Marko Kloos
Inactive
I don't care what all these people said about religion. (Although I can dig up anti-religious quotes from every one of those illustrious figures, if you want to really play a round of The Founding Fathers Are On My Side.)
What I do care about is what they wrote into the Constitution, and it is completely silent on a "religious base for moral government" or any such claptrap. In fact, the Constitution does not mention God, Jesus, or Christianity once, and the only mention of religion in the Bill of Rights (the amendments to that Constitution) is restrictive ("Congress Shall Make No Law..."), and restricting government at that. When the Constitution mentions religion at all, it is only in restrictive terms regarding government, i.e. "No religious tests shall be required for office", and such.
I don't care about the faith of my neighbor. I don't care what god he worships, or whether he worships none at all. I don't care whether his kids pray in school on their own time, and I don't care what kind of holiday display they set up on their own or rented property. I don't care how often a day he prays, and whether he says "God bless you" when I sneeze. It simply "neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my bones", to speak with Jefferson.
I do care about people who try to make me or my children acknowledge or please their deity by force of law, using public resources which they are prohibited from using for religious purposes except under very limiting conditions. I care about people who claim that I'm either not a true American, or that I cannot possibly know morality or right and wrong without also believing in their particular deity.
Those people may just feel more comfortable in an environment that encourages such actions, but they have no right to push their faith by force of law in the United States, under this Constitution, regardless of what the framers of that Constitution believed in regards to their cosmic origin. See, they were smart enough to realize that religion is a personal and private thing, and that government has no business promoting or hindering any religious activity...because that always leads to the pack of believers with the most votes or guns pushing their cosmology on everyone else.
Ah yes, the good old days, when people believed in God, the Darkies knew their place, and Jane had a Martini ready for Dick when he came back to his Nuclear Family after a fruitful day at work.
The country had a whole bunch of serious problems in the 1940s and 1950s, not the least of which was some of the selfsame oh-so-moral and God-fearing people stringing dark-hued folks up on trees and making a public fiesta out of it. That's right...lynchings were common, blacks couldn't vote in vast stretches of the USA, women couldn't get a bank account or apartment lease without their husbands' permission (wonder why the divorce rate was lower back then?), and Congress was deeply concerned with hijacking the Pledge of Allegiance for Jesus, so God Himself would know that we were better than the heathen commies. Not satisfied with that, they also made sure everyone made a religious statement every time they pay with U.S. paper currency. (Imagine how pleased God must be every time some drunk stuffs a piece of paper with His name on it into a stripper's g-string, or into the hand of a crack dealer.)
And high school was not the utopia of Leave it to Beaver back then...fully 50% of American high school kids did not graduate, and only 50 percent of eigth-graders even continued to high school. And violence? Do a search on switchblade laws, when they originated, and why they came about. I'll give you a hint: "Blackboard Jungle".
Food for thought, indeed.
What I do care about is what they wrote into the Constitution, and it is completely silent on a "religious base for moral government" or any such claptrap. In fact, the Constitution does not mention God, Jesus, or Christianity once, and the only mention of religion in the Bill of Rights (the amendments to that Constitution) is restrictive ("Congress Shall Make No Law..."), and restricting government at that. When the Constitution mentions religion at all, it is only in restrictive terms regarding government, i.e. "No religious tests shall be required for office", and such.
I don't care about the faith of my neighbor. I don't care what god he worships, or whether he worships none at all. I don't care whether his kids pray in school on their own time, and I don't care what kind of holiday display they set up on their own or rented property. I don't care how often a day he prays, and whether he says "God bless you" when I sneeze. It simply "neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my bones", to speak with Jefferson.
I do care about people who try to make me or my children acknowledge or please their deity by force of law, using public resources which they are prohibited from using for religious purposes except under very limiting conditions. I care about people who claim that I'm either not a true American, or that I cannot possibly know morality or right and wrong without also believing in their particular deity.
Those people may just feel more comfortable in an environment that encourages such actions, but they have no right to push their faith by force of law in the United States, under this Constitution, regardless of what the framers of that Constitution believed in regards to their cosmic origin. See, they were smart enough to realize that religion is a personal and private thing, and that government has no business promoting or hindering any religious activity...because that always leads to the pack of believers with the most votes or guns pushing their cosmology on everyone else.
Ah yes, the good old days, when people believed in God, the Darkies knew their place, and Jane had a Martini ready for Dick when he came back to his Nuclear Family after a fruitful day at work.
The country had a whole bunch of serious problems in the 1940s and 1950s, not the least of which was some of the selfsame oh-so-moral and God-fearing people stringing dark-hued folks up on trees and making a public fiesta out of it. That's right...lynchings were common, blacks couldn't vote in vast stretches of the USA, women couldn't get a bank account or apartment lease without their husbands' permission (wonder why the divorce rate was lower back then?), and Congress was deeply concerned with hijacking the Pledge of Allegiance for Jesus, so God Himself would know that we were better than the heathen commies. Not satisfied with that, they also made sure everyone made a religious statement every time they pay with U.S. paper currency. (Imagine how pleased God must be every time some drunk stuffs a piece of paper with His name on it into a stripper's g-string, or into the hand of a crack dealer.)
And high school was not the utopia of Leave it to Beaver back then...fully 50% of American high school kids did not graduate, and only 50 percent of eigth-graders even continued to high school. And violence? Do a search on switchblade laws, when they originated, and why they came about. I'll give you a hint: "Blackboard Jungle".
Food for thought, indeed.