So get a life. Get a religion. You know the better religion. You're just denying it in your heart.

[Rick]

Our founders were right. We had better hope (pray) that we do not become a Godless nation. If our rights do not come from God then they can be taken away by men.
Morality is not just a religious or sexual concept,however. Providing for your family, for instance, is a moral concept. When the government relieves you of that responsibility through welfare, food stamps, etc. the government also relieves you of the liberty of conducting your family affairs without interferrence.
Liberty and responsibility are flip sides of the same coin. When the government relieves you of one side of the coin the other side is sure to follow.

[tjproudamerican]

While I agree that Multi-Culturism will never work, it shocks me how little culture Americans get in their education. Most college students know very little about the great Western Tradition, Western History, or anything we used to learn in school.

But, shockingly, they know no other tradition in its place, either. They grow up acultural and apolitical and ahistorical.

I suppose when Democrats win elections, people will say this non-culture favors Democrats, and when Republicans win, they will say it favors Republicans or is a call to end ignorance. But really, it is sad and nobody who thinks, loves ideas, values art and religion and philosophy and all those other important signs of an educated person, can be happy about the sorry state of American Education and Culture.

We should call Multi-culturism by what it is: anti-culturism.

[You can call me Owl]

You are quite right. Our rights do not come from God, they come from man and they are only as inalienable as the men who give them. The only right God gives Christian believers is the right to be his children. Rather than rights, God gives believers obligations tempered by grace. I have an obligation to God to love my brother as myself. There is no mention by God of my brother's right to my love. If everyone in the world observed these obligations to God, then the question of rights would be moot. Rights are essential for the non-Christian world (the one we live in) where no one really wants to observe obligations to God and will not observe them if they can get away with it. Man steps into this void to give these so-called rights as part of the social compact and enforces them with the rule of law. But what man does is flawed and temporary and changeable, and it always will be. The founders were not unified in their belief of God, but they were wise enough to have the rights reflect Christian obligations. That was a temporary solution that worked pretty well for 200 years. It is probably just about over.

[toritto]

Pretty sad when half the country believes that the world is 5,000 years old, that we all descended from Adam and Eve (by the way, if Eve only had sons how was that possible? Oh never mind) and that a wafer can be turned into the actual body and blood of a long dead Jew by mumbling in Latin over it.

Yes I know....that's cruel. Usually I keep my mouth shut about such things. Atheists are the most oppressed minority in America, even though there are tens of millions of us. We have had white male office-holders, women, Jews, African -Americans, gays, a Vietnamese, an Indian-American governor, native-Americans and a black President.....but NOBODY ever runs as a non-believer. So I quietly go about my life, make fun of no one's beliefs and mind my own business.

Might as well worship Zeus for all the good it will go you.

Blame the Egyptians.....

"How many are your deeds,
though hidden from sight.
O sole God without equal !
You made the Earth as You desired, You alone.
With people, cattle, and all creatures.
With everything upon Earth that walks on legs,
and all that is on high and flies with its wings.

Every leg is on the move since You founded the Earth,
You rouse them for your son, who emerged from your body."

...from the walls at Amarna, 1350 BC

[Jimbo]

I think you are talking about spirits here, right? Spirits? Spirits in the sky (I think that's a song, no?) Listen, take care of your children and your parents. Take care of yourself and look to your neighbors for help and support. The spirits you speak of have been manufactured for citizen control since time began. Kings used the illusion of God to control and direct his/her uneducated and uninformed populace. God is a human invention, designed for non religous reasons. The fact that rumors are allowed to grow into these entities is a testament to the shallowness of humans. All religions thinks thiers is the best, and yours is the worst - all of them. Think about it: Nations have gone to war and killed REAL PEOPLE to fight another group of REAL PEOPLE over what amounts to a rumor (the existance of God). I would suggest the greater fool is the one who believes his or her God is bigger, stronger, and tougher than all others. Be good to yourself and your country.

[Steve J.]

Mohler and his allies are one of the main reasons people have
turned away from fundamentalism.

[Michelle]

There is a vast difference between promoting a particular religion verses acknowledging God. The founders acknowledged God as the source of the rights they claimed, but rejected the idea of a particular sect or denomination or even "Christianity" as a state religion.

It is not infantile or unsophisticated to believe in God. The concept of God has been been used and abused by people all through the ages of history, but this hardly destroys God Himself.

If your rights do not come from God, then you have none. I'm sorry for you. My rights do come from God, this does not mean people will not try to take them away, but this does give me permission to fight for them and it does assure me of divine justice in the next life, if not in this.

[toritto]

Michelle: "My rights do come from God"

Well said. Could have come from the mouth of Louis XVI or Czar Nicholas II.

:-)

[North Dallas Thirty]

"Pretty sad when half the country believes that the world is 5,000 years old, that we all descended from Adam and Eve (by the way, if Eve only had sons how was that possible? Oh never mind) and that a wafer can be turned into the actual body and blood of a long dead Jew by mumbling in Latin over it."

Including the Obamamessiah, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, apparently.

http://race42008.com/2008/05/12/barack-obamas-pitch-in-kentucky/

Then again, since Obama, Pelosi, and Reid lie about everything else, it wouldn't surprise us if they were lying about their religious beliefs, too.

[toritto]

north dallas thirty: As I said, nobody but nobody runs as a non-believer.

Atheists for the most part keep their mouths shut.

:-)

[WM]

The Founding Fathers NEVER said that man's rights came directly from God. This is something that somebody in the Christian right movement came up with. There were two competing viewpoints about the source of rights during the Founding era: That rights came from the social contract, or it came from natural law, i.e., man's nature, and it is discovered by reason. In the end, the natural law viewpoint gained hegemony, and for good reason. The social contract viewpoint is a passkey to subjectivism.

[surynan]

It was, as the founders said, self-evident that all men are created, therefore there is a God who created us, and therefore we have a right to continue living. This creator gives us minds and hearts that can't be known by others, thereby granting us the right to at least the freedom of thought and belief; other freedoms such as the right to speak our thoughts can be extrapolated from that.
It was self-evident, before we became so sophisticated and superior in intellect to the founding fathers. Their work was followed by 200 years of growth and prosperity. It amazes me that average people can confidently assume they know better than the generations that bought and defended what they now carelessly hold in open hands. We shall have to see if the results of freeing ourselves of God's oppressive rights-granting will work out better than what went before.

[seekeronos]

Individual Sovereignty and Rights are indeed sourced from the Most High Sovereign, that is, God... and using Reason along with a knowledge of the Creator's will and His Word, we can define laws (such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights) which spell out those rights in exact detail.

However, the maintenance and protection of such Sovereignty and its associated Rights are largely secured at the point of a weapon, especially firearms.

In Stalin's Russia, and Mao's China... the government and the Party held the rights, and the peasants had little recourse to whatever abuses those godless governments sought to carry out against their populations, to the death toll of some several dozen millions of their citizens.

For the long part of history in the USA, liberty and freedom and one's rights were secured by the maintenance of firearms by a majority, if not a sizeable portion of the citizenry; in like manner, the Native Americans suffered from a deficit of firepower against the Union Army, and were unable for the most part, to defend their lands from encroachment and subsequent dispossession.

Now, when men FORGET GOD, and try to drag Him down from His throne (it shall not be done, for He is the Creator and we are but dust to Him) it comes at a grave price: He turns His back upon that nation, and lets it experience the results of its folly.

It is when we try to put God away, that we discover that our rights are no longer sourced from the Divine, but are rather *granted* to us by men with bigger and better guns.

[seekeronos]

Surynan:

"--- It amazes me that average people can confidently assume they know better than the generations that bought and defended what they now carelessly hold in open hands. ---"

It's called the foolish, boastful pride of man, and his highly polished toys which tell him that his society "sits as a queen..."

Reflect upon this verse from Isaiah:

"----- Therefore hear now this, thou that art given to pleasures, that dwellest carelessly, that sayest in thine heart, I am, and none else beside me; I shall not sit as a widow, neither shall I know the loss of children: But these two things shall come to thee in a moment in one day, the loss of children, and widowhood: they shall come upon thee in their perfection for the multitude of thy sorceries, and for the great abundance of thine enchantments. -----" (Isaiah 47:8-9, KJV)

God doesn't operate in a vacuum. The seeds of sin sown today and yesterday - 40 million unborn children mercilessly slaughtered, unfettered sexual deviancy (whether homo- or hetero- ) and willful defiance of God's commandments and a refusal to publicly honour Him as God... shall reap an horrible harvest for us all.

[WAHOO WILLIE]

"with the ranks of professing Christians in decline"

Some may notice the term "PROFESSING" Christians which may have very little to do with belieing or practicing Christians. After years and years of being attacked by the left in every form and media, some people simply do not want to bother confessing Christ in order to be vilified and beat down by "tolerant" leftists for thier beliefs.

[SDN]

Which, unfortunately, WAHOO WILLIE, means that they are not Christians as defined by Christ Himself.

Luke 12:8-9 Also I say unto you, whosoever shall confess Me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God. But he that denieth Me before men shall be denied before the angels of God.

[WAHOO WILLIE]

SDN...Absolutely right. Then I've long thought that the majority of "religious" people's beliefs were fairly shallow. You know...the ones who are on the front row Sun morning with a hangover. For some playing church is business networking. Let's face it. Ifd the majority of folks who "profess" to be Christian actually acted like it it would be a better country and a better world.