tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87278197474996525182023-11-15T22:52:56.892-08:00Political ViewpointUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-81391667572435801452012-03-31T13:03:00.000-07:002019-09-05T03:47:30.982-07:00A Nation "Blessed By God"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdtrfOyzBYWfzZF8gfg5gn2sLPcbfA7L28X16HvbzUV7de-nQab4ENv8-iScK1J1Yuuk0VjISUL0xrKnF460W-7IaiDZ_nAO5CeKX2_BAZnJxZ73mIrwIqhm-SNqZ_xgHUQ3DZPf0gG74X/s1600/img.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdtrfOyzBYWfzZF8gfg5gn2sLPcbfA7L28X16HvbzUV7de-nQab4ENv8-iScK1J1Yuuk0VjISUL0xrKnF460W-7IaiDZ_nAO5CeKX2_BAZnJxZ73mIrwIqhm-SNqZ_xgHUQ3DZPf0gG74X/s400/img.jpg" width="400" height="200" data-original-width="628" data-original-height="314" /></a></div>
<p><strong>DO WE WANT A NATION “BLESSED” BY GOD?</strong><br />Numerous Christian organizations are eager for America to seek the “blessings of God.” But have they studied what happened to that other nation “blessed by God,” the nation of Israel? Hmmm, let’s see…According to the Bible, the God of Israel tried to kill Moses (and failed); struck dead two sons of Aaron; commanded “brother to kill brother” leading to the deaths of 3,000 Israelites (right after He gave them the commandment, “Do not kill”); opened up the earth and buried alive “wives, sons and little children;” sent a fire that consumed 148 Levite princes; cursed his people to wander in the desert for forty years and eat 40,000 meals of quail and “manna” (talk about a monotonously torturous diet--and when they complained about it, God killed 3,000 Israelites with a plague); had a man put to death for picking up sticks on the Sabbath; <a name='more'></a> denied Moses and Aaron entrance into the “promised land” because Moses struck a rock twice with his staff instead of talking to the rock; delivered to his people a “promised land” that was parched, bordered by desert, and a corridor for passing conquering armies; sent fiery serpents among Israel, killing many; wanted to kill every Israelite and start over with Moses and his family (but Moses talked God out of that plan); drove the first king of Israel to suicide; killed someone who tried to steady a teetering ark of the covenant; murdered king David’s innocent child; sent plagues and famines upon his people that killed men, women and children; ordered the execution of 42 children of the king of Judah; “smote all Israel” killing half a million men of Israel in a civil war between Israel and Judah; “delivered into the hand of the king of Israel” 120,000 Judeans massacred in one day along with 200,000 Jewish women and children; gave Satan the power to kill Job’s children and servants (in order to win a bet); let the Babylonians conquer the holy city of Jerusalem, and then the Greek forces of Alexander the Great, followed by the Romans; and finally left the Jews homeless and persecuted by Christians and Moslems for nearly 2000 years. Furthermore, the large number of laws in the Hebrew Bible concerning the treatment of lepers and those with sores demonstrates that the Israelites were far from being blessed with unparalleled good health. And archeological evidence indicates that in ancient Israel the infant mortality rate was as high as fifty percent.</p>
<p>So, knowing everything that happened to that nation “blessed by God,” I’ve got to ask the Religious Right WHAT THE #%$?! ARE THEY THINKING?<br />E.T.B. [See the Bible for all of the cases mentioned above, except for the archeological evidence concerning ancient Israel’s infant mortality rate. For the latter see, Drorah O’Donnell Setel, “Abortion,” The Oxford Guide to Ideas & Issues of the Bible, ed. by Bruce Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (Oxford University Press, 2001)]</p>
<p><strong>ANOTHER NATION THAT INVOKED “GOD’S BLESSING”: THE SOUTH</strong><br />After the states of the South seceded from the Northern states in the U.S., the Confederacy drew up its own separate Constitution and made sure it contained an invocation to God: “We, the people...invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God…”</p>
<p>Learning what the South had done, a few legislators in the North drafted bills to have a Divine invocation added to the Constitution in the North, but all such bills were voted down. To this day (2004), the U.S. Constitution does not mention “God” nor invoke “God’s favor and guidance.” It does however, guarantee “freedom of religion.”</p>
<p>E.T.B. (See The Confederate Constitutions, compiled by Charles Robert Lee, Jr.)</p>
<p><strong>“FORCED RELIGION STINKS IN GOD’S NOSTRILS”</strong><br />The "godly and zealous" Roger Williams was a prime example of an extreme separatist. He arrived in Massachusetts in 1631 and was elected minister of the church in Salem in 1635. But his opposition to the alliance of church and civil government turned both ministers and magistrates of the colony against him. He insisted that government magistrates should have no voice in spiritual matters and that "forced religion stinks in God's nostrils." He also advanced the radical idea that it was "a national sin" for anyone, including the king, to take possession of any American land without buying it from the Indians. For these teachings he was banished by the General Court. Williams departed Massachusetts in January 1636, traveling south to the head of Narragansett Bay. There he worked out mutually acceptable arrangements with the local Indians and founded the town of Providence. In 1644, after obtaining a charter from Parliament, he established the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. The government was relatively democratic, all religions were tolerated, and church and state were rigidly separated. Whatever Williams's temperamental excesses, he was more than ready to practice what he preached when given the opportunity.</p>
<p>Dr. Priest’s Magical History Tour, AP U.S. History, On-line History Textbook, Chapter One, <a href="http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/uhs/WebSite/Courses/APUSH/1st%20Sem/Garraty%20Short%20History%20Chapters%201-18/chapter_one.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Europe Discovers America</a></p>
<p><strong>KEEPING THE LORD’S DAY “HOLY” IN AMERICA (FOLLOWED BY QUOTATIONS ON THE "RELIGIOUS RIGHT")</strong><br />Stringent laws regarding the Christian Sabbath were enacted in New England in Puritan days. (These laws were called “blue laws” because they were written on blue paper.) The prohibition against working on the Sabbath was strictly enforced. A public flogging was the penalty for violation. No food could be cooked, no beds were to be made, cutting hair and shaving were prohibited. A mother could not kiss her child on the Sabbath. Riding on this holy day or walking in the garden was prohibited. Even a sick relative or friend could not be visited if it were necessary to ride to his house. The only thing permitted was to walk “reverently to and from church.”</p>
<p>One man was fined for being about on the Sabbath; his excuse that he was running to save a man from drowning did not help him. As late as 1831 a lady was arrested within sight of her father’s house and fined for unnecessary travel on a Sunday. To violate these provisions of the Sabbath observance in a manner calculated to “defy” the Lord was punishable with death.</p>
<p>A charge of non-attendance at church was brought against William Bladgen of New Haven in 1647. He pleaded that he had fallen into the water late on Saturday, and since he could not light a fire on Sunday to dry his clothes, he had lain in bed to keep warm while his only suit of garments was drying. His excuse was not accepted, and he was sentenced to be “publicly whipped.”</p>
<p>When Captain Kemble returned to Boston in 1656 after a three years’ journey, his wife met him on the doorstep, and embraced and kissed him. For this “vulgar” display of human affection on Sunday, he was kept in the public stocks for two hours.</p>
<p>An incident recorded in the Columbian Centinel of December, 1789, is worth mentioning: “The President [George Washington], on his return to New York from his late tour through Connecticut, having missed his way on Saturday, was obliged to ride a few miles on Sunday morning in order to gain the town at which he had proposed to attend divine service. Before he arrived, however, he was met by a tithing man, who, commanding him to stop, demanded the occasion of his riding; and it was not until the President had informed him of every circumstance and promised to go no further than the town that the tithing man would permit him to proceed on his journey.”~</p>
<p>In 1658, James Watt was reproved “for writing a note about common business on the Lord’s Day, at least in the evening somewhat too soon.” In 1646, Aquila Chase, of Newbury, and his wife were fined for gathering peas from their own garden on the Sabbath. In 1772, William Estes, of Wareham, acknowledged that he was guilty of raking hay on the Sabbath, and was fined ten shillings. In 1774, another citizen of Wareham was fined for “pulling apples on the Sabbath.” A Dunstable soldier, for “wetting a piece of old hat to put in his shoe” to protect his feet, was fined forty shillings.~</p>
<p>A New Haven man was severely whipped and fined for declaring that he received no profit from the minister’s sermons. In Windham, in 1729, a most unregenerate citizen was guilty of “vile and slanderous expressions” when he declared that “I would rather hear my dog bark than Mr. Bellamy preach.” In 1631, Phillip Ratcliffe, for “speaking against the church,” was whipped and had his ears cut off. An extremely wicked man in Hartford who had the temerity to say that “he hoped to meet some of the members of the church in Hell before long, and he did not question that he would,” was put in the pillory and severely whipped.~</p>
<p>Even as late as 1840, a rich old lady provoked a nine-day discussion by providing herself with a cushion to sit on to relieve her aching back caused by the hard, straight-back benches.</p>
<p>In the law books of that period is recorded this case: “His Majesty’s tithing man entered complaint against Jona and Susan Smith, that on the Lord’s Day during Divine Service they did smile.”</p>
<p>The petty insults and embarrassments, to say nothing of the beatings and whippings inflicted on “sinners” of that time by the fanatical Sabbatarians, seem incredible.</p>
<p>So fanatical did the Puritan Christian become in the observance of the Sabbath that in order to be certain that he would not violate a single minute of the precious day, he began to observe it from sundown on Saturday until Sunday night. Superstition filled the air, and the slightest infraction of the rules and regulations intensified the fear.</p>
<p>An incident is recorded of a man who was hired by the day to finish a job and who worked an hour after sundown on Saturday. The next day his little child was left alone for a while. She fell into an uncovered well in the cellar of the house and was drowned. It is said that the father freely, “in open congregation, did acknowledge it the righteous hand of God for his profaning his holy day.” Imagine believing that a God would kill a child in retaliation for her father’s working on the Sabbath!</p>
<p>As late as 1855, shops in Hartford, Connecticut, were not open on Saturday evening. However, there lived at that time some people with both a sense of humor and a bit of courage, and here and there a poet with a little reason would write:~</p>
<p>“And let it be enacted further still<br />That all our people strict observe our will;<br />Five days and a half shall men, and women, too,<br />Attend their business and their birth pursue,<br />But after that no man without a fine<br />Shall walk the streets or at a tavern dine;<br />One day and halt ‘tis respite to rest<br />From toilsome labor and a tempting feast.<br />Henceforth let none on peril of their lives<br />Attempt a journey or embrace their wives;<br />No barber, foreign or domestic-bred,<br />Shall ever presume to dress a lady’s head;<br />No shop shall sell (half the preceding day)<br />A yard of ribbon or an ounce of tea.”</p>
<p>And there is still heard this rhymed warning:</p>
<p>“Better a child had ne’er been born<br />Than cut her nails on a Sunday morn!”</p>
<p>And:</p>
<p>“Sunday shaver, Sunday shorn,<br />Better hadst thou ne’er been born!”</p>
<p>How fanatical human beings could become over their observance of this Commandment is shown by Carl Sandburg in discussing “Stonewall” Jackson:~”Stonewall’s reverence for the Sabbath went so far that he wouldn’t mail a letter to his wife on Sunday, or open one from her that arrived that day. But, ‘with the blessing of an ever-kind Providence,’ he would, ‘fight, slay and deliver doom to the enemy if on the Sabbath the enemy looked ready for punishment.’”</p>
<p>The stringency of the Sabbath laws in this country is described by Herbert Asbury.~”When I was a boy in Farmington, Sunday was a day of dreadful gloom; over everything hung an atmosphere of morbid fear and dejection. In the morning the whole town donned its Sunday suit, almost always black and funereal and depressing, and therefore becoming to religious practice, and trudged sorrowfully and solemnly to Sunday school and to church, there to wail doleful hymns and hear an unlearned man...beseech the Lord upon the universal prayer theme of ‘gimme.’ Then the village marched, in mournful cadence, back home for Sunday dinner.” After removing their Sabbath raiment until after supper, “the family clutched its Bibles and wandered forth despairingly to evening service. We could not play games on Sunday; card playing was an invention of the Devil and could not be played on any day, but on Sunday the children were not allowed to play such games as Lotto, Old Maid and Authors. The Lord did not approve of Sunday-night suppers, and so we could not have them. In the homes of the godly, there was only a cold snack for the evening meal. It was considered sinful to light a fire in the cookstove after twelve o’clock. Dancing on Sunday was considered the Sin of Sins. Sunday newspapers were not considered religious.”</p>
<p>On July 27, 1927, Governor John G. Richards of South Carolina made a statement expressing his determination to “close up South Carolina tight on Sundays.” He said: “I regard the great national sin today, the want of a proper observance of the Sabbath. Much of the present-day lawlessness can be traced to the fact that people are neglecting religion in order that they may make a sporting event of Sunday. Normal conditions can be restored by regard for religious requirements of the Sabbath.” The Governor admitted that with blue laws enforced, there was still much lawlessness in the State, but he thought that could be remedied if everything was closed down on the Sabbath day.~</p>
<p>On Sunday, July 31, 1927,~in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, these conditions prevailed: No automobile was permitted on the streets; no cars could pass through the city from midnight Saturday until midnight Sunday; parking in front of one’s own home was prohibited; no man, woman or child was permitted to bathe in the surf; a messenger could not deliver a telegram on his bicycle, but had to walk a mile from Asbury Park, or get off his bicycle and wheel it into Ocean Grove. A newspaper published a photograph of William Young, a messenger boy, wheeling his bicycle to deliver a rush telegram. No ice cream could be purchased; if one wanted a plate of ice cream, one had to go to a restaurant owned by the Sunday Association and order a whole meal costing a dollar. Sunday newspapers were taboo. Even special-delivery letters could not be delivered. Dentists were not permitted to treat patients, and all drugstores were closed.</p>
<p>The delicious dish of ice cream covered with syrup now known as a “sundae” is an invention to circumvent the law passed in many States prohibiting the sale of ice-cream sodas on Sunday as a desecration of the Sabbath. Soda dispensers circumvented the law by serving ice cream, which was considered a food, covered with syrup, as a Sabbath substitute for ice-cream sodas, and so the “sundae” came into existence!~</p>
<p>On November 9, 1930, Richard Hannah, 18, was shot to death and his brother George, 22, was wounded while they were resisting arrest for violating the blue law prohibiting Sunday hunting in Chardon, Ohio.</p>
<p>On December 2, 1927, members of the City Council of Lawrenceville, Illinois, planned to introduce an ordinance prohibiting housewives from preparing dinner on Sunday and to prevent physicians from attending the sick.~</p>
<p>On May 2, 1927, an artist was arrested in Baltimore, Maryland, for painting a picture on Sunday.</p>
<p>Blue laws in East Orange, New Jersey, prohibited the showing of moving pictures on Sunday, but they were permitted in Orange, New Jersey. A theatre on the borderline between the two cities divided the theatre with a rope, and special ushers were hired to see that no one sat on the side of the house that was in East Orange!~</p>
<p>On December 12, 1926, in Irvington, New Jersey, ninety-five people were fined for violating the Sabbath law. These arch criminals were guilty of selling cigars, toothpaste, gasoline, shoe polish, ice cream and tin whistles.</p>
<p>Joseph Lewis, The Ten Commandments: An Investigation into the Origin and Meaning of The Decalogue and an Analysis of its Ethical and Moral Value as a Code of Conduct in Modern Society, “The Fourth Commandment,” sub-section, “Christianity and the Sabbath” (Freethought Press Association New York, N. Y., 1946) [online]</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>Zachary Taylor, the winner of the U.S. presidential election of 1848, took the “Lord’s Day” so seriously, that he refused to take the oath of office on a Sunday. So David Rice Atchison, president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, stood in for him as president for 24 hours, and Taylor was sworn in on Monday.<br />E.T.B.</p>
<p><br /><strong>THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT</strong></p>
<p>Religion is a queer thing. By itself, it’s all right. But sprinkle a little politics into it and dynamite is bran flour compared with it.</p>
<p>Finley Peter Dunne’s “Mr. Dooley”</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>The Christian Right do not call upon their faith to certify their politics as much as they call for a country that certifies their faith. Fundamentalism really cannot help itself--it is absolutist and can compromise with nothing, not even democracy. It is not surprising that immediately after the Islamic fundamentalist attack on the World Trade Center’s twin towers and the Pentagon, two prominent Christian fundamentalists (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson) were reported to have accounted it a justifiable punishment by God for our secularism. In thus honoring the foreign killers of almost 3,000 Americans as agents of God’s justice, they established their blood brotherhood with the principle of righteous warfare in the name of all that is holy, and gave their pledge of allegiance to the theocratic ideal of government of whatever sacred text.</p>
<p>E. L. Doctorow, Reporting the Universe (Harvard)</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>I’m not convinced that faith can move mountains, but I’ve seen what it can do to skyscrapers.</p>
<p>William H. Gascoyne, “One-liners,” Op/Ed section, San Jose Mercury, Jan. 20, 2004</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT IN IRAQ</strong><br />In post-Saddam Iraq many children are being educated in private Islamic fundamentalist schools where they learn to memorize the Koran, rather than being prepared for a world of complex diverse knowledge and higher paying jobs. Therefore, such schools breed further misunderstandings between world cultures, as well as perpetuate poverty, which in turn perpetuates anger. Moreover, as pointed out by professor W. Andrew Terrill (professor at the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, and the top expert on Iraq there), “I don’t think that you can kill the insurgency in Iraq. If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation. Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators. There’s talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents.”</p>
<p>W. Andrew Terrill, [Cited by Sidney Blumenthal, sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com, “Far graver than Vietnam,” The Guardian, Thursday September 16, 2004]</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN LEADER, PAT ROBERTSON, FLIP FLOPS ON THE NECESSITY OF “SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE” DEPENDING ON THE COUNTRY</strong><br />If the United States tries nation building [in Iraq], it’s got to [have] at the very top of its agenda a separation of church and state…It’s… imperative to set up a constitution and safeguards that say we will maintain a secular state.<br />- Pat Robertson, 700 Club broadcast, March 17, 2003 (cited in a March 18th press release from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State)</p>
<p>We have had a lie foisted on us that there is something in the Constitution [of the U.S.] called separation of church and state.- Pat Robertson , speech at the Christian Coalition “Road to Victory” Conference Oct. 12, 2002 (cited in a March 18th press release from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State)</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>President Bush is worried that Iraq is going to be overrun by religious fundamentalists. Hey, if it’s O.K. for the Republican party, it’s good enough for Iraq.</p>
<p>Jay Leno, The Tonight Show</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>We don’t want the establishment of a state religion here, as in Saudi Arabia, where the religious police are permitted to whip with sticks any woman not modestly attired. There aren’t enough trees in North America for the necessary sticks. You’d have to level Yellowstone just to deal with [insert name of hot female rock star].</p>
<p>James Lileks, “Bow Wow,” Fresh Lies</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>GUESS WHICH NATION’S CONSTITUTION EXPLICITLY EXCLUDES MENTION OF “GOD.”</strong><br />America is the first and only country to adopt a Constitution that specifically excludes all reference to a higher power. I say “specifically” because those meeting at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia considered and rejected any such reference. [They also considered and rejected whether or not to open their meetings with public prayer.--E.T.B.] Many bishops and preachers of the time warned that God would punish such decisions, but many were the preachers who said the same about the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, which did no more than state that no citizen could be obliged to pay for the upkeep of a church in which he did not believe.</p>
<p>Christopher Hitchens, “Believe It or Not: Making a Patriotic Case for those of Little Faith,” a review of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism by Susan Jacoby, in the Book World section of the Washington Post, April 25, 2004 [slight editing and one added sentence by E.T.B.]</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>DID JESUS PURSUE THE SAME GOALS AS TODAY’S RELIGIOUS RIGHT LEADERS?</strong><br />Was Jesus For Or Against the Separation of Church and State?<br />Jesus said, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”<br />- Matthew 22:21</p>
<p>Was Jesus For Or Against Public Prayer?<br />Jesus said, “And when thou pray, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward.~But thou, when thou pray, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father who sees in secret shall reward thee openly.”<br />- Matthew 6:5-6</p>
<p>Did Jesus Rail Against Abortion or Infanticide?<br />Jesus didn’t mention either topic, though the Hellenistic world not only employed abortifacents, but also abandoned unwanted newborns, usually females, to die (or be picked up by anyone who wished to raise the newborn as their slave).</p>
<p>So What Did Jesus Rail Against?<br />Jesus railed primarily against two things: 1) “the rich,” and, 2) overly pious, legalistic, self-righteous religious “hypocrites.” Those were his two priorities when it came to a good railing.</p>
<p>Jesus does not sound like the kind of person today’s Religious Right would let lead them.</p>
<p>E.T.B.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>WHAT IF JESUS RAN FOR PRESIDENT?</strong><br />Washington, D.C.--Jesus Christ formally declared himself a contender for the Republican presidential nomination today, amid growing controversy over his purported “anti-family” views.</p>
<p>Mr. Christ’s principal rivals for the GOP nomination were quick to cite an occasion reported in Luke 9:60, where Mr. Christ refused to allow one of his campaign volunteers time off to bury his father. One senator added that the next two verses of that same chapter show that Mr. Christ does not even permit his volunteers to so much as say goodbye to their families when they join his campaign. “That’s just plumb shameful,” deplored the senator.</p>
<p>Leaders of the religious right were even more critical of Mr. Christ’s stand on family issues. The head of the Christian Coalition quoted Matthew 10:35-36--verses, he insisted, that revealed Mr. Christ’s “secret plan” to destroy the traditional family: “For I am come to set a man at variance with his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” The head of the Christian Coalition added, “What further proof do we need that Mr. Christ is the enemy of all that is good and wholesome in American family life? Even the most extreme elements of the homosexual lobby haven’t proposed anything as subversive as this!”</p>
<p>Responding to rumors that Mr. Christ had sought to address a mass meeting of the male Christian organization known as “The Promise Keepers,” and had been turned away, the organization’s founder said that Mr. Christ’s appearance at the Promise Keeper’s rally would be “inappropriate,” given the organization’s avowed purpose of helping men become better husbands and fathers. Mr. McCartney said it is common knowledge that Mr. Christ is over thirty years of age, still unmarried, hints at the ideal of becoming “a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven” (Mat. 19:12), and leads a rootless, itinerant lifestyle. Furthermore, he noted, Mr. Christ encourages his married followers to leave their families behind when they come to work for him.</p>
<p>Hal Gordon, article in The Texas Triangle, Dec. 1, 1996</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>IF JESUS RAN FOR PRESIDENT, HOW WOULD HIS POLITICAL OPPONENTS COUNTER HIS STATEMENTS? </strong></p>
<p>Jesus: “Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you.”<br />COUNTER: Jesus favors more government handouts for welfare cheats.</p>
<p>Jesus: “Judge not, that you be not judged.”<br />COUNTER: Jesus is soft on crime.</p>
<p>Jesus: “Render unto Ceasar the things which are Caesar’s.”<br />COUNTER: Jesus will raise your taxes.</p>
<p>Jesus: “Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other.”<br />COUNTER: Can we trust Jesus to fight the War on Terror?</p>
<p>Jesus--Wrong on social services. Wrong on crime. Wrong on defense. Wrong for America.</p>
<p>Mad magazine</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>THE CHRISTIANIZED ROME EMPIRE STILL FELL</strong><br />After Christian Emperors assumed the leadership of Rome and began throwing state money and support at Christianity, many concrete “worldly” problems were no longer treated as such, but began being blamed on “Satan,” while the finest minds of the Empire were reduced to brooding over Biblical minutia and spiritual problems, from “sniffing out heresies” to “preserving one’s virginity.”</p>
<p>E.T.B.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>BIBLICAL ETHICAL RELATIVISM</strong><br />In the Bible you cannot find any verses that say polygamy, concubinage, slavery, or genocide are always and everywhere “sins.” In fact, according to the Bible such practices are perfectly acceptable to “God,” even praiseworthy--depending on the circumstances.</p>
<p>E.T.B.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>IS MORE CHRISTIANITY “THE ANSWER” TO A NATION’S WOES?</strong><br />The percentage of the U.S. population that is in prison is the highest percentage for any nation on earth. One child in five grows up in poverty in the U.S. (a conservative estimate). So we do not appear overly “blessed” when compared with nations that have lower crime rates, less poverty, and far fewer “Christians” than we do. Yet the U.S. spends more money on weapons of mass destruction than all other nations combined. Which makes you wonder, how exactly do those other nations, with fewer Christians, less Bible reading and less churchgoing, achieve lower crime rates, less poverty, lower rates of unplanned pregnancies, and higher educational test results?</p>
<p>Maybe “more Christianity” isn’t necessarily “the answer” to a nation’s woes?</p>
<p>E.T.B.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>THE UNITED STATES OF JESUS?</strong><br />For those who were caught off guard by the fundamentalist take-over of the Southern Baptist Convention (after which, the Southern Baptists suffered schisms, loss of donations, and isolated themselves from the rest of the world’s Baptists by quitting the World Baptist Alliance), consider this…What if fundamentalists took over the U.S.A.? Here’s their game plan as of 2003…</p>
<p>Rev. D. James Kennedy<br />For 30 years, the 73-year-old Reverend has been broadcasting The Coral Ridge Hour on Sunday mornings (with a combined listening and viewing audience of about 3.5 million) in front of his 9,000-member congregation. Kennedy held the first Reclaiming America conference in 1994. A year later, Kennedy opened the Center for Christian Statesmanship in Washington, D.C., and in 1996 founded the Center for Reclaiming America in Fort Lauderdale.</p>
<p>Richard Land<br />Richard Land is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and a speaker at the Reclaiming America conference. In 2001, Bush appointed Land to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, of which he is now chairman. Land has the ear of Karl Rove, the president’s closest adviser. In other words, he’s essentially part of the administration.</p>
<p>O’Neal Dozier<br />O’Neal Dozier founded the Worldwide Christian Center in 1985 in Pompano Beach. In 2001, Jeb Bush appointed him to the 17th Judicial Nominating Committee, which is the board that recommends lawyers for judicial seats in Broward County. A former linebacker with the Chicago Bears, Dozier received a law degree from John Marshall Law School in Chicago. Dozier freely mixes politics and religion in the pulpit…Quoting from the Old Testament book of Leviticus, Dozier declares that homosexuality is “an abomination,” which he defines as “something so nasty and disgusting that it makes God want to vomit.” “Why is it one of the paramount of sins?” he poses. “Well, it is a very bad kind of sin because it really hurts society in so many ways.” God, however, found a way to punish the homosexuals through HIV-AIDS, he says. “It is a type of judgment for such a sin as this one, homosexuality.” (E.T.B.’s Comment: See the sections on AIDS, HOMOSEXUALITY, and, DIVORCE)</p>
<p>Then there’s the matter of the death penalty. “Listen, God is 100 percent for capital punishment,” Dozier pronounces slowly and emphatically. “Oh, yeah, God knew some were going to slip through, a few innocent ones. He knew that. But you cannot have a society without capital punishment.” Murmurs of accord rise from Dozier’s audience. “You’re right,” calls out one woman. Dozier sees one sure way to ensure that these lofty ideals become the immutable law of the land: take over the world’s economy. “We ought to be the ones in charge of economics on this Earth,” he says. “Secondly, we as Christians must take control of the government. We should be the ones in charge of the government. Wouldn’t you agree with that?” Everyone nods and mutters in agreement… (E.T.B.’s Comment: Christians must take control of the government? See the sections, AMERICAN CHRISTIANS (BEFORE THE U.S. CONSTITUTION), THINGS CHRISTIANS HAVE BEEN AGAINST, and, KEEPING THE LORD’S DAY “HOLY” IN AMERICA)</p>
<p>Dozier also talks about “faith-based initiatives” that would provide federal tax dollars to church-run programs for the poor, elderly, and ill. “Do you know what it would mean for Christ if the church could have the money to take care of the poor?” he asks. “That means that the poor would come to the church and the poor would see Jesus as their God and not the government as their god.” (E.T.B.’s Comment: Funny, that’s exactly the way it was in the days of the Roman Empire under the Christian Emperors, “Imperial supplies of food and clothing, granted to the clergy to distribute to the poor, turned the ferociously inward-looking care of fellow-believers for each other, which had characterized the Christian churches of an earlier age, into something like a public welfare system, designed to alleviate, and to control, the urban poor as a whole.” [Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd Ed., (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p.78] And we know how that turned out. Christians competed with each other over doctrines, influence and money (both for the poor and for their churches), and the Empire still crumbled, all the while invoking the blessings and protection of the Christian God.)</p>
<p>Phil Kent<br />Atlanta political activist Phil Kent is there… handing out fliers called “Defending a Christian General,” referring to Jerry Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense, who came under fire for disparaging Islam. In one instance, Boykin told an audience that a Somalian warlord boasted that Allah would protect him from capture. “Well, my God is bigger than his god,” Boykin said. “I knew my God was a real god and his was an idol.” Kent’s defense is thus: “This is true!” Concerns by “left-wingers and atheists” that Boykin would inflame “our radical Islamic enemies” is a “joke,” according to Kent. (E.T.B.’s Comment: The real “joke” is that Boykin equates the “bigness” of his God with the size of America’s annual defense budget, larger than all other defense budgets of the world combined. Of course God does tend to “answer the prayers” of the most well equipped army, even if they aren’t praying.)</p>
<p>Roy Moore<br />Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore… covertly placed a 5,300-pound granite monument of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building…A federal court ordered the monument removed, but Moore refused…A state judicial ethics panel removed Moore from the Alabama Supreme Court for not complying with the court’s order. It’s not just Moore’s views on blending church and state that make him a hero to theocrats. Moore also hits a sweet spot with his views on gays. In denying a gay parent custody of a child in one court case, he wrote that homosexuality is “an inherent evil, an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it,” though he went on to do so: “abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature.” Government has the power “to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution,” he wrote. (E.T.B.’s Comment: See the sections on HOMOSEXUALITY, and, DIVORCE)</p>
<p>Wyatt Olson, “<a href="http://www.newtimesbpb.com/issues/2003-11-27/feature.html/1/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">United States of Jesus</a>: The Folks Who Are ‘Reclaiming America For Christ’ Are Pushing An Agenda For A Taliban-Like State Where Scripture Is Law,” copyright New Times Broward-Palm Beach all rights reserved</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>I am in favor of the separation of church and state. I figure, either of those institutions screws you up so much on its own, put them together, you got certain death.</p>
<p>George Carlin, Saturday Night Live, 1984</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-31492913434888001152012-03-30T16:12:00.001-07:002019-09-04T14:53:00.778-07:00The Bible, Prayer and American History<p><em>January 17, 2005</em></p>
<p>EDWARD T. BABINSKI'S CRITIQUE OF "<a href="http://www.salem-voice.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">BIBLE AND PRAYER IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA</a>" by PAUL CINIRAJ, SALEM VOICE, DEVALOKAM (P.O), KOTTAYAM, KERALA-686038, INDIA</p>
<p>ED: The author of the article is Indian. Is the history of the Bible and Prayer in America a big topic in India these days? He seems to have merely edited together bits and pieces of "Christian Nation" arguments found elsewhere on the web. Neither is the author aware of Christian scholars and historians who have produced critiques of "Christian Nation" arguments, like noted Church historian, Mark Noll, of Wheaton College (an Evangelical Christian institution). Had Paul sought out the works of fellow Evangelical Christians on this topic, he might have written a different article. *smile*</p>
<a name='more'></a>
<p>Speaking of India, I recently learned that in India they don't show people kissing in their movies. The lips of the movie actors may approach one another, but they then may change scenes or have the actors burst into song, and thus avoid showing the kiss. Catholic censors in Italy used to edit out kisses in movies too, according to the opening scene in Cinema Paradiso. Indians also take oaths in court with their hand on the Bhagavad-Gita rather than the Bible. Their families are close and loving. I know Indian students where I work: Parsis, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, all wonderful people. I also still hear from former Parsi neighbors, again, wonderful people. In American we have all heard about Mother Teresa, but there are hundreds of indigenous Indian charities that we never hear about that have done far more charitable work than Mother Teresa and her group. When the Bophal plant exploded, Mother Teresa's group showed up late and did little, yet rec'd most of the media coverage. By the way the 1997 winner of the million dollar Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion was a Hindu, Shastri Athavale, whose spiritual and social activism was inspired by the The Bhagavad Gita. Athavale has inspired hundreds of thousands of people to spend two weeks or more visiting India's poorest villages where they seek to advance the self-respect and economic condition of those they visit. For more than four decades Athavale has taught that service to God is incomplete without service to humanity.</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: The U.S. Constitution was founded on Biblical principles, and it was the intention of the authors for this to be a Christian nation.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: What the authors of the Constitution intended was "religious freedom," exactly as the first amendment guarantees. Quite a striking right to guarrantee, especially when compared with the first commandment ("though shalt have no other gods before me").</p>
<p>Also, many Christians despised "democracy" even after America's Constitution was ratified. Some despise it today, and, like Rev. Pat Robertson of the 700 Club, would rather see a "limited democracy under God" i.e., under Old Testament laws.</p>
<p>John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called democracy “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.”</p>
<p>In 1800 the Christian president of Yale University, Timothy Dwight, said: “The great object of democracy is to destroy every trace of civilization in the world and force mankind back into a savage state…We have a country governed by blockheads and knaves. [And after giving some horrible particulars he added] Can the imagination paint anything more dreadful this side of Hell?”</p>
<p>Pope Gregory XVI, the head of the Catholic church from 1831-1846, said, “From the polluted fountain of indifferentism flows that absurd and erroneous doctrine, or rather, raving, which claims and defends liberty of conscience for everyone. From this comes, in a word, the worst plague of all, namely, unrestrained liberty of opinion and freedom of speech…It is in no way lawful to demand, to defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, or speech, of writing, or of religion, as if they were so many rights that nature has given man.”</p>
<p>I have read that many colonists wanted to continue to obey the powers that be, King George in Britain, just as Saint Paul said to do. I've read that a third of people were in favor of a war of idependence, another third still sided with Britain, and the remainder just kept out of the way.</p>
<p>Speaking of the "Ten Commandments," why are Christians so attached to them and want them posted everywhere, rather than say, wanting to post the Beatitudes of Jesus their savior?<br />The beatitudes of Jesus, according to St. Matthew:<br />Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Verse 3)<br />Blessed are the meek: for they shall posses the land. (Verse 4)<br />Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted. (Verse 5)<br />Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have<br />their fill. (Verse 6)<br />Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. (Verse 7)<br />Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God. (Verse 8)<br />Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. (Verse 9)<br />Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Verse 10)</p>
<p>I saw a book recently that points out in detail that America has become the most religiously diverse nation on earth (more diverse than India? I wonder). In fact I have even read that there are now more practicing Muslims in America than practicing Jews.<br />For a thoughtful treatment of the concept of America as a Christian nation from three of America's best religious historians, see Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, & George Marsden, The Search for Christian America (Helmers & Howard, 1989).</p>
<p>Here is an article on the web that outlines the debate going on between Christians over the "<a href="http://www.pfm.org/Content/ContentGroups/BreakPoint/Other_Content/Colsons_Page/Before_20024/Christian_America.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Christian America</a>" question.</p>
<p>Mark Noll, church historian at Wheaton College, an Evangelical Christian college: There is a "Christian America" view which holds that in some unique, providential way, God singled out the United States as really a part of the outworking salvation in the world. That's the view that I don't think it's appropriate to hold. As a Christian, I believe that only ancient Israel is a chosen nation. Once the Gospel came in the person of Jesus Christ, then there was a universal, human applicability to God's revelation, and God's peoplethe people of God, the nation of Godcomes now, as the book of Revelation says, for "every tribe, every tongue, every nation." But I think we can also talk about a weaker sense of "Christian America" and ask ourselves, "Is the United States a place where a significant Christian influence has had a significant Christian impact?" And I do want to take some time to qualify things, but at the end of the day, I would probably say yes.</p>
<p>JT: And how would you qualify that meaning?</p>
<p>Mark Noll: The qualification would come from a number of things. The time in American history that I think we can see the most influence from Christian values, when the churches were strongest relative to other institutions in society, and when the meaning of Christian faith was probably more clearly understood by a large part of the populationthat was a time, unfortunately, when the United States sanctioned slavery as a legal institution. It was a time when very little attention was given to the humanity of Native Americans. It was a time when some concepts of public morality that are taken for granted today simply didn't exist. I don't want to give a blanket endorsement to an earlier period. And I don't want to make a blanket statement about the drift of modern American secularization, even though I do want to stand by the idea that there were significant Christian values influencing a significant part of the Christian population for good in many particulars.</p>
<p>ED: At the very end of my critique of Paul's article I include some lengthy reviews of books that Paul should read. Note especially Mark Noll's essay in the first book reviewed. Noll shows that "evangelicalism as defined by its conservative Protestant exponents today played at best a negligible role in the founding era of the 1770s and 1780s." True, the political leaders of the Revolution spoke of the deity with respect, but they were not born-again Christians or believers in original sin. They were not atheists, but neither were they evangelicals. Nor, for the most part, was the public that they led. Both inside and outside the leadership ranks, the public political discourse during the Revolution was "overwhelmingly this-worldly" in character.<br />See also, the final essay in the same book with Noll's, titled, "Why Revolutionary America Wasn't a 'Christian Nation'" by Jon Butler, the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University. Asking if late eighteenth-century America was a Christian country, Butler proposes to "look at government, society, and people to recover what men and women of the time did and believed." He discovers that the answer to his question is complicated.</p>
<p>In some ways, America on the eve of the Revolution was more religious than it had been in the seventeenth century. Revivalism and denominational expansion during the eighteenth century caused a tremendous growth in the number of congregations. Moreover, the "state church apparatus" was also becoming stronger, with seven of the thirteen colonies giving legal support to a single Protestant church. Even in colonies without an establishment, Catholics, Jews, and blasphemers frequently endured legal discrimination and penalties.</p>
<p>But despite congregational growth and legal support for churches, most eighteenth-century Americans remained indifferent to religion. Before the Revolution, about eighty percent of adults did not even belong to a church. America was only nominally and formally Christian. Indeed, Butler argues that the laws establishing state churches and favoring Protestant Christianity were needed "precisely because actual Christian adherence in the population was relatively weak."</p>
<p>After the Revolution, denominational rivalries and Enlightenment objections to religious coercion led states "to withdraw from or greatly reduce government involvement with religion." In state after state, single-church establishments fell after religious pluralism provoked bitter political squabbles over tax support and legislative favoritism. The culmination of Americans' increasing suspicion of government partiality in religion was the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Going far beyond the prohibition of an established church_, the First Amendment "banned government activity in religion generally." Revolutionary Americans understood that theirs was "a society where Christianity was important yet not ubiquitous." It was not a Christian nation. There was too much indifference, heterodoxy, and atheism to call it that. Given their religious diversity and its potential for turmoil, Americans realized that they could preserve civil peace and promote spiritual renewal only by keeping government from meddling in religion. If the United States were ever to become a Christian nation, it would do so as "a matter of practice, not law or governmental encouragement." Besides the Christian historians, above, also read, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism by Susan Jacoby</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: There were 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence on the year 1775, of which 52 were orthodox, deeply committed evangelical Christians.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: See the January issue of FIRST THINGS magazine, the article, "The Deist Minimum" by Cardinal Avery Dulles for a more truthful and nuanced discussion of what historians know (and don't know) about many of the signer's beliefs. See also the books by Evangelical Christians below.</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: It is the same Congress that formed the American Bible Society.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: "Congress" formed the American Bible Society? Then why doesn't the American Bible Society's website brag about that fact? Also, the American Bible Society was formed decades after the Constitutional Congress first met.<br />1816: <a href="http://absoc.convio.net/site/PageServer?pagename=abs_history_of_abs" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Founding of the American Bible Society</a> in New York City. Elias Boudinot was elected its first president.</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: Immediately after creating the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress voted to purchase and import 20,000 copies of scripture for the people of this nation.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: <a href="http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel04.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Depends</a> on how you define "immediately." The Declaration was created and signed in 1776, and the subsequent war with Britain cut off the supply of many goods that America formerly purchased from Britain, including Bibles, with the result that on Sept. 11, 1777, Congress instructed its Committee of Commerce to import 20,000 Bibles from "Scotland, Holland or elsewhere," i.e., other than from Britain.</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: Patrick Henry, who is called the firebrand of the American Revolution, </em></blockquote>
<p>ED: He was called many other things <a href="http://www.redhill.org/history_essay.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">besides</a>:<br />To James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in 1787-88, Patrick Henry was "the great adversary" who sounded "the trumpet of discord" with his implacable opposition to their plans for a powerful new central government. To a considerable extent history has shared their perspective: Henry is remembered for his revolt against the King, but his opposition to the Constitution is regarded as cranky, wrong-headed, and if not precisely seditious, certainly an affront to national progress and historical good order...</p>
<p>The "liberty or death" speech (delivered, by the way, not in the capitol at Williamsburg, but in a church, in Richmond) resonates with Biblical references and cadences, but let's take another look at that famous concluding phrase--"I know not what course others may take but, as for me, give me liberty or give me death." What posterity hears is the devotion to liberty, but what his audience heard, and what we need to hear as well--is the emphasis, as in evangelical religion, on personal choice and individual commitment, here directed toward unorthodox and daringly original political ends. "You never heard anything more infamously insolent than P. Henry's speech," a Tory merchant wrote. "This creature is so infatuated that he goes about praying and preaching amongst the common people."</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: Patrick Henry is still remembered for his words, "Give me liberty or give me death." But in current textbooks the context of these words is deleted. Here is what he actually said: "An appeal to arms and the God of hosts is all that is left us. But we shall not fight our battle alone. There is a just God that presides over the destinies of nations. The battle sir, is not to the strong alone. Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death."</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: The above version ignores a lot of words between sentences! See all of <a href="http://libertyonline.hypermall.com/henry-liberty.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Henry's words in context</a>: "Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death," Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: The following year, 1776, Patrick Henry wrote this: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great Nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For that reason alone, people of other faiths have been afforded freedom of worship here."</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: "Christian nation" propagandist David Barton popularized <a href="http://www.wallbuilders.com/resources/search/detail.php?ResourceID=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the above quotation</a>, but after being challenged to provide a reference for it, Barton ceased citing it, and even issued a statement conceding that 12 quotations he formerly attributed to prominent American historical figures are either false, questionable, or unconfirmed.<br />Patrick Henry advocated taxing the public to support religion, and limiting public office to only "Trinitarian Protestants" (i.e., in other words, no Jews, no Unitarian Christian in public office). However interesting may be Patrick Henry's comments, they represent the losing side of the Constitutional struggle, <a href="http://www.buildingequality.us/ifas/fw/9606/barton.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a fact Barton fails to point out</a>.</p>
<p>"While some of the country's founders believed that the government should espouse Christianity, that viewpoint soon became a losing proposition. In Virginia, Patrick Henry argued in <a href="http://www.au.org/site/PageServer?pagename=resources_brochure_christiannation" target="_blank" rel="noopener">favor of tax support</a> for Christian churches. But Henry and his cohorts were in the minority and lost that battle."</p>
<p>Also, was Patrick Henry, "<a href="http://www.redhill.org/history_essay.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">born again</a>?":<br />"Henry had grown up partly in the snug and cozy world of the Virginia gentry--his father was a magistrate and his uncle an Anglican minister--and partly in the world of the evangelical dissenters--his mother, grandfather, and many kinfolk had joined the Presbyterian revival of the 1740s. Patrick Henry sympathized with the spiritual force of the revival, though he never experienced the new birth himself, and he sensed the cultural and political challenge to the gentry's aristocratic control that lay behind it. Though he knew the gentry's ways and remained comfortable with tavern and courthouse politics, his father's declining status and his mother's religious alienation made him somewhat of an outsider."</p>
<p>Also note the following book by a Christian who admits that the Constitution we have is not a "Christian" creation but was too secular to begin with! Fundamentalist Christian author, Dennis Woods, a political pollster with credentials in journalism, education and theology, in his book, Discipling the Nations--The Government Upon His Shoulders, poses the question, "Why are documented historical facts routinely being revised and distorted...by evangelical Christians?" This fundamental question leads to a host of other questions that are in turn addressed by the book. For example....</p>
<p>If George Washington was a Christian why did he refuse to take Communion? (p. 31)</p>
<p>If the U.S. Constitution is a Christian document why does it contain no substantive references to God? (p. 19).</p>
<p>Why do the Federalist Papers contain no references to the Bible and almost 30 references to the governments of pagan Greece and Rome (p. 13).</p>
<p>Why does the U.S. Constitution deny a religious test for public office, when almost all of its colonial forerunners required such a test? (p. 27)</p>
<p>What is the critical difference between government by social compact and government by Biblical covenant? Which one is the U.S. Constitution? Does it matter? (p. 134)</p>
<p>Why were the state legislatures excluded from a part in confirming the U.S. Constitution, as required by the Articles of Confederation? (p. 33)</p>
<p>Why did strong Christian statesmen such as Patrick Henry, John Hancock and Samuel Adams explicitly refuse the invitation to attend the Constitutional Convention? (p. 32)</p>
<p>Why was the convention shrouded in secrecy, with all notes sequestered until after the death of the last delegate? (p. 33)</p>
<p>Why does the Constitution rely on "we the people" to "ordain and establish this Constitution" rather than God, as did nearly every one of its predecessors? (p. 21)</p>
<p>Why did James Madison believe that Christianity was a source of faction rather than the unifying factor in civil government? (p. 24)</p>
<p>The author believes that the naïve or simplistic responses typically offered by Evangelicals like John Eidsmoe, David Barton (WallBuilders), Peter Marshall, and D.J. Kennedy damage the credibility of the very cause they are trying to defend. They seem to feel the Constitution must be defended as a Christian document at all costs, to serve as a firebreak against the conflagration of moral/cultural disintegration. Ironically, they end up defending the root cause of the very evil they are trying to eradicate. "We need to take what is good from the Constitution," says Woods, "admit the problems, and then move forward to correct them." After reading this book a state legislator and longtime seminar instructor on America's Christian history had this observation:</p>
<p>Lastly, consider this quotation from Patrick Henry:</p>
<p>"That religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience." (Patrick Henry, 1736-1799, American patriot and statesman, Virginia Bill of Rights, June 12, 1776. From Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p. 189.)</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: Consider these words that Thomas Jefferson wrote on the front of his well- worn Bible: "I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the unity of our Creator ."</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: The "doctrines of Jesus" as Jefferson understood them, are not to be confused with the "doctrines of Christianity" as you, Paul, understand them. See the following quotations from Jefferson:</p>
<p>"[Of Jesus] Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the the most lovely benevolence, and others, again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate, therefore, the dross; restore to him the former and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, the roguery of others of his disciples. Of this band of dupes and imposters, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus."<br />--Thomas Jefferson, Letter to W. Short, 1820</p>
<p>"To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other."--Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803, with Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, with Copies; Partial Transcription Available "The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind."<br />--Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Moses Robinson, 1801. ME 10:237</p>
<p>"I, too, have made a wee-little book from the same materials, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus; it is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists [orthodox Christians], who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great Reformer of the vicious ethics and deism of the Jews, were He to return on earth, would not recognize one feature."<br />--Thomas Jefferson to Charles Thomson, January 9, 1816</p>
<p><a href="http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Works of Thomas Jefferson</a> in Twelve Volumes. Federal Edition.<br />Collected and Edited by Paul Leicester Ford.</p>
<p>Jefferson also acknowledged:<br />"Some have made the love of God the foundation of morality. This, too, is but a branch of our moral duties, which are generally divided into duties to God and duties to man. If we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the atheist? It is idle to say, as some do, that no such Being exists. We have the same evidence of the fact as of most of those we act on, to wit their own affirmations, and their reasonings in support of them. I have observed, indeed, generally that while in Protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God."<br /><a href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/foley-browse?id=JC0642" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Law</a>, June 13, 1814.From Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society, New York: George Braziller, 1965, p. 358.</p>
<p><strong>MORE THOMAS JEFFERSON QUOTATIONS</strong><br />"Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear. ... Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you"<br />--Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson's Works, Vol. ii., p. 217.<br />The God of the Old Testament -- the God which Christians worship -- Jefferson pronounces "a being of terrific character -- cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust" (Works Vol. iv., p. 325).</p>
<p>In speaking of the Jewish priests, he denominates them "a bloodthirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac, and Jacob, and the local God of Israel" (Ibid.).<br />In a letter to John Adams, dated April 8, 1816, referring to the God of the Jews, be says:<br />"Their God would be deemed a very indifferent man with us" (Ibid., p. 373).</p>
<p>To his nephew he writes as follows regarding the Bible:<br />"Read the Bible as you would Livy or Tacitus. For example, in the book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still for several hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of blood, speaking of their statues, beasts, etc. But it is said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine, therefore, candidly, what evidence there is of his having been inspired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry, because millions believe it. On the other hand, you are astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature" (Works, Vol. ii., p. 217).</p>
<p>In this same letter, he thus refers to Jesus Christ:<br />"Keep in your eye the opposite pretensions: First, of those who say he was begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended and reversed the laws of Nature at will, and ascended bodily into heaven; and second, of those who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted, according to the Roman law, which punished the first commission of that offence by whipping, and the second by exile or death in furea."<br />His own opinion respecting the above is expressed in a letter to John Adams, written a short time previous to his death:<br />"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" (Works, Vol. iv, p. 365).<br />In the gospel history of Jesus, Jefferson discovers what he terms "a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticism, and fabrications" (Works, Vol. iv, p. 325).</p>
<p>He continues:<br />"If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers [Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,] father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor" (Ibid..).</p>
<p>Jefferson, however, did not regard Jesus as an impostor. He says:<br />"Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, of so much absurdity, so much untruth and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross, restore to him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some and the roguery of others of his disciples" (Ibid., 320).</p>
<p>Jefferson made a compilation of the more rational and humane teachings of Jesus, the "gold," as he termed it, which has since been published. Some superficial readers have supposed this to be an acknowledgment of Christ. Orthodox teachers, however, know. better and ignore the book. For the man Jesus, Jefferson, had nothing but admiration; for the Christ Jesus of theology, nothing but contempt.<br />John Remsburg, Six Historic Americans, Chapter 2</p>
<p>See also "<a href="http://candst.tripod.com/pol1800.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Dangers of Combining Politics And Religion Examples From Early American History</a>, 1797 to 1800," research by Jim Allison:<br />This article begins in the last three years of the 1700s in America. In this beginning section you will read how John Adams used religion and later regretted it. Alexander Hamilton recommending the use of religion for political purposes. The Treaty of Tripoli, signed by Adams into law, stating that this nation was not founded on religion. A July 4th sermon by the Rev Timothy Dwight, newspaper reactions to some of these goings on. The stage was being set for what was to come in a couple of short years. Some have said that the dirtiest political campaign in American history was the campaign of 1800. During that campaign religion was brought into it a big way. The Clergy of New England, in particular, used religion as a weapon to prevent Jefferson from being elected president. He was called an atheist, an infidel. Religious prejudices, biases and fears of many of the people were played upon. They used the pulpit, they used pamphlets, they used the newspapers. Many of the Federalist party joined in this tactic. Friends of Jefferson responded defending him and frequently attacking the religion of members of the Federalist party, especially John Adams. In this article you will find a couple of pamphlets that were published at that time that cannot be found anywhere else on the Internet that the general public has access to. The pamphlets are: Serious Considerations on the Election of a President: Addressed to the Citizens of the United States. Rev. William Linn, Rev. John Mitchell Mason (New York 1800) and A Vindication of Thomas Jefferson; Against the Charges Contained in a Pamphlet Entitled, "Serious Considerations on the Election of a President:<br />Addressed to the Citizens of the United States" Clinton, DeWitt, 1769-1828</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: Thomas Jefferson was also the chairman of the American Bible Society, which he considered his highest and most important role.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: <a href="http://www.partyof1776.net/p1776/fathers/contents.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">False</a>. But presidents, John Quincy Adams and John Jay, did serve the American Bible society either as president or vice-president, after the American Bible Society was formed in 1816.</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: The U.S. Constitution is the form of its government, but the power is in the virtue of the people. The virtue desired of the people is shown in the Bible. This is why Biblical morality was taught in public schools until the early 1960's. Government officials were required to declare their belief in God even to be allowed to hold a public office until a case in the U.S. Supreme Court called Torcaso v. Watkins (Oct. 1960). God was seen as the author of natural law and morality. If one did not believe in God one could not operate from a proper moral base. And by not having a foundation from which to work, one would destroy the community.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: Article VI of the U.S. Constitution concludes with these words: "No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."</p>
<p>Many state constitutions also added the requirement of a minimal belief in a supreme Being: Article 37 of the Declaration of Rights of the Maryland Constitution: "[N]o religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this State, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God "</p>
<p>So, yes, the <a href="http://members.aol.com/TestOath/Torcaso.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">case of Torcaso v. Watkins</a> did make a difference, interpreting "no religious test" in the broadest sense possible, including atheism.</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: On July 4, 1821, President Adams said: "The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity."</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: John Adams, great patriot and second President, was a Unitarian, and did not believe in Jesus' equality with God or the doctrine of the Trinity. It is also doubtful that he believed in the doctrine of eternal damnation, since Unitarians had their doubts about that teaching as well. John Quincy Adams was likewise a Unitarian.</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution of the United States, said this: "We have staked the whole future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments."</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: Robert S. Alley, professor emeritus at the University of Richmond and author of James Madison on Religious Liberty, undertook a dogged <a href="http://www.wallbuilders.com/resources/search/detail.php?ResourceID=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">effort to track down</a> the above alleged Madison quotation. Enlisting the help of the editors of The Papers of James Madison at the University of Virginia, Alley scoured reams of documents, books and writings. After coming up empty-handed, the Madison scholar concluded that the <a href="http://members.tripod.com/~candst/misq1.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">quote</a> was probably fictional. The major purveyor of the quote, David Barton, has admitted it is "unconfirmed."</p>
<p>However, here are some genuine confirmed quotations from James Madison:<br />Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize [sic], every expanded prospect. (James Madison, in a letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774, as quoted by Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 37.)<br />Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity in exclusion of all other religions may establish, with the same ease, any particular sect of Christians in exclusion of all other sects? That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute threepence only of his property for the support of any one establishment may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever? (James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance," addressed to the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1785; from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, pp. 459-460. According to Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, pp. 39 ff., Madison's "Remonstrance" was instrumental in blocking the multiple establishment of all denominations of Christianity in Virginia.)</p>
<p>Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents. (James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788; from Michael Kammen, The Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History, 1986, pp. 369-370. )</p>
<p>On Feb. 21, 1811, Madison vetoed a bill for incorporating the Episcopal Church in Alexandria, and on Feb. 28, 1811, one reserving land in Mississippi territory for a Baptist Church. (James D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents [Washington, 1896-1899], I, 489-490, as cited in a footnote, Elizabeth Fleet, "Madison's Detatched Memoranda," William & Mary Quarterly, Third series: Vol. III, No. 4 [October, 1946], p. 555.)</p>
<p>Chaplainships of both Congress and the armed services were established sixteen years before the First Amendment was adopted. It would have been fatuous folly for anybody to stir a major controversy over a minor matter before the meaning of the amendment had been threshed out in weightier matters. But Madison did foresee the danger that minor deviations from the constitutional path would deepen into dangerous precedents. He took care of one of them by his veto [in 1811] of the appropriation for a Baptist church. Others he dealt with in his "Essay on Monopolies," unpublished until 1946. Here is what he wrote: "Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom? In strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative. The Constitution of the U. S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion. The law appointing Chaplains establishes a religious worship for the national representatives, to be performed by Ministers of religion, elected by a majority of them, and these are to be paid out of the national taxes. Does this not involve the principle of a national establishment ... ?" The appointments, he said, were also a palpable violation of equal rights. Could a Catholic clergyman ever hope to be appointed a Chaplain? "To say that his religious principles are obnoxious or that his sect is small, is to lift the veil at once and exhibit in its naked deformity the doctrine that religious truth is to be tested by numbers, or that the major sects have a right to govern the minor." The problem, said the author of the First Amendment, was how to prevent "this step beyond the landmarks of power [from having] the effect of a legitimate precedent." Rather than let that happen, it would "be better to apply to it the legal aphorism de minimis non curat lex [the law takes no account of trifles]." Or, he said (likewise in Latin), class it with faults that result from carelessness or that human nature could scarcely avoid." "Better also," he went on, "to disarm in the same way, the precedent of Chaplainships for the army and navy, than erect them into a political authority in matters of religion." ... The deviations from constitutional principles went further: "Religious proclamations by the Executive recommending thanksgivings and fasts are shoots from the same root with the legislative acts reviewed. Altho' recommendations only, they imply a religious agency, making no part of the trust delegated to political rulers." (Irving Brant, The Bill of Rights: Its Origin and Meaning, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965, pp. 423-424. Brant gives the source of "Essay on Monopolies" as Elizabeth Fleet, "Madison's Detatched Memoranda," William & Mary Quarterly, Third series: Vol. III, No. 4 [October, 1946], pp. 554-562.)</p>
<p>And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together. (James Madison, letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822; published in The Complete Madison: His Basic Writings, ed. by Saul K. Padover, New York: Harper & Bros., 1953.) The only ultimate protection for religious liberty in a country like ours, Madison pointed out--echoing Jefferson;--is public opinion: a firm and pervading opinion that the First Amendment works. "Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance." (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 56. Madison's words, according to Gaustad, are from his letter of 10 July 1822 to Edward Livingston.)</p>
<p>Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offense against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered. (James Madison, according to Leonard W. Levy, Treason Against God: A History of the Offense of Blasphemy, New York: Schocken Books, 1981, p. xii.)</p>
<p>This assertion [that Madison was committed to total and complete separation of church and state] would be challenged by the nonpreferentialists, who agree with Justice Rehnquist's dissent in the Jaffree case. Contrasted with the analysis set forth above, Rehnquist insisted that Madison's "original language Ônor shall any national religion be established' obviously does not conform to the Ôwall of separation' between church and state which latter day commentators have ascribed to him." Rehnquist believes Madison was seeking merely to restrict Congress from establishing a particular national church. There are three problems with this contention. First, nothing in Madison's acts or words support such a proposition. Indeed, his opposition to the General Assessment Bill in Virginia, detailed in the "Memorial and Remonstrance," contradicts Rehnquist directly. Secondly, all of Madison's writings after 1789 support the Court's twentieth-century understanding of the term "wall of separation." Third, the reference to Madison's use of "national" simply misses his definition of the word. Madison had an expansive intention when he used the term national. He believed that "religious proclamations by the Executive recommending thanksgiving and fasts ... imply and certainly nourish the erroneous idea of a national religion." He commented in a similar way about chaplains for the House and Senate. Historical evidence lends no support to the Rehnquist thesis. And clearly Jefferson, even though absent from the First Congress, seems a far more secure source of "original intent" than Justice Rehnquist. (Robert S. Alley, ed., The Supreme Court on Church and State, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 13.)</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: Unfortunately, in October 1961 the Supreme Court of the United States removed prayer from schools in a case called Engel v. Vitale.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: <a href="http://candst.tripod.com/tnppage/pray2c.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">See</a>.</p>
<p>Was school prayer widespread before 1962? The religious right has a stake in making people think that the Supreme Court rulings of the 1960s destroyed a common and widely accepted practice of school prayer. In fact, laws requiring school prayer and Bible reading were not nearly as widespread as prayer advocates claim, were late-comers to the public education, were frequently and successfully challenged in court, and were on their way out when the Supreme Court handed down it's rulings in Engle v. Vitale and Abington Township School District v. Schempp. To begin with, research suggests that mandatory prayer and Bible reading were not historically required n the public schools. Robert Boston, for example, summarizes the research of Boardman W. Katham, a United Church of Christ Minister who has researched public education extensively, as follows:<br />As public schools evolved in the post-Revolutionary War period, there was a general attitude of indifference toward religion among the American public. While the Bible was often used in schools as a reader and speller, formal daily prayers and devotional readings were held sporadically, often only when a local clergyman visited a school (Why the Religious Right is Wrong About Separation of Church and State, p. 102).</p>
<p>Rather, the move to require prayer and Bible reading in the public schools didn't gain steam until the Civil War era, and even then didn't generally manifest itself in law until early 1900s:<br />(P)rior to 1900, only Massachusetts has a law on the books dealing with prayer and Bible reading in public schools. Between 1910 and 1930, seventeen states and the District of Columbia passed similar laws. The movement to get these ordinances on the books was spearheaded by a powerful lobby of conservative church groups, led by the National Reform Association.</p>
<p>Critically, these practices were soon challenged in Court as violating the freedom of religion provisions of various state Constitutions. In 1910, for example, an Illinois Supreme Court struck down religious exercises in its public schools. Wisconsin ruled such exercises unconstitutional in 1890 and Nebraska did the same in 1903 (Boston, pp. 100-101). In total, the issue of religious practices in public schools came up in 22 state courts before 1962, with those practices being struck down in eight cases and upheld in 14.</p>
<p>Nor was Bible reading all that widespread. According to Boston (p. 101), Americans United for Separation of Church and State took a survey of Bible reading in the public schools in 1960, only three years before the Supreme Court's Bible reading decision (Abington Township School District v. Schempp). According to the survey, only five states required Bible reading in the public schools, while twenty five states allowed such practices. Eleven states had declared the practice unconstitutional, and the remainder had no relevant laws on the books.</p>
<p>The fact is that school prayer and Bible reading was only infrequently required by law, and had been declared illegal by a number of states before 1962. The school prayer and Bible reading decisions of the Supreme Court were neither unprecedented, nor out of step with a growing body of laws and court cases that saw these practices as an infringement of our religious liberty.</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: For 185 years prayer was allowed in public and the Constitutional Convention itself was opened with prayer.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: I read that Benjamin Franklin stood up and suggested that they pray, but the convention delegates voted down Franklin's suggestion.</p>
<blockquote><em>PAUL: The 1961 prayer in question was not even lengthy or denominationally geared. It was this: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country."<br />Removing this simple acknowledgment of God's protecting hand dramatically increased the birth rates for unwed girls 0f 15-19 year olds, and sexually transmitted diseases among 10-14 year olds...Moral character has plummetted resulting in a much higher divorce rate, tens of millions of abortions, and a suicide rate among teenagers that is one of the leading causes of death. The Bible, before 1961, was used extensively in curriculum. After the Bible and the prayer was removed from the schools, scholastic aptitude test scores dropped considerably.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: Removing that little prayer did all of that? I would like to see exact figures. I read an article on the internet a while back that pointed out that such changes were not "dramatic," but already moving in certain directions, and there were other reasons for such changes, other than no longer repeating a little prayer in school each day or having kids read from the Bible. Also, do you have proof that the Bible was used "extensively" in public school curriculums throughout the entire U.S. prior to 1961?</p>
<p>DETAILED REVIEWS OF SEVERAL BOOKS THAT PAUL NEEDS TO READ<br />James H. Hutson, ed. Religion and the New Republic: Faith in the Founding of America. Lanham, Md., and Oxford, England: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000.<br />Reviewed for H-SHEAR by William Breitenbach , Department of History, University of Puget Sound<br />I was delighted to read this refreshing comment by Jon Butler in the essay that concludes this volume: "Let's be blunt. It is no longer possible for historians generally, or for a historian--this historian--to pretend that any judgment about this question is merely an exercise of abstract scholarship...Only by acknowledging the sheer partisanship that now invades these matters can we go back to the eighteenth century with any sense of honesty. Perhaps, we ought to return to it with relief" (pp. 188-89).</p>
<p>For the most part, it is indeed a relief to follow this book's seven essayists back in time as they attempt to puzzle out what it was that eighteenth-century Americans thought about religion and government. Not surprisingly, what the essayists have found in the past varies, for, as editor James H. Hutson admits, when the Library of Congress sponsors a symposium on "Religion and the Founding of the American Republic," as it did in June 1998, it must take pains "to ensure that a variety of views are represented" (p. vii). (With one exception, the essays in this book are revisions of papers delivered at that symposium.)</p>
<p>As Butler's remark implies, the journey into the past comes with a round-trip ticket. Each of these essayists wants to suggest--some more strongly than others--that what revolutionary Americans thought and did has some relevance to current debates about religion and the republic. The best of the essays, however, return to the present with a complex sense of historical context, a sense which, if widely shared, would hush those clamorous partisans who delight in yelling at one another across the wall. I'll take the essays up in the order of their appearance. John Witte, Jr., is Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and the director of the Law and Religion Program at Emory University Law School. His essay, "'A Most Mild and Equitable Establishment of Religion': John Adams and the Massachusetts Experiment," looks at the religious establishment sanctioned by the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. Witte's main point is that Jefferson's model of religious liberty, which called for the complete detachment of the state from religion, was not the only model blessed by the founders. Jefferson's friend and rival, John Adams, shared with the Virginian an abhorrence of ecclesiastical tyranny and a commitment to liberty of conscience, but he nonetheless believed that "the freedom of many private religions" was perfectly compatible with "the establishment of one 'Publick religion'" (p. 3).</p>
<p>Article III of the Massachusetts Constitution attempted to create, or rather preserve, the type of mild religious establishment that Adams favored. It protected rights of conscience and permitted religious pluralism but it also authorized the state legislature to require towns to institute the public worship of God; to provide tax support for elected "public protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality"; and to "enjoin attendance upon the instructions of the public teachers" for residents who could conscientiously and conveniently attend (p. 13). Those townsfolk who regularly worshiped with other denominations could direct their taxes to their own ministers, but everyone else would have his taxes go toward the maintenance of the community's chosen public minister. Although John Adams did not draft Article III and indeed had left the country before the constitutional convention completed its deliberations, he supported the Massachusetts model of religious establishment. He believed that a common religion and a shared sense of morality were essential foundations for liberty and republican government: As Witte puts it, Adams assumed that "too much freedom of religion would only encourage depravity in citizens" (p. 18). Hence, Adams defined freedom of religion as a right to religion: "the right of each individual to discharge divine duties--which duties the Constitution helped to define" (p. 17). According to Witte, Adams considered religious rights to be as much social as individual in character; they were shaped by the needs of society for public virtue and public peace.</p>
<p>Witte observes that the "slender" religious establishment in Massachusetts had three manifestations. In addition to the "institutional establishment" (p. 22) perpetuated by Article III, there was a "ceremonial establishment" (p. 19) that drew upon Puritan covenantalism by invoking the name and presence of God in public rituals, as when public officials swore their oaths of office. There was also a "moral establishment" (p. 20), which took the form of constitutional endorsements of religious morality as the prerequisite for civil liberty. The institutional establishment, controversial even in 1780 and "unworkable in practice" (p. 29), continued to arouse opposition until it was overturned by constitutional amendment in 1833. But the ceremonial and moral establishments, Witte suggests, remain entombed to this day in the Massachusetts Constitution, waiting to be resurrected (p. 22).</p>
<p>Witte's concluding paragraphs reveal the destination to which he wants to return after his journey to the eighteenth century. Jefferson should not be viewed as the exclusive spokesman for the founders. We should also (instead?) listen to Adams, who would "likely insist" that we recognize the "dialectical nature of religious freedom and religious establishment":<br />"Too firm a religious establishment breeds coercion and corruption. But too little religious establishment allows secular prejudices to become constitutional prerogatives" (pp. 30-31). In favoring "a complete disestablishment of religion," the Supreme Court has done a disservice to "a people so widely devoted to a public religion and a religious public" (p. 31). Americans today should follow Adams's example and seek a new constitutional balance "between extremes" (p. 31), by which Witte presumably means judicial affirmation of "modern theories of accommodationism and religious communitarianism" (p. 4).</p>
<p>As I was reading Witte's essay, I kept thinking of a chapter title in Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic: "The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams." Why should we follow Adams in matters of religion when we follow him in so little else? Witte is clearly right to note that not all revolutionary Americans wanted a complete separation of religion and government. After all, Massachusetts did retain its institutional establishment for half a century after the Revolution. But Massachusetts was hardly typical or representative in doing so. And even in Massachusetts, the mild establishment was nearly flushed away by "a torrent of objections" (p. 23). Article III actually failed to receive the requisite two-thirds majority from the people when the Constitution was ratified in 1780 (though the constitutional convention ignored the vote). So, if we want to look to eighteenth-century Massachusetts for "noble instruction" (p. 31) on religious liberty, a case could be made for choosing Isaac Backus over John Adams as the Revolutionary whose opinions should count. For that matter, it might make sense to listen to the anti-ecclesiastical Adams of A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765) rather than to hearken, as Witte does, to the cranky old man who spent the 1810s deluging his correspondents with lamentations about the loss of republican virtue. Still, even if Witte does not prove Adams to be the best guide for the present, he does demonstrate convincingly that Jefferson's views on church and state were not universally accepted, not even by other famous founders who shared his Enlightenment culture and his revolutionary experience.</p>
<p>In "The Use and Abuse of Jefferson's Statute: Separating Church and State in Nineteenth-Century Virginia," Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., shows, among other things, that not even Jefferson adhered to Jefferson's principles. Nor did the nineteenth-century Virginians who claimed to be applying them. Buckley, who is Professor of Historical Theology in the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, offers a fascinating discussion of the ways that Virginians regularly transformed the meaning of church-state separation to meet the culturally conditioned needs of their particular circumstances. Like many other commentators, Buckley takes as his central text Jefferson's famous Statute for Religious Freedom (1786). But unlike those who treat it as a timeless precept, Buckley considers it historically, examining Virginians' "lived experience of the Statute in the nineteenth century" (p. 43). In particular, his essay focuses on three issues: the exclusion of clergymen from public office, the legal incorporation of religious organizations, and the place of religion in public education. Jefferson's Statute called for a strict separation of church and state. Declaring that "our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions," it denounced as a violation of "natural right" any measure that linked public office to religious profession or that diminished or enlarged people's civil capacities because of their religious beliefs (pp. 41-42). Yet when a Methodist preacher named Humphrey Billups was elected to the House of Delegates in 1826, the legislature disqualified him by a vote of 179 to 2. In disregarding the language of the Statute, Billups's opponents appealed to its supposed purpose, which they said was to prevent sectarian domination of government. When the Virginia Constitution was revised in 1830, Jefferson's prohibition against religious tests was incorporated into it but so too was clerical exclusion. The inconsistency was again justified on cultural grounds: the clergy should be excluded lest they be corrupted by "the rough and tumble" of politics. And so it went for forty more years. Ignoring Jefferson's principles of civil and natural rights, Virginians drew the line between church and state according to the current values of their culture. It was only when the culture changed and Reconstruction-era reformers wanted to "elevate the moral tone of politics" (p. 45) that the disqualification of ministers was dropped from the Constitution. Jefferson's notions of natural rights had nothing to do with it.</p>
<p>Buckley makes a similar argument about cultural context trumping abstract rights in his section on the incorporation of religious organizations. After repealing the incorporation of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1787, the Virginia legislature routinely refused to incorporate churches, seminaries, or religious charities. Restrictions of one sort or another continued through a succession of constitutional revisions, all the way into the twentieth century. What motivated this policy was not the doctrine of separation but the widespread cultural fear of powerful and wealthy churches. Virginians persisted in their policy even though its consequences seemed to violate the principles of Jefferson's Statute. For example, the state's courts found themselves continually entangled in the temporal affairs of unincorporated churches, and many of the state's citizens found themselves denied rights merely because they chose to gather themselves into religious associations.</p>
<p>Buckley's third case--religious education--reveals how the evangelical culture of the nineteenth century reshaped church-state separation. Jefferson had hoped to eliminate religion from his proposed public university by removing theology from the curriculum. But as evangelical Protestantism came to dominate Virginia's culture in the early nineteenth century, Jefferson realized that he would have to compromise: he accepted nonsectarian religious education at the University of Virginia so long as it was taught under the name of moral philosophy. The separation of church and state apparently did not require, even for Jefferson, an unreligious public education. Jefferson's compromise was reenacted at other colleges, and even denominational colleges were required to be nonsectarian (though they were permitted to be religious). By the end of the nineteenth century, the separation of church and state meant, in Virginia's public school system, the inculcation of nonsectarian evangelical Protestantism, complete with Bible-reading, praying, and hymn-singing. Few seem to have complained, as long as students were not subjected to denominational coercion or compulsion.</p>
<p>Buckley's conclusion sounds like a historian's conclusion, one sensitive to context and change: "The meaning of the Virginia Statute, of separation of church and state, not only unfolded in Virginia, it changed. Its application, like that of the First Amendment, has been and always will be culturally contextualized" (p. 55). The "always will be" is a clue, however, that Buckley, like Witte, returns from his historical journey with a contemporary destination in mind. It turns out to be a destination pretty close to Witte's position on accommodationism. If "culturally contextualized separation" (p. 54) was good enough for Jefferson, Buckley implies, it should be good enough for us. Jefferson and his nineteenth-century disciples in Virginia "refused to follow rigid principles to their logical, absolute conclusions when they perceived that higher concerns and values were at stake" (p. 55). What's at stake--then and apparently now--is the "welfare of the commonwealth," something seemingly so dependent upon religion that "the government should recognize it and support it" (p. 55). Since "most Americans today" would agree, since "we" understand "the important benefits the religious faith of our people confers on our republic" (p. 55), we should presumably tolerate a little cultural contextualizing of our principles. Hmmm, is that sound I hear the wall shifting?</p>
<p>Daniel L. Dreisbach, Associate Professor in the Department of Justice, Law, and Society at American University, examines Jefferson's wall with the care of a structural engineer. His essay, "Thomas Jefferson, a Mammoth Cheese, and the 'Wall of Separation Between Church and State,'" discusses the origins of the "wall of separation" metaphor in Jefferson's 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association and the subsequent use of the metaphor by courts and commentators to describe the constitutional relationship between church and state. Dreisbach's purpose is to advance a new interpretation of Jefferson's metaphor, an interpretation consistent with the text and context of the Danbury letter and consistent too with his preferences for church-state relations today.</p>
<p>Dreisbach's essay is long, diffuse, and quite repetitive. Some of the sections seem to bear little relationship to the main point, including the introductory one that describes a half-ton cheese sent from Massachusetts to the White House by Jefferson's Baptist supporters. (This may be my only professional opportunity to urge someone to cut the cheese, so I'll seize it.)</p>
<p>When Dreisbach gets down to business, he makes the following points. The phrase "a wall of separation between Church & State" appeared in Jefferson's reply to a letter written by the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, congratulating him on his election to the presidency. Jefferson wrote his response carefully, even circulating a draft to two New Englanders in his cabinet, because he was acutely aware of its political implications. Indeed, Jefferson's letter was fundamentally a political document, not a theological or jurisprudential one. He wanted to shore up electoral support among the New England Baptists by reassuring them that he was devoted to their religious liberty. He also wanted to cuff the Federalist-Congregationalist establishment that had denounced him as an infidel during the presidential campaign of 1800. His hope was to sow some "'useful truths & principles' that 'might germinate and become rooted among [the people's] political tenets'" (p. 72). As Dreisbach notes, this horticultural wording of the letter's purpose implicitly admits that Jefferson's position on church-state separation did not reflect prevailing public attitudes. Hence it is not legitimate for historians and jurists to use the letter as an epitome of the founders' generally accepted understanding of the proper constitutional relationship of church and state.</p>
<p>When Dreisbach moves from the context to the text of Jefferson's letter, he discovers that it was not as far-reaching as historians and jurists have sometimes taken it to be. Here is the relevant sentence: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & 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 & State" (quoted at p. 74). Following Jon Butler, Dreisbach argues that Jefferson narrowed the scope of his statement by using the word church rather than the word _religion. Jefferson also narrowed the reach of the other key word, according to Dreisbach, by making it clear that the "State" he referred to was the national government, not the governments of the states. From the restrictive wording, Dreisbach concludes that Jefferson was not using the wall metaphor to announce a universal principle nor was he expressing "his views on the constitutional and prudential relationship between religion and all civil government" (p. 75).</p>
<p>What then was he doing? Dreisbach advances a "jurisdictional interpretation of the metaphor," contending that Jefferson's wall was intended to separate "the legitimate jurisdictions of federal and state governments on religious matters" (p. 75). In other words, Jefferson was offering a gloss on the First Amendment, explaining to the Danbury Baptists the nature of federalism, not the nature of church-state relations. In effect, his letter was alerting them that the federal government might be constitutionally barred from interfering in religion but that state governments were "authorized to accommodate and even prescribe religious exercises" (p. 78).</p>
<p>As evidence for this jurisdictional interpretation, Dreisbach points to Jefferson's own "willingness to issue religious proclamations in colonial and state government settings" (p. 77). From this apparent inconsistency, Dreisbach concludes that Jefferson's wall metaphor applied solely to the federal government. Next, he shifts his analysis from the Danbury letter to the First Amendment, arguing that Jefferson and his contemporaries viewed the Bill of Rights as "essentially a states' rights document" (p. 79). The First Amendment was, he says, a guarantee to the states that the federal government could not interfere with their religious establishments: "The use of a First Amendment wall to protect dissenters' religious rights in the states would have dangerously undermined that other great protector of civil and religious liberty--federalism" (p. 81). Hence those who take the wall metaphor as "the quintessential symbolic expression" of Jefferson's views on church and state are using it in ways that he "almost certainly would not have recognized and, perhaps, would have repudiated" (p. 84).</p>
<p>But to prove this claim, Dreisbach must ignore the three introductory clauses in Jefferson's wall sentence quoted above. And he must also disregard the sentence in the Danbury letter that follows the wall sentence: "Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties" (quoted at p. 74). To me at least, these words suggest that Jefferson was attempting to state universal principles about religion and government, principles that the federal constitution had incorporated and that he wished to see extended more generally.</p>
<p>Besides, Dreisbach's argument confuses Jefferson's understanding of his constitutional powers with his personal principles and preferences. It is rather like reasoning that President Lincoln wished slavery to flourish in 1861 because he said that he lacked constitutional authority to free the slaves. Even Dreisbach seems to concede that he has pushed too far. After insisting that the wall metaphor was not a general statement of Jefferson's views on church-state relations, he acknowledges, "It is plausible, even likely, that Jefferson desired each state through its respective constitutions and laws to erect its own wall of separation..." (p. 83).</p>
<p>If so, why all the jurisdictional huffing and puffing? Dreisbach's real quarrel seems to be not with historians who have misunderstood Jefferson's values but with jurists who have misapplied his words. If the courts had not seized on the wall metaphor as the authoritative explication of the First Amendment, it is hard to imagine that Dreisbach or anybody else would have attempted to argue that the Danbury letter was about Jefferson's views on federalism rather than his views on church and state. But if Dreisbach is to get where he wants to go today, he must either change legal doctrine or change history. It is easier to change history.<br />Unlike judges, historians don't subscribe to the principle of stare decisis.</p>
<p>After three essays that seem intent upon finding historical grounds for a flexible and "accommodationist" reading of the First Amendment, it is refreshing to encounter one that has no obvious policy goals for the present. Catherine A. Brekus, Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School, seeks to explain how the Revolution's religious settlement helped to change the status of women. Her essay, "The Revolution in the Churches: Women's Religious Activism in the Early American Republic," makes the following resolutely historical argument. Before the Revolution, when church was closely tied to state, "women were almost universally excluded from positions of religious leadership" (p. 118), and they were disciplined--by church and state alike--if they challenged males' authority in religion. The exceptions were dissenting sects like the Baptists, Quakers, and Separates. Because these sects had divorced religion from politics, they did not view women's public religious leadership as threatening their legal, economic, and political subordination to men. Brekus acknowledges that theology was also a factor, but she contends that there was "a strong correlation between religious dissent and female leadership in colonial America" (p. 121).</p>
<p>When the First Amendment "shattered the traditional relationship between religion and politics" (p. 121), all churches became, in effect, dissenting sects. As voluntary associations that depended on persuasion for their success, they occupied a middle ground "between the private world of the family and the public world of the government" (p. 123). Because they were no longer quasi-governmental institutions, the newly disestablished churches could accept women's religious activism and leadership without seeming to countenance political disorder. Indeed, the notion of republican motherhood suggested that women's participation in church-sponsored reform movements actually secured public order. Thus the ante-bellum churches offered women an entrance into public life. Women of all kinds--Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; blacks and whites; Northerners and Southerners; middle class and working class--surged through the opening. The most striking and controversial examples of women in the public sphere were female evangelical preachers. Although these women preachers typically denied any desire to overturn male authority, it was but a short step from their defense of women's religious rights to feminists' demands for women's political rights: if women could be preachers, "why couldn't they also vote or hold public office?" (p. 130).</p>
<p>Now, one might object that Brekus gives too much weight to disestablishment and the First Amendment (though her emphasis is understandable, given the book's subject). It is quite likely that women's religious activism would have increased had there been no Revolution. After all, religious women in England actively participated in nineteenth-century missionary and moral reform movements. Moreover, in the United States women's activism in religion and reform was greatest in New England, the region where established churches held on the longest. Still, Brekus's essay offers an intriguing, fresh look at some old topics. Although it might seem that she is saying the same thing that Nancy F. Cott said a quarter century ago in The Bonds of Womanhood, Brekus gives her argument a slightly different spin. She stresses women's agency and leadership more than male ministers' control and direction. And she describes religious and reform societies not as sororal extensions of women's domestic sphere but rather as public arenas in which "women worked side by side with men" (p. 124; see also p. 126). Other historians have observed that the women's rights movement had religious roots. But when Brekus says that the political revolution for American women was preceded by a religious revolution (p. 117), she helps us realize that this fact belongs as much in the history of American religion as it does in the history of American feminism.</p>
<p>Finally, this essay is a useful complement to the currently popular argument that the American Revolution constructed a definition of citizenship through gender (and racial) exclusion. Without disputing that claim, Brekus nevertheless restores some revolution to the Revolution by showing that once the "founders set in motion a religious revolution" (p. 130), they inadvertently started a gender revolution as well. This is a nice essay. It made me think anew about matters that I thought I already understood.</p>
<p>The next essay, "Evangelicals in the American Founding and Evangelical Political Mobilization Today," is great. Written by Mark A. Noll, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, it is the one essay that was not delivered as a paper at the Library of Congress symposium. Noll, who is widely admired as an evangelical Christian scholar dedicated to intellectual candor and historical rigor, sets out to correct the misuse of history by contemporary disputants, especially by politically mobilized evangelicals who claim that America's founders embraced evangelical beliefs.</p>
<p>Noll begins his essay with a long, careful doctrinal, sociological, and historical analysis of political mobilization among white conservative Protestant evangelicals during the past twenty-five years. Resentful of "national standards of moral practice" (p. 145) that accompanied the expansion of federal authority, these evangelical Protestant conservatives felt "a sense of historical violation": "the deep conviction that the United States was once a Christian country in a meaningful, if nonestablishmentarian, sense of the term, which in the fairly recent past has been hijacked by secularists in a great conspiracy to negate that historical reality" (p. 145). In reaction to this evangelical myth of the founding disseminated by the New Christian Right, there has emerged a liberal, secularist counter-myth, typified by R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick's book The Godless Constitution: The Case against Religious Correctness. Noll explodes both myths. In so doing, he reveals that good history makes for complex truths and that complex truths in turn make for good politics, which is to say politics based on understanding and tolerance.</p>
<p>Noll shows that "evangelicalism as defined by its conservative Protestant exponents today played at best a negligible role in the founding era of the 1770s and 1780s" (p. 146). True, the political leaders of the Revolution spoke of the deity with respect, but they were not born-again Christians or believers in original sin. They were not atheists, but neither were they evangelicals. Nor, for the most part, was the public that they led. Both inside and outside the leadership ranks, the public political discourse during the Revolution was "overwhelmingly this-worldly" in character (p. 147). In fact, what we would recognize as evangelical Christianity did not begin to flourish in America until after 1800; in other words, it emerged after the framework for church-state relations had been set by the decidedly non-evangelical founding generation. The founders had determined that there would be no religious establishment, but they also had assumed that religion would be relied upon to "provide the morality without which a republic would collapse"(p. 151). In the nineteenth century, voluntarist evangelical denominations responded to the founders' challenge, successfully moralizing American culture. But even as they spread their values, they never produced a unified evangelical politics. Throughout the ante-bellum period, evangelicals were divided politically along regional, class, denominational, and doctrinal lines.</p>
<p>Having proved that the founders' guidelines for religion and society emerged in a situation "more theistic than some modern liberals admit" but "much less explicitly Christian than modern evangelicals wish" (p. 154), Noll ends with four contemporary applications. First, he urges Americans to engage in honest political debate rather than search the mythic past for a "constitutional silver bullet" (p. 154). Second, he urges evangelicals to recognize that while political mobilization is traditional in America, a unified evangelical politics is not. Third, he urges evangelical conservatives to consider the dangers of political involvement by reflecting on the lessons of the Civil War, which weakened evangelicalism "as a spiritual force" in both North and South (p. 155). Finally, he urges all Americans to understand that though today's evangelicals are wrong to appropriate the founders, they are right to insist that the founders rested their hopes for the republic on the virtue that religion promotes.</p>
<p>Noll's balanced arguments and judicious tone are models for historians who seek to study a past that has become the present's battleground. This essay should also be required reading for anyone tempted to arm himself with a quotation from Washington's Farewell Address and fire off a letter to the editor about the Faith of Our Fathers. As if to demonstrate, however, that good advice is generally ignored, Noll's sensible contribution is followed by Michael Novak's harangue on "The Influence of Judaism and Christianity on the American Founding." Novak, who occupies the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, has written the kind of essay that Noll's is designed to prevent. To a historian, this essay will seem the weakest one in the book, not simply because it has the most overt political agenda but also because it displays the least concern for historical context. A swashbuckling op-ed style is evident in the deliberately provocative question that begins the piece: "Can an atheist be a good American?" (p. 159). That style is also apparent in the breezy contention that "few historians or political philosophers" possess sufficient familiarity with "the traditions of religious reflection on liberty" to descry the thesis that Novak intends "to lift into view" (p. 159). Once hoisted, however, the thesis does not appear to be all that novel. Novak asserts that the founders drew upon both "Whig and Jewish-Christian theories of liberty" (p. 159). Reason and revelation converged to teach them that liberty required virtue, that virtue required religion, and that all three--religion and virtue and liberty--were precarious and easily lost. To secure all three and preserve republican government, the founders chose not to establish a national church but rather to foster "religious habits of the heart" in the American people (p. 173). Their efforts to build the republic on a moral foundation meant that they accepted and even encouraged the "free exercise" of religion in public life (p. 174). Unlike Noll, who contrasts the unevangelical American Revolutionaries with their nineteenth-century evangelical descendants, Novak contrasts them with their near-contemporaries, the infidel Jacobins. Whereas the future-oriented French Revolutionaries followed the Enlightenment's abstract principles of Reason to their destructive, radical, atheistic conclusions, the American Whigs were traditionalists who shunned utopian abstractions and sought instead to restore ancient Saxon liberties and Jewish-Christian religion. In Novak's version of comparative revolutions, Robespierre bade his countrymen lose their heads in the Terror; Washington bade his bow their heads in prayer.</p>
<p>But, Novak warns, the founders' foundation is being sapped. During the past fifty years "important elites in American life" including political philosophers, law school professors, and judges "have come to regard religion as a force inimical to democracy" (p. 163). They have been "Europeanizing" (p. 163) the American Revolution by denying its religious sources and stressing instead the secular ideas of Enlightenment thinkers, especially Locke, who is being used by certain unnamed "interpreters" to drive our country "down the winding road to Gomorrah, into the decadence that has destroyed many nations" (p. 184, n.37). The first step downward is to define humans in Lockean terms as solitary and atomistic individuals. The second step is to define all obligations and responsibilities as merely volitional. The third step is "to empower the government to root out every vestige of religious expression from every aspect of public life" (p. 176). Novak apparently believes that if these anonymous elites succeed in giving the Revolution a French roll, the "extinction" of Judaism and Christianity "in private life" is sure to follow (p. 176). Can tumbrels and the guillotine be far behind? To avert this apocalypse, Novak pries quotations from their context and hurls them indiscriminately at the "elites." (Much of the ammunition was already assembled for him in William J. Bennett's arsenal for non-elites, Our Sacred Honor: Words of Advice from the Founders in Stories, Letters, Poems, and Speeches.) Passages by Benjamin Rush and Rev. Samuel Cooper are flung out to prove that republics require religion. Utterances by Joseph Story and Noah Webster are plucked from the nineteenth century and heaved. Even Jefferson and Madison, collaborators on Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom, have their words seized and shied at the irreligious. Novak's evidentiary standards are not high. If in 1860 John Wingate Thornton declared that "To the Pulpit, the Puritan Pulpit, we owe the moral force which won our independence" (quoted at p. 164), well then it must be so.</p>
<p>But quibbles about evidence are ultimately irrelevant, for this piece is a jeremiad, not a work of historical scholarship. The quotations that fill it serve about the same purpose that scripture citations serve in a Puritan sermon. Novak's essay begins by asking if an atheist can be a good American. It ends by calling for virtue and vigilance and by promising that "America's experiment in liberty is especially dear to Providence. Looking down on it, God smiles" (p. 178). Perhaps so, I'm not sure. I can't see God's face. I am certain, though, that a historian winced. Editor Hutson has saved the best for last: "Why Revolutionary America Wasn't a 'Christian Nation'" by Jon Butler, the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University. Asking if late eighteenth-century America was a Christian country, Butler proposes to "look at government, society, and people to recover what men and women of the time did and believed" (p. 189). He discovers that the answer to his question is complicated.</p>
<p>In some ways, America on the eve of the Revolution was more religious than it had been in the seventeenth century. Revivalism and denominational expansion during the eighteenth century caused a tremendous growth in the number of congregations. Moreover, the "state church apparatus" (p. 189) was also becoming stronger, with seven of the thirteen colonies giving legal support to a single Protestant church. Even in colonies without an establishment, Catholics, Jews, and blasphemers frequently endured legal discrimination and penalties.</p>
<p>But despite congregational growth and legal support for churches, most eighteenth-century Americans remained indifferent to religion. Before the Revolution, about eighty percent of adults did not even belong to a church. America was only nominally and formally Christian. Indeed, Butler argues that the laws establishing state churches and favoring Protestant Christianity were needed "precisely because actual Christian adherence in the population was relatively weak" (p. 191).</p>
<p>After the Revolution, denominational rivalries and Enlightenment objections to religious coercion led states "to withdraw from or greatly reduce government involvement with religion" (p. 192). In state after state, single-church establishments fell after religious pluralism provoked bitter political squabbles over tax support and legislative favoritism. The culmination of Americans' increasing suspicion of government partiality in religion was the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Going far beyond the prohibition of an established church, the First Amendment "banned government activity in religion generally" (p. 196).</p>
<p>Revolutionary Americans understood that theirs was "a society where Christianity was important yet not ubiquitous" (p. 197). It was not a Christian nation. There was too much indifference, heterodoxy, and atheism to call it that. Given their religious diversity and its potential for turmoil, Americans realized that they could preserve civil peace and promote spiritual renewal only by keeping government from meddling in religion. If the United States were ever to become a Christian nation, it would do so as "a matter of practice, not law or governmental encouragement" (p. 198).</p>
<p>Looking back, Butler marvels at the "remarkable risks taken by remarkable men and women in remarkable times" (p. 189). In separating government and religion, they boldly devised an arrangement that was, in its day, virtually unprecedented and that became, in the days to follow, notably successful. As Butler comments, their risks and their achievements still "challenge modern Americans who would pretend to exercise equal leadership on still difficult questions of religion, the state, conscience, and faith" (p. 189).</p>
<p>If that challenge is to be issued to modern Americans, it will be historians who deliver it. We should be grateful, I suppose, because we have here a subject--religion and the Revolution--about which modern Americans actually care to hear what we think. There's always a danger, though, when historians are handed an audience, especially an audience eager to act on instruction. The opportunity can bring out the worst in us. We don't do our duty as historians when we oversimplify and overstate, when we ignore historical context, when we disregard the differences between present and past circumstances, when we pretend that the words of a few great men express the convictions of all their contemporaries. We do our duty as historians when we help our contemporaries comprehend a past that was, as Butler shows it to be, more "complicated, fascinating, and historically unique" than they might have imagined (p. 189). Fortunately, in this collection of essays historians can find several models of duty well done.</p>
<p>H-NET BOOK REVIEW<br />Published by H-SHEAR @ h-net.msu.edu (September, 2001)<br />Copyright 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>to MESSRS. NEHEMIAH DODGE, EPHRAIM ROBBINS, AND STEPHEN S. NELSON, A COMMITTEE OF THE DANBURY BAPTIST ASSOCIATION, IN THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT.<br />WASHINGTON, January I, 1802.<br />GENTLEMEN,-The affectionate sentiments of esteem and approbation which you are so good as to express towards me, on behalf of the Danbury Baptist Association, give me the highest satisfaction. My duties dictate a faithful and zealous pursuit of the interests of my constituents, and in proportion as they are persuaded of my fidelity to those duties, the discharge of them becomes more and more pleasing.</p>
<p>Believing with you that religion is a matter which 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. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.</p>
<p>I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common Father and Creator of man, and tender you for yourselves and your religious association, assurances of my high respect and esteem.<br /><a href="http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/tj-rel.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Thomas Jefferson</a></p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-19511176303979907272012-03-30T16:06:00.001-07:002019-09-04T14:53:12.330-07:00America and its "Christian Heritage"<p>The Following Email Was Sent As A Circular...</p>
<blockquote>DID YOU KNOW? As you walk up the steps to the building which houses the U.S. Supreme Court you can see near the top of the building a row of the world's law givers and each one is facing one in the middle who is facing forward with a full frontal view .. it is Moses and he is holding the Ten Commandments!<br />
<p>DID YOU KNOW? As you enter the Supreme Court courtroom, the two huge oak doors have the Ten Commandments engraved on each lower portion of each door.</p>
<p>DID YOU KNOW? As you sit inside the courtroom, you can see the wall, right above where the Supreme Court judges sit, a display of the Ten Commandments!</p>
<p>DID YOU KNOW? There are Bible verses etched in stone all over the Federal Buildings and Monuments in Washington, D.C.</p>
<a name='more'></a>
<p>DID YOU KNOW? James Madison, the fourth president, known as "The Father of Our Constitution" made the following statement:</p>
<blockquote>"We have staked the whole of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."</blockquote>
<p>DID YOU KNOW? Patrick Henry, that patriot and Founding Father of our country said:</p>
<blockquote>"It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by religionists but by Christians, not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ".</blockquote>
<p>DID YOU KNOW? Every session of Congress begins with a prayer by a paid preacher, whose salary has been paid by the taxpayer since 1777.</p>
<p>DID YOU KNOW? Fifty-two of the 55 founders of the Constitution were members of the established orthodox churches in the colonies.</p>
<p>DID YOU KNOW? Thomas Jefferson worried that the Courts would overstep their authority and instead of interpreting the law would begin making law an oligarchy .<br />the rule of few over many.</p>
<p>DID YOU KNOW? The very first Supreme Court Justice, John Jay, said:</p>
<blockquote>"Americans should select and prefer Christians as their rulers."</blockquote>
<p>How, then, have we gotten to the point that everything we have done for 220 years in this country is now suddenly wrong and unconstitutional?</p>
<p>Lets put it around the world and let the world see and remember what this great country was built on.</p>
<p>Chamber, US House of Representatives</p>
<p>I was asked to send this on if I agreed or delete if I didn't. Now it is your turn...<br />It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore, it is very hard to understand why there is such a mess about having the Ten Commandments on display or "In God We Trust" on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Why don't we just tell the other 14% to Sit Down and SHUT UP!!!</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>That email you rec'd is not only a bogus email, it's Bogus Maximus!</strong></p>
<p>Claim: Religious symbols and references abound in U.S. capital buildings and the words of America's founders.<br /><a href="http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/capital.asp" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Response</a> (thorough).</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>ADDITIONAL RESPONSES</strong><br />The internet is abuzz with "Christian nation" misstatements and myths these days. Even some conservative fundamentalist Christians find the "hard-line Christian nation" arguments of their fellow fundamentalists to be less than accurate. For instance, Christian author, Dennis Woods, a political pollster with credentials in journalism, education and theology, in his book (Discipling the Nations--The Government Upon His Shoulders), asks:</p>
<p>If the U.S. Constitution is a Christian document why does it contain no substantive references to God?</p>
<p>Why do the Federalist Papers contain no references to the Bible and almost 30 references to the governments of pagan Greece and Rome?</p>
<p>Why does the U.S. Constitution deny a religious test for public office, when almost all of its colonial forerunners required such a test?</p>
<p>Why does the Constitution rely on "we the people" to "ordain and establish this Constitution" rather than God, as did nearly every one of its predecessors?</p>
<p>What is the critical difference between government by social compact and government by Biblical covenant? Which one is the U.S. Constitution?</p>
<p>Why were the state legislatures excluded from a part in confirming the U.S. Constitution, as required by the Articles of Confederation? (p. 33)</p>
<p>Why did strong Christian statesmen such as Patrick Henry, John Hancock and Samuel Adams explicitly refuse the invitation to attend the Constitutional Convention? [Patrick Henry wanted only Trinitarian orthodox Christians to be able to serve in public office.--E.T.B.]</p>
<p>Why did George Washington not receive communion?</p>
<p>Why was the convention shrouded in secrecy, with all notes sequestered until after the death of the last delegate?</p>
<p>Why did James Madison believe that Christianity was a source of faction rather than the unifying factor in civil government?</p>
<p>Woods believes that the naïve or simplistic responses typically offered by Evangelicals like John Eidsmoe, David Barton (WallBuilders), Peter Marshall, and D.J. Kennedy damage the credibility of the very cause they are trying to defend.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>The country America won her independence from was Great Britain whose founding documents, as well as those of other European nations, mention "God" many times. But the members of America's Constitutional Convention decided against mentioning "God" in America's founding document. We are a government "by the people and for the people."</p>
<p>One interesting note: When the Southern states seceeded from the Northern ones right before the Civil War, they added the name of "God" to their Constitution.(But it didn't help them.)</p>
<p>Indeed, it if had been true that America's founders were Bible-loving orthodox evangelical Christians, then they overlooked the words of Paul in the Bible in which he commanded Christians to obey the powers that be, not revolt against them. "For the powers that be are ordained of God and do not bear the sword in vain."</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>CHRISTIAN LEADERS WHO DO NOT APPROVE OF THE U.S. BEING DECLARED A "CHRISTIAN NATION"</strong><br />Christian leaders, including Chuck Colson and Father Neuhaus met with other Christian leaders and together they all signed the following statement in 1997:</p>
<p>"We reject the idea that ours should be declared a 'Christian' nation. We do not seek a sacred public square but a civil public square. We strongly affirm the separation of church and state, which must never be interpreted as the separation of religion from public life. Knowing that the protection of minorities is secure only when such protections are supported by the majority, we urge Christians to renewed opposition to every form of invidious prejudice or discrimination. In the civil public square we must all respectfully engage one another in civil friendship as we deliberate and decide how we ought to order our life together."<br />SOURCE: <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9710/articles/documentation.html">We Hold These Truths</a>: A Statement of Christian Conscience and Citizenship Copyright (c) 1997 First Things 76 (October 1997):51-54.</p>
<p>ORIGIN OF THE ABOVE STATEMENT: Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship and Father Richard John Neuhaus convened a meeting of Christian leaders in Reston, Virginia, to consider the development of a statement on "conscience and citizenship" relative to the American constitutional order. After months of drafting and consultation, it was decided to release the statement on the Fourth of July. Historians of American religion have observed that "We Hold These Truths" represents an unprecedented range of Christian leadership addressing together a question of great public moment. Although many others have indicated their support, the list of names appended here is limited to the original signatories.<br />-The Editors of First Things magazine</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>QUESTION: Is David Barton's claim true, that "52 of the 55 signers of the Constitution were orthodox Christians and many were evangelical Christians?"</p>
<p>ANSWER: Barton does not cite any authority to support this assertion.<br />Indeed, the weight of scholarly opinion is to the contrary. For example, Professor Clinton Rossiter has written:</p>
<blockquote>"Although it had its share of strenuous Christians... the gathering at Philadelphia was largely made up of men in whom the old fires were under control or had even flickered out. Most were nominally members of one of the traditional churches in their part of the country.. and most were men who could take their religion or leave it alone. Although no one in this sober gathering would have dreamed of invoking the Goddess of Reason, neither would anyone have dared to proclaim his opinions had the support of the God of Abraham and Paul. The Convention of 1787 was highly rationalist and even secular in spirit." (Clinton Rossiter, 1787; The<br />Grand Convention, pp. 147-148.)</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://members.tripod.com/~candst/bjcpa1.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Much has been made of Benjamin Franklin's suggestion</a> that the Convention open its morning sessions with prayer. His motion was turned down, however, and not again taken up. Franklin himself noted that "with the exception of 3 or 4, most thought prayers unnecessary." (Ferrand, Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, rev. ed., Vol. 1, p.452.)<br />While there can be little doubt that Christian values shaped the thinking of the Founders, it is wrong to jump to the conclusion that the Founders were almost all orthodox evangelicals Christians. Even though many of the Founders applauded religion for its utility- believing religion was good for the country- they also argued vigorously for voluntary religion and complete religious freedom. Thus, even if Barton's point were true, it does not compel the conclusion that we should privilege Christianity in any legal or constitutional sense.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>WHAT ABOUT THOSE WHO SIGNED THE "DECLARATION OF INDEPEDENCE?"</strong><br />"Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, the theological leanings of some twenty have been identified. Three have been characterized as deists: Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, and Stephen Hoepkins of Rhode Island. Two others, John Adams of Massachusetts and George Wythe of Virginia, are described as liberal Christians strongly influenced by deism. Four, including Jefferson’s friend Benjamin Rush, were liberals not inclined toward deism. About eleven were definitely orthodox believers. Samuel Huntington, Philip Livingston, and John Witherspoon, president of Princeton University, were prominent in this last group... Among the founders of the American republic who were not signers of the Declaration of Independence, George Washington, James Madison, and George Mason were religious liberals leaning toward deism. Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and Alexander Hamilton were generally orthodox Christians opposed to deism... In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, deism in the United States, as elsewhere, seemed to be sweeping everything before it... The deist outlook... in the American colonies... became popular among the rich and well-born about the time of the Revolution."<br />--Cardinal Avery Dulles admits in his article "<a href="http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0501/articles/dulles.htm">The Deist Minimum</a>" in the Jan. 2005 issue of First Things magazine</p>
<p>See also the New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (Oxford U. Pres, 2001) According to that atlas only 25% of the country attended church at the time of the American Revolution. Church attendance grew over the years.</p>
<p>Other sources corroborate that between the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the start of the Civil War (1861), the "rate of adherence" to Christianity more than doubled.<br />--Christianity Today, Aug. 16, 1993, p. 62, book review of Roger Finke and Rodney Stark's The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press).</p>
<p>So, America at the time of the Revolution was not even as Christian as America is today.</p>
<p>"Why Revolutionary America Wasn't a 'Christian Nation'" by Jon Butler (the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University) in James H. Hutson, ed., Religion and the New Republic: Faith in the Founding of America (England: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000)</p>
<p>Butler takes a "look at government, society, and people to recover what men and women of the time did and believed" (p. 189). He discovers that the answer to his question is complicated.</p>
<p>In some ways, America on the eve of the Revolution was more religious than it had been in the seventeenth century. Revivalism and denominational expansion during the eighteenth century caused a tremendous growth in the number of congregations. Moreover, the "state church apparatus" (p. 189) was also becoming stronger, with seven of the thirteen colonies giving legal support to a single Protestant church. Even in colonies without an establishment, Catholics, Jews, and blasphemers frequently endured legal discrimination and penalties.</p>
<p>But despite congregational growth and legal support for churches, most eighteenth-century Americans remained indifferent to religion. Before the Revolution, about eighty percent of adults did not even belong to a church. America was only nominally and formally Christian. Indeed, Butler argues that the laws establishing state churches and favoring Protestant Christianity were needed "precisely because actual Christian adherence in the population was relatively weak" (p. 191).</p>
<p>After the Revolution, denominational rivalries and Enlightenment objections to religious coercion led states "to withdraw from or greatly reduce government involvement with religion" (p. 192). In state after state, single-church establishments fell after religious pluralism provoked bitter political squabbles over tax support and legislative favoritism. The culmination of Americans' increasing suspicion of government partiality in religion was the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Going far beyond the prohibition of an established church, the First Amendment "banned government activity in religion generally" (p. 196).</p>
<p>Revolutionary Americans understood that theirs was "a society where Christianity was important yet not ubiquitous" (p. 197). It was not a Christian nation. There was too much indifference, heterodoxy, and atheism to call it that. Given their religious diversity and its potential for turmoil, Americans realized that they could preserve civil peace and promote spiritual renewal only by keeping government from meddling in religion. If the United States were ever to become a Christian nation, it would do so as "a matter of practice, not law or governmental encouragement" (p. 198).</p>
<p>Looking back, Butler marvels at the "remarkable risks taken by remarkable men and women in remarkable times" (p. 189). In separating government and religion, they boldly devised an arrangement that was, in its day, virtually unprecedented and that became, in the days to follow, notably successful. As Butler comments, their risks and their achievements still "challenge modern Americans who would pretend to exercise equal leadership on still difficult questions of religion, the state, conscience, and faith" (p. 189).Source: <a href="http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/tj-rel.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tigger.uic.edu</a></p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>AMERICA'S "FORGOTTEN FOUNDERS" (NATIVE AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND AMERICA'S FOUNDING)</strong><br /><a href="http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">On June 11, 1776</a> while the question of independence was being debated, the visiting Iroquois chiefs were formally invited into the meeting hall of the Continental Congress. There a speech was delivered, in which they were addressed as "Brothers" and told of the delegates' wish that the "friendship" between them would "continue as long as the sun shall shine" and the "waters run." The speech also expressed the hope that the new Americans and the Iroquois act "as one people, and have but one heart." After this speech, an Onondaga chief requested permission to give Hancock an Indian name. The Congress graciously consented, and so the president was renamed "Karanduawn, or the Great Tree." With the Iroquois chiefs inside the halls of Congress on the eve of American Independence, the impact of Iroquois ideas on the founders is unmistakable. History is indebted to Charles Thomson, an adopted Delaware, whose knowledge of and respect for American Indians is reflected in the attention that he gave to this ceremony in the records of the Continental Congress.</p>
<p>This book has two major purposes. First, it seeks to weave a few new threads into the tapestry of American revolutionary history, to begin the telling of a larger story that has lain largely forgotten, scattered around dusty archives, for more than two centuries. By arguing that American Indians (principally the Iroquois) played a major role in shaping the ideas of Franklin (and thus, the American Revolution) I do not mean to demean or denigrate European influences. I mean not to subtract from the existing record, but to add an indigenous aspect, to show how America has been a creation of all its peoples.<br />--<a href="http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/FFexcerpts.html">Forgotten Founders</a>: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois and the Rationale for the American Revolution by Bruce E. Johansen</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>QUESTION: Did James Madison, the fourth president, known as "The Father of Our Constitution" say "Our future is staked on the Ten Commandments?"<br />(i.e., David Barton has spread the story that Madison wrote: "We have staked the whole of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.")</p>
<p>ANSWER: The "Ten Commandments" quote allegedly written by James Madison <a href="http://members.tripod.com/~candst/misq1.htm">remains unsubstantiated</a>, as even David Barton has admitted, though there is evidence that such a quote might be based on someone else's opinion expressed in the mid-1900s.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>QUESTION: Every session of Congress begins with a prayer by a paid preacher, whose salary has been paid by the taxpayer since 1777. But, what did the "Father of Our Constitution," James Madison, think of the government paying for a preacher?</p>
<p>ANSWER: Madison opposed--although he didn't stop--the appointment of chaplains for Congress. "Is the appointment of Chaplains to the two Houses of Congress consistent with the Constitution, and with the pure principle of religious freedom?" he asked in 1820. His answer: "In the strictness the answer on both points must be in the negative. ...The establishment of the chaplainship to Congs is a palpable violation of equal rights, as well as of Constitutional principles."</p>
<p>Madison went on to suggest that if members of Congress wanted a chaplain, they should pay for it themselves. "If Religion consist in voluntary acts of individuals, singly, or voluntarily associated, and it be proper that public functionaries, as well as their Constituents should discharge their religious duties, let them like their Constituents, do so at their own expense. How small a contribution from each member of Congres would suffice for the purpose! How just would it be in its principle! How noble in its exemplary sacrifice to the genius of the Constitution; and the divine right of conscience! Why should the expense of a religious worship be allowed for the Legislature, be paid by the public, more than that for the Ex. or Judiciary branch of the Gov."</p>
<p>James Madison even objected to government giving money to churches to care for the poor. It would be the beginning of a dangerous mixture, he believed - dangerous both to government and churches alike. Thus, on February 21, 1811, President James Madison vetoed a bill passed by Congress that authorized government payments to a church in Washington, DC to help the poor.</p>
<p>In Madison's mind, caring for the poor was a public and civic duty - a function of government - and must not be allowed to become a hole through which churches could reach and seize political power or the taxpayer's purse. Funding a church to provide for the poor would establish a "legal agency" - a legal precedent - that would break down the wall of separation the founders had put between church and state to protect Americans from religious zealots gaining political power.</p>
<p>Thus, Madison said in his veto message to Congress, he was striking down the proposed law, "Because the bill vests and said incorporated church an also authority to provide for the support of the poor, and the education of poor children of the same;..." which, Madison said, "would be a precedent for giving to religious societies, as such, a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty."</p>
<p>But always, in Madison's mind, the biggest problem was that religion itself showed a long history of becoming corrupt when it had access to the levers of governmental power and money.</p>
<p>In 1832, he wrote a letter to the Reverend Jasper Adams, pointing this out. "I must admit moreover that it may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points. The tendency to a usurpation on one side or the other or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them will be best guarded against by entire abstinence of the government from interference in any way whatever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order and protecting each sect against trespasses on its legal rights by others."</p>
<p>As he wrote to Edward Everett on March 18, 1823, "The settled opinion here is, that religion is essentially distinct from civil Government, and exempt from its cognizance; that a connection between them is injurious to both..."</p>
<p>Religious leaders in the Founders' day, in defense of church/state cooperation, pointed out that for centuries kings and queens in England had said that if the state didn't support the church, the church would eventually wither and die.</p>
<p>James Madison flatly rejected this argument, noting in a July 10, 1822 letter to Edward Livingston: "We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: the Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government." He added in that same letter, "I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and<br />Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together."<br />--Thom Hartmann, "Scalia To Synagogue--Jews Are Safer With Christians In Charge," CommonDreams.org, published Thursday, December 2, 2004</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-88816968849387911262012-03-26T14:58:00.001-07:002019-09-04T14:53:25.117-07:00Dr. D. James Kennedy's "Scholarship"<p>While visiting the <a href="http://www.campusfreethought.org/forum" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Campus Freethought Forum</a> I noticed one young Christian debater who relied heavily upon quotations of America's Founding Fathers which he copied from books written by Dr. D. James Kennedy, a scholar whom he praised for having had "9" doctorates bestowed upon him (8 of which are probably mere token Ph.D.s given to him in exchange for delivering a speech at a Christian college graduation ceremony).</p>
<p><strong>KENNEDY ERROR THAT WAS CITED AS TRUTH<br />(PRAYERS SAVED THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION?)</strong><br />Kennedy's tale about the Constitutional Convention being in disarray until Benjamin Franklin suggested praying, afterwhich they all took to prayer like ducks to water -- and the work of writing the Constitution was finished forthwith -- is erroneous. No public prayers were offered in the Convention from the time it convened until it closed. So nearly unanimous were the members in their opposition to Franklin's proposition that not even a vote was taken on it. Franklin himself, referring to it, says: "The Convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary." Another matter they voted on was whether or not to include mention of "God" in the Constitution, and they voted that suggestion down too.</p>
<a name='more'></a>
<p>Do you know what country DID invoke the blessings of "God" in their Constitution? Answer: The Southern U.S., right after the South seceeded from the North, shortly before the Civil War.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>ANOTHER KENNEDY ERROR<br />(RELYING ON DAVID BARTON FOR QUOTATIONS FROM THE FOUNDING FATHERS)</strong><br />Like a lot of "Christian America" televangelists, Kennedy swallowed David Barton's "Christian Nation" quotations as the last word in truth. But afterwards, Barton was forced to admit that some of his most prized and highly publicized quotations were either false, highly questionable, or unsubstantiated.</p>
<p>Take this quotation that Barton attributed to James Madison, the architect of the Constitution: "We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." Barton, has admitted it's bogus. His group, WallBuilders' issued a one-page document titled "Questionable Quotes," a list of 12 statements allegedly uttered by Founding Fathers and other prominent historical figures, that are now considered to be suspect or outright false. Madison's alleged comment about the Ten Commandments is number four on the list and is flatly admitted by Barton to be "false."</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://members.tripod.com/~candst/misq1.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">misq1.htm</a></li>
<li><a href="http://members.tripod.com/~candst/boston2.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">boston2.htm</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.wischepp.com/Truth_Morality.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Truth_Morality.htm</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/founding.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">founding.htm</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I have a long time Evangelical Christian friend, Everette Hatcher, who has researched David Barton's quotations himself, and found them wanting and contacted Barton to suggest he get his stuff together. Everette himself chose to abandon his earlierr attempts to prove that America was founded as a "Christian nation." Everette sent me some of the results of his own research and also sent letters to Church and State admitting the falsity of his previous "Christian nation" views, and Everette remains an Evangelical Christian.</p>
<p>Another Evangelical Christian, quite a well known one, is Chuck Colson, who also agrees that America was not founded as a "Christian nation." In fact he debated William Murray, the son of Madalyn Murray O'Hair. (William Murray is a former atheist and former alcoholic who converted to a strongly virulent form of fundamentalist Christianity and who now believes that America was founded as a "Christian nation.") Colson disagrees.</p>
<p>There have also been quite a few scholarly books by EVANGELICAL Christian historians over the past few years who have disputed the fundamentalist movement's attempts to prove that America was founded as a "Christian nation." I have seen one such book that contains essays by several premier EVANGELICAL Christian historians who dispute the "Christian nation" myth that James Dobson and Pat Robertson and Barton and Kennedy, and other fundie ignoramuses are trying to hoist upon their listeners.<br />Read for instance, THE SEARCH FOR CHRISTIAN AMERICA by Mark A. Noll, George M. Marsden, Nathan O. Hatch</p>
<p>I've read elsewhere that about one third of Americans during the American revolution were in favor of it, one third remained neutral, and one third were against it. The majority of those who remained neutral or against the American revolution were Christians who believed with the apostle Paul that rulers were put in authority by God and should not be disobeyed, i.e., they were for King George of England, and they either helped mother England or refused to get involved in the revolutionary war at all.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>OVER A HUNDRED KENNEDY ERRORS</strong><br />Back in the late 1980s Rev. Kennedy was featured as the main guest on a series of John Ankerberg programs on creation and evolution. Kennedy rattled off 200 quotations, but unfortunately for Kennedy, a biology Professor at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, Dr. Thomas J. Wheeler, taped the program and wrote Ankerberg and Kennedy, asking them to reference each quotation. Wheeler's exchanges with the producers who were closest to Kennedy and Ankerberg, demonstrated that Kennedy had misattributed, miscited, misunderstood and misued quotations, as well as apparently having invented quotations that nobody could substantiate, not even Kennedy. In the end, Kennedy was shown to have exhibited a level of "scholarship" that was at the level of hearsay or folk-science, and last I heard, Ankerberg was hesitatnt about ever rebroadcasting that series. I am trying to get Wheeler to post his manuscript on the web, since he wrote his original paper back in the days when everybody did NOT have their own website nor webspace. I have paper copies of his paper and correspondence.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>YET ANOTHER KENNEDY ERROR<br />(FABRICATING A JULIAN HUXLEY QUOTATION, AND MISINTERPRETING WHAT JULIAN'S BROTHER SAID AS WELL)</strong><br /><a href="http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/julian_huxley_lie.html">I personally performed research</a> into the origin of a quotation that Kennedy loves to repeat and wrote an online paper on the subject.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>From the ease with which Kennedy relies on other Christian's unscholarly collections of quotations and wild stories, it makes you realize how easy it must also be for Kennedy to rely on the Bible's alleged quotations and wild stories. He has also preached both of them with equal vigor.</p>
<p>Cheers!</p>
<p>Edward T. Babinski (author of LEAVING THE FOLD: TESTIMONIES OF FORMER FUNDAMENTALISTS, Prometheus Books, paperback 2003)<br /><br /></p>
<hr />
<p>From: "ed babinski"<br />To: "Coral.Ridge.Ministries.Correspondence"<br />Sent: Friday, October 22, 2004 4:27 PM<br />Subject: Thank you for your reply, Sean, questions answered</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Coral.Ridge.Ministries.Correspondence"<br />Coral.Ridge.Ministries.Correspondence@coralridge.org writes:<br />Dear Ed,<br />It is a blessing to hear from you again. As you know, Dr. Kennedy and staff can give detailed responses to your positions, time permitting. Or else, they could point you in the direction of first rate scientists who agree with Dr. Kennedy and cannot agree with your position for valid professional reasons. However, what really puzzles us, Ed, is whatever is your real personal reason for expending so much emotional energy writing and restating your positions to us?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>ED: Dear Sean, Thank you for your reply! Please see my answers to your questions below!</p>
<p>I just happened to run into Kennedy's Julian Huxley fabrication quite recently, and thought it worth investigating, I work in a library and like to do research. While just last night I ran into one of Kennedy's sycophants on the campus freethought forum site, posting a number of emails with Kennedy's erroneous statements in them about America's Founding Fathers, and I quickly stitched together information concerning Kennedy. I thought your organization might appreciate a copy as well, so I cc'd you. I find it puzzling how a man of God can boast about his intellect and degrees yet be so gullible, not even hiring a good team of<br />quote and fact checkers.</p>
<hr />
<blockquote>
<p>Might it be that, down deep, you are not as sure of your positions as your protestations would seem to make you? Are you really, on the emotional level, struggling because the views that you have been advancing with such determined insistence over the years, might not be absolutely and incontrovertibly certain after all?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>ED: Sounds like you're looking in a mirror.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote>
<p>What if your evolutionary views were ultimately found to be totally scientifically unfounded, even to your satisfaction?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>ED: Kennedy's Young-Earth "Flood geology" has been dead ever since leading Christians scholars in geology at Cambridge and Oxford rejected it, and that was before Darwn's Origins was ever published.<br />By the 1850s, Christian men of science agreed the earth was extremely old.<br />For some of their reasons, see, "<a href="http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/flood.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Reasons Why 'Flood Geology' Was Abandoned in the Mid-1800s</a> by Christian Men of Science"<br />Such men included:<br />Reverend William Buckland (head of geology at Oxford)<br />Reverend Adam Sedgwick (head of geology at Cambridge)<br />Reverend Edward Hitchcock (who taught natural theology and geology at Amherst College, Massachusetts)<br />John Pye Smith (head of Homerton Divinity College)<br />Hugh Miller (self taught geologist, and editor of the Free Church of Scotland's newspaper) and,<br />Sir John William Dawson (geologist and paleontologist, a Presbyterian brought up by conservative Christian parents, who also became the only person ever to serve as president of three of the most prestigious geological organizations of Britain and America).<br />All of these giants of the geological sciences rejected the "Genesis Flood" as an explanation of the geologic record -- except for possibly the topmost superficial sediments, though <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/apr02.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Adam Sedgewick and Buckland</a> later abandoned even that hypothesis<br />Neither were their conclusions based on a subconscious desire to support "evolution," since none of the above evangelical Christians were evolutionists, none became evolutionists, and the earliest works of each of them were composed before Darwin's Origin of Species was published.</p>
<p>The "Flood geology" of Henry Morris (founder of the Institute for Creation Research), was a revival in the 1960s that even failed to convince the American Scientific Affiliation -- a longstanding group of Evangelical Christians and scientists whom Morris fled to form his own little group of strictly young-earth creationists, the Institute for Creation Research. And, Morris' book that sparked the "Flood geology" revival, The Genesis Flood, is filled with so many errors that it appears to be more a work of "Satan" than of God, since it lies about so many things, from the Paluxy manprints (that ICR and Answers in Genesis have since backed away from); to the "human skull found in coal" (the "Frieberg Skull" that two articles in the Creation Research Society Quarterly later debunked!); to the "Lewis Mountain Overthrust," the world's largest overthrust and reversed layer formation in geology that Morris said would turn the world of modern geology upside down (but later, two ICR geologists, Austin and Wise, concluded that the evidence that it was a genuine overthrust was reliable, so they have ceased using that formation as evidence against modern geology); in fact, Answers in Genesis has backed away from nearly all claims that evidence of "pre-Flood" man have been found, and even suggested that no such evidence may EVER be found. Answers in Genesis has even produced an article at their website concerning arguments for a Young-Earth that creationists should NOT use. Has Kennedy read that article? Does he realize how many Young-earth arguments over the years have added up to cases of embarrassment for YECs greater than"Piltdown man" and "Nebraska man" were embarrassing to evolutionists?</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote>
<p><em>What would you have lost, really? Remember Thomas Edison's famous remark to the reporter, "Young man, I did not fail 10,000 times to discover a light bulb. I successfully found 10,000 ways to not discover a light bulb". You could always continue on as a real scientist in the light of new and systematically improved science.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>ED: There is no science in either creationism or I.D., not if things *poof* into existence. Short science class indeed.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><em>That would be no loss, ultimately. You do not seem to convincingly exude that kind of self-confidence or self-assurance. </em></blockquote>
<p>ED: People who "convincingly exude self-confidence and self-assurance" include used car salesman. So, thank you for not comparing me to people like that.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><em>Is what is really irking you, that you might have to find that your current position has placed you on the rear guard, rather than the vanguard, of developing systematic science? There are, after all, a number of highly qualified scientists, both believers in God and unbelievers, who finally came to conclude to reject evolution, based on their scientific investigation of the evidence. </em></blockquote>
<p>ED: You are using the term "evolution" in different ways above. Also, Michael Denton does believe in a higher power, and he also has come to accept the theory of evolution, i.e., descent with modification from a common ancestor of all living things.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><em>Furthermore, as you are probably aware, philosophers, both believers and unbelievers, have in general had serious problems with evolution since the beginnings of the theory.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: Again, you haven't distinguished between evolution as the theory of common descent, and evolution as the theory of whatever mechanism whereby it occurs.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><em>There are first rate scientists and philosophers who are convinced that microbiology, physics, probability and cosmology support creation. </em></blockquote>
<p>ED: Cosmology? Evolution of the stars and galaxies and even of the evolution of all the elements out of hydrogen (which is going on inside stars right now) has lots of supporters among EVANGELICAL Christians. Google the websites for the Christian astronomer Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe, or the Christian astronomer Robert C. Newman of the Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute http://www.ibri.org/ or the books of the Christian astronomer, Howard Van Till of Calvin College.</p>
<p>Or consider the following admissions of YOUNG-EARTH creationist astronomers who admit that evolutionary astronomers are far ahead of them in figuring the cosmos out: <a href="http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/hypothesis.html">CREATIONISTS ADMIT "DIFFICULTIES" WITH THEIR HYPOTHESES</a></p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><em>And this is not to mention experts in formal logic, epistemology, scholastic metaphysics, rational psychology, and theodicy.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: The question is: Can you live with the knowledge that I can name more EVANGELICAL Christian professional scientists who agree that Kennedy and the YEC movement are wrong? The YEC movement on the internet, both ICR and AiG, boast of having 8 geologists. But the American Scientific Affiliation has an entire organization just FOR Christian geologists all of them OLD EARTHERS. http://www.wheaton.edu/ACG/ Heck, I can even name about 8 professional geologists who used to believe in a younger earth until they studied the earth and the history of YECism more carefully. (I might add that even at Loma Linda, the YECs are only found<br />in the apologetical organization on campus, not in the geology department proper.)</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><em>Or could it be, Ed, that you have had something of value in your background that does not dovetail with your current evolutionary position, yet the lack of which is something you really miss? If you are a former believer in Jesus, what have you gained by giving up belief in eternal life,</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: Abandoning the "belief" that you can PROVE your particular "beliefs" about the afterlife to others, is not the same thing as giving up either "belief" or "hope."</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><em>and in giving up a personal relation with Him as your Lord and Savior and Redeemer?</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: If an argument doesn't make sense scientifically, geologically, cosmologically, then bringing in the question of having a personal relationship with a spiritual being isn't going to help the argument at all. (Perhaps you are referring to the fact that Jesus in the Gospels is recorded as referring to Adam and Eve and Noah and the Flood as real people and events. But then, what Jew in Jesus' day didn't refer to them as real people and real events? Even Augustine's "accommodationist" theory of the incarnation, that Jesus spoke in a way he would be most easily understood by people in his day, can explain the way Jesus spoke about such matters, yet leave room for theistic evolutionary explanations.)</p>
<p>Actually, many EVANGELICAL Christians think that equating "Flood geology" and proofs of a "young-earth" with "Christianity" has inflicted harm to Christianity's reputation, just as harm has also been similarly inflicted on Christianity's reputation by those who equate their King-James-Only arguments with Christianity, or who equate their geocentric arguments ("Biblical astronomy") with Christianity (like Dr. Gerhardus Bouw).</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><em>Do you miss sharing with family and other significant persons in your life, what things of precious value you had with them previously?</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: My family was mostly Catholic when I became a Protestant fundamentalist. Of my former funda-gelical-costal friends from high school and college, my fellow musician pal, Artie Silver, has remained my friend for over the past three decades. We still like Phil Keaggy and other musicians, and we still both write music, and I may be working with him in future on some instrumentals and new songs. As my own parents have grown older, one of them has grown more devout, and listens to Catholic apologetics on the radio, perhaps to counter the Southern Baptist apologetics she gets from her neighbors here in the South. She's especially fond of Scott Hahn, a former Presbyterian minister who converted to Catholicism along with another Presbyterian minister friend of his. Today Hahn is an apologist for Catholicism. He also has a stirring testimony of how he was led by God to become a Catholic.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><em>Or, on the other hand, what do you risk losing by giving up Jesus and your Christian heritage--or, conversely, by giving up to Jesus and letting Him return to you? </em></blockquote>
<p>ED: I pray sometimes, or sometimes just listen quietly and pray internally. I am not against prayers. I figure there's a bit of theist inside even atheists, and a bit of atheist inside even theists. As I said, I have my own private beliefs and hopes in God and an afterlife, just as Deists and philosophical theists and people of many different religions have since time immemorial.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><em>You furthermore have to be aware of the historical legacy of the proponents of evolution and the enormous damage they have given rise to over the last murderous century. </em></blockquote>
<p>ED: Actually, historians agree that the 13th century was worse in terms of the death and damage it caused, what with the Black Death and Genghis Khan. Yet God was worshiped in Europe moreso then than now, still God allowed the Black Death. Likewise, during the Thirty Years War in Europe, most everyone in Europe believed in creationism, and in Jesus' divinity and the Trinity. It was an age of faith, of similar basic shared orthodox doctrines, including creationism, and yet it was also a time of much bloodshed and war, Christian killing Christian. If the folks back then had the 20th century weapons Hitler and Stalin did, and if the cities of Europe were as filled with people as they were in our 20th Century, only THEN might we perhaps be able to compare the resultant misery of that age with our own. Yet even without modern weapons, with mere single-shot pistols and canons, and swords and pikes, and lacking poison gas or airplanes or bombs, or barbed wire or machines guns, the Thirty Years War may have STILL been the most brutal and damaging conflict (per capita) that Europe has EVER seen.</p>
<p><strong>THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR<br />"THE WORST THUS FAR IN EUROPEAN HISTORY?"</strong><br />By the division of Christianity at the Reformation, religious authority itself became the cause of conflict. The Protestant states thereafter rejected the right of the Universal Church to judge their actions, while the Catholic states took that rejection as grounds to make war against them in clear conscience. The outcome was the Thirty Years' War, the worst thus far in European history, which may have killed a third of the German-speaking peoples and left Central Europe devastated for much of the seventeenth century.<br />- John Keegan, War and Our World (the Reith Lectures, 1998, broadcast on the BBC, recorded at the Royal Institution, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, King's College, London)</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>The last great spasm of the Reformation was its worst. The Thirty Years' War, from 1618 to 1648, killed millions in Central Europe and left Germany a wasteland of misery. It began because Catholic Habsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire tried to suppress growing Calvinism in regions already smoldering with Catholic-Lutheran tensions. Evangelical princes formed a defensive alliance, the Protestant Union. The other side formed the Catholic League. They faced each other like ticking bombs -- which finally exploded over a trifle: Protestant nobles entered the imperial palace in Prague and threw two Catholic ministers out a window onto a dung heap, touching off war.</p>
<p>Catholic armies quickly slaughtered the Protestant forces. The conflict might have ended then, but Catholic Emperor Ferdinant II decided to eradicate Protestantism entirely. The faith was outlawed and cruel persecution was inflicted.</p>
<p>Protestants appealed for foreign help, and Protestant King Christian IV of Denmark, sent an army to their rescue. Lutheran and Calvinist German princes joined him. Once again the Protestants were defeated, once again Ferdinand resumed religious oppression, and once again the victims sought outside aid.</p>
<p>Next, Protestant King Gustav Adolph of Sweden marched into Germany to rescue his fellow believers. His soldiers sang Martin Luther's hymn "Ein Feste Burg" in battle. Terrible slaughter occurred. A Catholic army captured Magdeburg and massacred its Protestant residents. King Gustav was killed, and his troops wreaked vengeance on Catholic peasants.</p>
<p>Eventually the war turned more political than religious. Catholic France entered on the side of the Protestants, in an attempt to cripples the rival Habsburgs. The killing dragged on decade after decade until both sides were too exhausted to continue.</p>
<p><br />The Thirty Years' War was a human catastrophe. It settled nothing, and it killed uncountable multitudes. One estimate says Germany's population dropped from 18 million to 4 million. Hunger and deprivation followed. Too few people remained to plant fields, rebuild cities, or conduct education or commerce. This disaster helped break the historic entwinement of Christianity and politics. The concluding Peace of Westphalia prescribed an end to the pope's control over civil governments.<br />- James A. Haught, Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1990)</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>The terrible Thirty Years' War had evolved out of religious as well as political differences. It ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. The provisions of the Treaty having an effect upon the idea of tolerance were few. In the first place, all stipulations regarding tolerance that the Peace produced pertained only to the Christian denominations; these were the religious parties that were granted equality in the eyes of the law. Only the Reformed (Zwinglians and Calvinists), the Catholics, and those who associated themselves with the Augsburg Confession (the Lutherans) were to enjoy equality and religious liberty according to the provisions of the Peace. As for all other faiths, Article VII, 2, expressly declared, "Besides the above-mentioned religions no other ones may be introduced into or tolerated within the Holy Roman Empire." It was on this account that Pope Innocent X, in the Bull Zelo domus dei of Nov. 20, 1648, protested that dissidents were being allowed to express their heresies freely. The idea that religious liberty is an inalienable right of man, first officially pronounced by a state in North America, was doubtless an effect of the Enlightenment. It influenced the French Nation Assembly's famous Declaration on Human Rights of Aug. 26, 1789. The Assembly also demanded freedom of religion and worship as human rights."<br />- Gustav Mensching [one of Europe's most respected comparative religionists], Tolerance and Truth in Religion, trans., Hans-J. Klimkeit(Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1971), p. 98, 99.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>Herbert Langer in The Thirty Years' War, says that more than one quarter of Europe's population died as a result of those thirty years of slaughter, famine and disease. Ironically, the majority of Europeans who killed each other shared such orthodox Christian beliefs as Jesus' deity, the Trinity, and even "creationism." So you cannot blame the horrific spectacle of the Thirty Years' War on modern day scapegoats like atheism, humanism or the theory of evolution. Such a war demonstrates that getting nations to agree on major articles of faith does not ensure peace, far from it. Some of the most intense rivalries exist between groups whose beliefs broadly resemble one another but differ in subtle respects.<br />E.T.B.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>THE ANABAPTISTS</strong><br />Although Catholic and Protestants were mortal enemies during most of the Reformation, they united to kill certain Christians [named derogatorily, "Anabaptists"] for the crime of double baptism. "A larger proportion of Anabaptists were martyred for their faith than any other Christian group in history -- including even the early Christians on whom they modeled themselves," British scholar Bamber Gascoigne wrote. [p. 109]<br />- James A. Haught, Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1990)</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>It is a fact recognized by many recent historians that the persecution of the Anabaptists surpassed in severity the persecution of the early Christians by pagan Rome. Persecution began in [Protestant] Zurich soon after the [Anabaptist] Brethren had organized a congregation. Imprisonment of varying severity, sometimes in dark dungeons, was followed by executions. Felix Manz was the first martyr to die in Zurich, but at least two Brethren had been martyred earlier in other cantons of Switzerland by Roman Catholic governments. Within a short period the leaders of the Brethren lost their lives in the persecution.</p>
<p>Anabaptism was made a capital crime. Prices were set on the heads of Anabaptists. To give them food and shelter was a made a crime. In Roman Catholic states even those who recanted were often executed. Generally, however, those who abjured their faith were pardoned except in Bavaria and, for a time, in Austria and also in the Netherlands. The duke of Bavaria, in 1527, gave orders that the imprisoned Anabaptists should be burned at the stake, unless they recanted, in which case they should be beheaded. King Ferdinand I of Austria issued a number of severe decrees against them, the first general mandate being dated August 28, 1527. In Catholic countries the Anabaptists, as a rule, were executed by burning at the stake, in Lutheran and Zwinglian states generally by beheading or<br />drowning. [p. 299-302]<br />- "<a href="http://www.anabaptists.org/writings/excerpts/meneu-1.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Persecution</a>," a chapter in Mennonites in Europe (Rod & Staff Publishers)</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><em>We are praying, Ed, that you admit to, and get past, your inner conflict and come to the complete and absolute Truth that never fails.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: I have my own prayers as well.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><em>If we may be of any other assistance to you, please let us know.</em></blockquote>
<p>ED: Yes, you may be of assistance. Thanks for reading this email. Please bring it to Kennedy's attention as well if possible.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote>
<p>May God richly bless you in this endeavor. We are praying for you.</p>
<p>SEAN</p>
Internet Correspondent</blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-13677225630682612822012-03-25T20:06:00.000-07:002019-09-04T14:53:42.518-07:00World Population Is a Problem, Perhaps the Biggest<p><em>The U.S.A., for example, has 300,000,000 residents, but yet there is still numerous areas of land with little or no residents. Ditto for Canada, Russia, and some parts of Asia and Africa. A lot of people inhabit metropolitan areas and coastal areas, thus resulting in a high density figure. As a generalization, if people were better distributed geographically, a "wildly overpopulated world" would not be your statement.</em></p>
<p>Ed: It's this argument that "there's still land to live on" that makes me want to strangle idiots like Rush Limbaugh and his Republican cronies. Sure we could cram every person on earth onto the island of Zanzibar, if we all stood nose to nose. The POINT about population problems, is that the world contains lots of places where it's next to impossible to live, places that lack fertile soil and drinkable water, or enough water for crops to grow. <a name='more'></a> And much of the earth consists of deserts and mountainsides and flood plains, and tornoado alleys, and fault lines, and dry scrublands and canyons and jungles where it's difficult to live, to say the least. (Not to mention that "spreading people out more" also leaves a food "distribution" problem, and health care distribution problem, etc.)</p>
<p>As for water, PARADE magazine had a front page article asking whether or not we would have enough in the coming decades for everybody on earth. Ground water pollution levels continue to rise, and areas of America and the world already are experiencing droughts and water shortages. My own town can't even process all the sewage and we've had contiminants in our water supply for decades now, sometimes people DIE just from drinking it. Not to mention that with industrialization came a huge increase in the needs and uses of water in general. Then there's the garbage factor and the recycling factor. Even at the present level of population, our low level of recycling and adding new pollutants will eventually kill mankind, we have to reduce those levels, and one way would be to simply reduce the population.</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-26305086456737123072012-03-25T18:15:00.000-07:002019-09-04T14:53:57.860-07:00Civil War, Slavery and John Ashcroft<p>Our prez, the dubiously honorable, George "Squeaked by on Election Night (or Election Month)" Bush must think he's got a mandate from his evangelical god on high to dare to nominate such a controversial and divisive candidate as John Ashcroft for Attorney General (grooming him for a seat on the Supreme Court no doubt).</p>
<p>John Ashcroft is so partisan he has praised a neo-Confederate magazine, SOUTHERN PARTISAN, for "defending partriots like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis," adding, "We've got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."</p>
<a name='more'></a>
<p>Which raises the question: Was slavery not a "perverted agenda?" The cause of state's rights wasn't being defended during the Civil War purely as an abstraction. It was linked to the right of the states to maintain slavery. Indeed, the last meeting that Jefferson Davis walked out on in Washington was one in which the federal government refused to extend slavery to the newly acquired western territories. Davis walked out ON THAT ISSUE, which Lincoln and his party would not compromise on. Indeed, it was that issue that got Lincoln elected in the first place: NOT to extend slavery to any of the newly acquired western terrritories. Moreover, Ashcroft and the SOUTHERN PARTISAN seem oblivious to general facts of related to the Civil War, including quotations from Jefferson Davis advocating slavery in ways that most people today have no trouble recognizing as a perverted agenda. Here's the facts that somebody needs to stuck up Croft's Ash:</p>
<p>When the Confederate states drew up their constitution, they added something the colonial founders had voted to leave out, namely, an invocation of the Deity. The South's proud new constitution began: "We, the people...invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God...".<br />[Charles Robert Lee, Jr., The Confederate Constitutions (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1963), p. 170].</p>
<p>Southern clergymen and politicians even argued that the South was more "Christian" than the North, it was the "Redeemer Nation.".<br />[Charles Wilson, Baptized in Blood (1980)].</p>
<p>"With secession and the outbreak of the Civil War, Southern clergymen boldly proclaimed that the Confederacy had replaced the United States as God's chosen nation.". [Mitchell Snay, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 193f.]</p>
<p>Even prior to the War, South Carolinian politician, James Henry Hammond, boasted, "Our denominations are few, harmonious, pretty much united among themselves [especially on the issue of slavery - ED.], and pursue their avocations in humble peace...Few of the remarkable Isms of the present day have taken root among us. We have been so irreverent as to laugh at Mormonism and Millerism, which have created such commotions farther North; and modern prophets have no honor in our country. Shakers, Dunkers, Socialists, and the like, keep themselves afar off. You may attribute this to our domestic Slavery if you choose [the slaves being taught what to believe only by members of the 'few, harmonious' Southern churches - ED.]. I believe you would do so justly. There is no material here [in the South] for such characters [from the North] to operate upon...A people [like we Southerners] whose men are proverbially brave, intellectual and hospitable, and whose women are unaffectedly chaste, devoted to domestic life, and happy in it, can neither be degraded nor demoralized, whatever their institutions may be. My decided opinion is, that our system of Slavery contributes largely to the development and culture of these high and noble qualities...". [Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), Chapter IV., "James Henry Hammond: Letter to an English Abolitionist," pp. 180, 181, 183, 184. Ironically, some of Hammond's "noble qualities" included seducing four of his young nieces. Later, his wife left him when he refused to stop seeing one of his female slaves by whom he had fathered a child. And Hammond told a close friend in 1857 that he was curious about the northern "Ism" called "Spiritualism." See, Carol Bleser, The Hammonds of Redcliffe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 9-12, 24.</p>
<p>Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, went further than Hammond in arguing for the superiority of southerners. A year after the war began, Davis publicly called northerners "miscreants," adding, "Were it ever to be proposed again to enter into a Union with such a people, I could no more consent to do it than to trust myself in a den of thieves...There is indeed a difference between the two peoples. Let no man hug the delusion that there can be renewed association between them. Our enemies are...traditionless.". [Lynda Lasswell Crist, Mary Seaton Dix, and Kenneth H. Williams, eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), Vol. 8, p. 567.]</p>
<p>Speaking of the South's "traditions," Jefferson Davis boasted, "It [slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God...it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation...it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts...Let the gentleman go to Revelation to learn the decree of God - let him go to the Bible...I said that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible, authorized, regulated, and recognized from Genesis to Revelation...Slavery existed then in the earliest ages, and among the chosen people of God; and in Revelation we are told that it shall exist till the end of time shall come. You find it in the Old and New Testaments - in the prophecies, psalms, and the epistles of Paul; you find it recognized, sanctioned everywhere.". [Jefferson Davis, Vol. 1, by Dunbar Rowland, pp. 286 & 316-317.] Davis' defenses of slavery are legion, as in his speech to Congress in 1848, "If slavery be a sin, it is not yours. It does not rest on your action for its origin, on your consent for its existence. It is a common law right to property in the service of man; its origin was Divine decree."</p>
<p>After 1856, Davis reiterated in most of his public speeches that he was "tired" of apologies for "our institution." "African slavery, as it exists in the United States, is a moral, a social, and a political blessing.".[Dodd, pp. 107, 154, 168. ] Or, as Davis reiterated after being elected President of the Confederacy, "My own convictions as to negro slavery are strong. It has its evils and abuses...We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him - our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude...You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be."<br />[. Kenneth C. Davis, Don't Know Much About the Civil War: Everything You Need to Know About America's Greatest Conflict But Never Learned (New York: Avon Books, 1996), p. 156.]</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-60328253547298888692012-03-25T18:11:00.000-07:002019-09-04T14:54:13.154-07:00George and Jeb Bush: Unfair Election in Florida<p>If you read the Liberal press, like The Nation magazine, they point out that the Florida governor Jeb Bush passed a law not allowing felons who served their time in other states, to register to vote in Florida. So any felons moving to Florida who went to register to vote for the presidential election were denied their voting priviledges. This incensed a lot of voters, because THERE IS NO FEDERAL MANDATE FOR SUCH A LAW that requires A GOV. to "doubly pardon" a felon from ANOTHER STATE if they have already served their time in that other state. This law of Jeb's was unconstitutional, and denied a lot of people their right to vote. One Black felon who'd served time in prison in another state ten years before, and who was now a minister and helping poor people was incensed at his voting priviledges being denied him in last year's election.</p>
<a name='more'></a>
<p>Furthermore, Jeb hired out the job of producing a list of ineligible voters to a company run and owned by staunch Republicans, and their list contained thousands of people who WERE NOT FELONS and who TRIED TO VOTE only to be turned away at the poles as "felons." Jeb even put up barricades at Black polling places and police to move those folks along even after they complained about being denied their voting privileges. Tens of thousands were denied their right to vote. Including a majority of Blacks.</p>
<p>Jeb also abolished affirmative action in Florida during his governance there.</p>
<p>There is a pattern of denying Black and Hispanic felons, and Black and Hispanic citizens (incorrectly listed as felons on the ineligible voter lists), and of abolishing affirmative action. That pattern was, according to the liberals, old Jim Crow injustice (from the post Civil War era) rearing its ugly head again. Why? Because those minorities are predominantly DEMOCRATIC.</p>
<p>That's what the liberal press says. I don't know enough about it myself. Though we all DO know that Pat Buchanan did not get ten thousand ballots in the predominantly Jewish county with the butterfly ballot. What's sad about the butterfly ballot case is that it's so easy to spot that a MAJOR flaw has occurred.</p>
<p>A major injustice in counting people's true votes in other words. If you compare the votes Pat got in all other Florida counties, even the most conservative and reactionary ones, you can see a HUGE spike for Pat in the ballot count of the one county with the huge elderly Jewish population that used the butterfly ballot. That's _ten thousand_ votes right there. And Gore only needed a couple hundred.</p>
<p>When you add up all of the above, it's clear that we have a fraud for a president. A man who cannot accept the real majority of the people's will along with the popular vote that Gore won. A man of integrity would not have accepted the results of such an ILL-ection, and certainly would not have pushed for such a speedy victory when he was ahead only a few hundred votes in a state of millions of voters. In my opinion Bush is not the president elect, and is just as dishonorable as every other scoundrel in Washington whom he portrays himself as being "above."</p>
<p>Lastly, Robert Anton Wilson points out that BOTH candidates received an equal 500,000 dollars in campaign funding from over 50 Fortune 500 companies. Our presidential contenders were both frauds so far as the people's will was concerned.</p>
<p>This guy is the famous investigative reporter who uncovered the Florida voting conspiracy.<br /><a href="http://www.gregpalast.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">http://www.gregpalast.com/</a></p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-32461169498396314362012-03-25T18:07:00.000-07:002019-09-04T14:38:32.892-07:00Dr. James Kennedy<blockquote>
<p>"Julie J." writes:</p>
<p>Hey, Ed.</p></blockquote>
<blockquote>Did you catch DJ Kennedy's sermon this a.m.? He used the Julian Huxley quote again. 'Said he heard it with his own ears. Sheesh!
<p>Julie</p></blockquote>
<p>To: "Julie J."<br />Subject: Re: Kennedy said it again!<br />Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 16:29:48 -0400</p>
<p>Sure it wasn't pre-recorded?</p>
<p>"Julie J." writes:</p>
<p>Ed,</p>
<p>I called Coral Ridge Ministries (1-800-988-7884) and asked if last Sunday was the first time the sermon "More Evidence for God" was preached. They told me it actually aired for the first time on April 11, 1999.</p>
<p>The sermon was particularly atheist-bashing, even by Kennedy's standards. The version on their website is considerably abridged. In the television version, he slams both Huxley and Bertrand Russell, another one of his favorite atheist poster boys for depravity. He tells (again) the story of how degenerate Russell was, and of course, it was due to his atheism.</p>
<p>In case you haven't heard it, the story is that BR liked to cheat on his wives and seduce his friends' wives and daughters. Kennedy's usually kind of vague about the particulars, but in this sermon, he adds some details about how BR's dear friend (no name) once invited him to his mansion, and he ended up seducing his 16-year-old daughter.</p>
<p>Kennedy probably surmised this information from a book called "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson (Harper & Row, 1988). He's touted it in several of his sermons. Naturally, I got a copy of the book a few years ago when I first heard these accusations against BR. It's a pot pourri of chapters, each one dedicated to the evils of a secular intellectual (deist, sceptic, or atheist) who "felt himself bound by no corpus of revealed religion." Yet these "mentors" were "just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs."</p>
<p>Johnson slams Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Percy Shelley, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Bertolt Brecht, Noam Chompsky, and even manages to toss in a woman, Lilian Hellman. Typical chapter titles include:<br />"Lies, Damned Lies, and Lillian Hellman," "Bertolt Brecht: Heart of Ice," and "Tolstoy: God's Elder Brother." BR's chapter is entitled "Bertrand Russell: a Case of Logical Fiddlesticks."</p>
<p>In the chapter on BR, it discusses his political views, philosophy, and his interest in women. He liked sex, and openly committed adultry. But his wives knew it, and he didn't try to hide it from them. He was an "open-marriage" kind of guy, and allowed one of his wives to have affairs, too (the others didn't try). This alleged "16-year-old" daughter of a friend is probably Helen Dudley. Here's the excerpt about her:</p>
<p>"Then in 1914 followed a discreditable episode with a young girl in Chicago. Helen Dudley was one of four sisters, the daughters of a leading gynaecologist, with whom Russell stayed while lecturing. According to Russell's account, 'I spent two nights under her parents' roof, and the second I spent with her. Her three sisters mounted guard to give warnings if either of the parents approached.' Russell arranged that she should come to England that summer and live with him openly, pending a divorce. He wrote to Lady Ottoline [his then-mistress] telling her what had occurred."</p>
<p>I don't know how D. James Kennedy figured out she's 16 years old from this. I'm sure if she had been, Johnson would have mentioned it. Probably just another one of his "lies, damn lies."</p>
<p>One thing I noticed about this past Sunday sermon, though, was at the end of it, when he devotes about 10 minutes to a year-in-review of the ACLU's activities. Erwin Lutzer is a featured speaker. Lutzer is the other author who mentions the Huxley quote in his book "Exploding the Myths that Could Destroy America." He's the one Kennedy legitimately cited in one of his books, although Lutzer didn't provide any citation. So, the two must know each other. You can take a look at it from <a href="http://www.coralridgehour.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>.</p>
<p>Just click on "ACLU Update." Be prepared to gag at the whole thing. Lutzer's main concern is not letting gay people adopt babies.</p>
<p>Julie</p>
<p>From: Ed Babinski<br />To: "Julie J."<br />Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2004 7:11 PM<br />Subject: Here's my latest sermon... you can compare it to Kennedy's.</p>
<p>Here's my latest sermon... you can compare it to Kennedy's. *smile* I am afraid I'm turning into quite a ranter with age.</p>
<p>Yes, I agree with the Rev. D. James Kennedy at least in the factual sense that the agnostic philosopher Bertrand Russell, committed adultery, so did the evolutionist, Julian Huxley, and Julian's wife too I think, just google up the newly published letters of "Mary Sarton" for more info. However, Julian and Julliette Huxley also lived to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary, which Kennedy no doubt forgot to mention. Neither did he mention the famous people in the Bible, nor famous modern day ministers who also committed "adultery," nor the famous men in the Bible with multiple wives and concubinage partners. Here's two verses for<br />Kennedy, "judge not," and, "first remove the beam from your own eye."</p>
<p>Of course elevating "sexual escapades" to the worst of sins overlooks that Christians persecuted fellow Christian "heretics," Jews, Muslims, witches, executed adulterers, kept women subservient, and disciplined children with the rod. Christian men like Luther and Calvin helped incite people to do such things. And right after the births of Lutherism and Calvinism there came perhaps the greatest war Europe has ever known (based on the percentage dead, its duration and the destruction it left behind, and no telling how much worse it would have been if both sides had modern weaponry like those used in the World Wars), I am speaking of the "Thirty Years War."</p>
<p>Today's secular wars were indeed horrendous, especially due to the world's increased population (since the late 1800s when vaccines and plumbing came into widespread use and reduced childhood illnesses) when cities were larger and hence more people existed who COULD be killed, and when more weapons existed to kill them quicker, easier, faster, and at longer ranges, more bullets, more artillery, more bombs, more gas, more tanks, etc. Dictators like Hitler, Mussolini basked in the "awe of rulers" that the churches had been busy INSTALLING IN PEOPLE'S MINDS FOR CENTURIES, along with centuries of anti-Semitic bigotry. Even communism had to pose as a "new religion," promising "paradise," a "worker's paradise," indoctrinating youth, doing everything religions do, and that includes the way Mao's little red book has raised high and waved about like a Bible by his followers, and memorized by them as well, verse by verse. And of course Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other communists also persecuted "heretics." The testimonies of American intellectuals who at first imagined that violent communistic revolution was the answer to the world's problems, then who repudiated communistic propaganda, is captured in a book appropriately titled, "The God That Failed." Yes, "the God."</p>
<p>Also, Kennedy mistakes all of America's blessings as being due to its "Christian heritage," but he neglects to mention America's Deistic heritage and classical heritage, equally strong influences, even moreso at her founding. "God" yes, but not of a particular religion, and not one who would be offended by "freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press," nor even by a deliberate neglect of the mention of the word "God" in our Constitution. Unlike both a theocracy or communism, one has to let the people read and believe what they will. However that also opens up the possibility of one religion gaining enough converts to be able to exert considerable sectarian force on such a government, as seems to be happening today. Though in the end, pollution, population, and greed may be the forces that bury every nation, regardless of its founding principles or religious majority. Not a cheery thought.</p>
<p>But of course conservative Christians are comforted even by that thought, putting a rosy hue even on the "end of the world." Their God will never fail them, not even as mankind sees its own extinction approaching on the horizon, because they can always convince themselves "it's part of God's plan." What if it's not part of God's plan, but of our own ignorance? What if we might be able to do something about things NOW if we protested the use of trillions of dollars each year by all the nations on earth to build things that simply go boom? If we used the money to develop alternative energy and recycling technologies (and to build technology to protect us from incoming asteroids)? If we used the money to pay people to get vasectomies in the most overcrowded regions on earth? If mankind woke up to its situation, living on a tiny lifeboat hanging in space, instead of damning each other to hells both in this life and in the next, and arguing over jots and tittles in holy books, or greedily devouring huge coporate bonuses and consuming junk food and junk entertainment and junk, period. Ah, but isn't that the primate way? Amusing ourselves to death I'd say, with religious entertainments being a primary form of such amusements that will continue to grow as the death of our species nears.</p>
<p>Kuwait's recent elections went to the fundamentalist Muslim party, and Islamic fundamentalism is growing in the highly westernized nation of Turkey. The southern hemisphere of earth is also growing in fundamentalistic religious believers, even in communist China. I also heard that people in China are having increasing psychological problems, not enough psychiatrists. Increasing pollution also. And water shortages in the bigger cities where more and more people from China's countryside are moving. And there pollution in the holy land of the Near East, and water shortages there as well, and in India and Pakistan. Most of the rivers in America are polluted, many lakes deemed unsafe to eat fish caught in them. And big ocean fish vanishing, fished out of the seas. Dead zones in the oceans. Ground water pollution levels rising. Superfund toxic pollutant dumpsites, leaking, requiring a trillion dollars to clean up. Relatively few people are reading, or listening, compared to the increasing billions reading their Bibles and Korans. "Oh save us!" We cry, and God will laugh and say, "Hey, I gave you the technology, the earth's wealth, and you used it for junk, from junk food to coporate junkets, from internet porn to sectarian religious preachers selling tickets to heaven and damning the rest to hell. Hope you had fun! Times up, let's see what brewing on the next solar system over yonder."</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>I also need to add some mention in such a sermon that Christianity, like Islam, is one of the most perfect indoctrination/control systems that has yet evolved on earth. Once you convince people that you have the truth that their eternal souls depend on believing, and dangle both an eternal carrot and an eternal stick in front of them, you don't NEED to brandish the earthly carrots and earthly sticks as much as, say, an atheist dictator would have to in order to maintain his desired strict control, because the basic "controlling" elements are already cemented in place internally. Though such internal religious control elements do tend to heighten fear and increase competition among alternative religious belief systems, such as rival Christian theologies and rival religions. So everything is never completely well in a religious country, or in countries that boarder each other and favor rival religions. (An atheistic country without a dictator, however, seems quite well off, and can have a low crime rate, like Czhechoslovakia today. )</p>
<p>And one must also admit that fear of big earthly sticks does seem to have worked effectively for communist China, since her crime rate continues to be the lowest on earth per capita, though that didn't hold true of communist Russia, but then, the Russians do tend to like their vodka, and the Chinese were a more sober and Confucian-like people to begin with. The American justice system, one must add, weilds it's earthly stick on its own people with less force than China does on her own people, since America prefers to simply lock people up, and presently has more of its population incarcerated than any other nation on earth, where it also tries to convert them. However, America's prisons contine to remain the fullest on earth, regardless of attempts to impose religion on repeat violators. Yes, America, with churches everywhere and preaching in our prisons, and one of the highest rates of belief in "God" in the world barring Ireland and Iran, continues to have one of the world's highest crime and incarceration rates.</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-41241557481081765902012-03-25T17:24:00.000-07:002019-09-04T14:38:48.346-07:00Alpha Male: Planet of the Apes, Bush, Limbaugh et al<p>QUESTION:</p>
<p><em>I just don't understand why the Libs can't find a radio audience. A big one. Is Rush that much more entertaining than Al Franken?</em></p>
<p>ANSWER: The difference is not that Rush is more entertaining, but because it's still basically a planet of the apes:<br /><a href="http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/">See Bush-Ape Pics</a></p>
<p>Many people are attracted instinctively to others who sound like "solid" alpha male primate pack leaders. (Consider the tons of good women who make bad choices, attracted to alpha male "bad boys.")</p>
<p>Speaking of people's desire for "solidity," the ancient Hebrews prized the notion of a "firm" foundation below their feet and a "firm" sky above them, keeping at bay the cosmic waters of chaos (that they assumed lay both beneath the earth and above the sky).</p>
<p>The majority of folks crave certainty and solidity.</p>
<p>That's also why soldiers march in formation with such solid pounding footsteps.</p>
<p>Sure, satire is capable of puncturing windbags like Limbaugh, but it takes more mental concentration to appreciate satire than it does to rally round a commanding voice that speaks shortly, exuding certainty, labeling one's enemies over and over again with a sneer, until you find yourself repeating along, mindlessly, hypnotically, "These Liba-ralls..." "These Fem-i-nazis..." "The Holy Buy-Bull says..." "The Great Satan must be destroyed..." etc.</p>
<p>Which is why I worry about humanity's "fascistic communistic Christian Muslim" tendencies.</p>
<p>Lastly, keep in mind that Al Franken's radio show is just getting started and there have been liberals who attracted large audiences and numbers of readers, namely, Ingersoll, Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, and Will Rogers.</p>
<p><strong>WILL ROGERS ON THE SCOPES “MONKEY” TRIAL</strong></p>
<p>The Supreme Court of Tennessee has just ruled [this was during the 1920s] that you other states can come from whoever or whatever you want to, but they want it on record that they come from mud only!</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>I don’t know why some of these states want to have their ancestry established by law. There must be some suspicion of doubt somewhere.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>William Jennings Bryan tried to prove that we did not descend from the monkey, but he unfortunately picked a time in our history when the actions of the American people proved that we did.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>Some people certainly are making a fight against the ape. It seems the truth kinder hurts. Now, if a man didn’t act like a monkey, he wouldn’t have to be proving that he didn’t come from one. Personally I like monkeys. If we were half as original as they are, we would never be suspected of coming from something else. They never accuse monkeys of coming from anybody else.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>You hang an ape and a political ancestry over me, and you will see me taking it into the Supreme Court, to prove that the ape part is O.K., but that the political end is base libel.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>If a man is a gentleman, he don’t have to announce it; all he has to do is to act like one and let the world decide. No man should have to prove in court what he is, or what he come from. As far as Scopes teaching children evolution, nobody is going to change the belief of Tennessee children as to their ancestry. It is from the actions of their parents that they will form their opinions.</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-87473032018750073992012-03-25T17:10:00.000-07:002019-09-04T14:38:57.041-07:00Discrimination in the Job Market<p><em>Civil Rights issues and discrimination in the job market. Taking a look at statistics on the availability of employment and advancement for women and minorities like in the early twenty first century.</em><br /><br /><strong>Discrimination in the Job Market</strong><br />by Sharon Mooney</p>
<p><br />Society has made progress since the civil rights movement, however there is no way to deny racism and similar prejudice exists, not excluded from within the modern job market. I felt a worthwhile place to start proving this point would be through statistics.</p>
<p>First taking a look at discrimination against women, we can gather the majority of poor in America are females, many being of minority status.</p>
<p><strong>POVERTY FACT SHEET</strong><br />Poverty Among Women</p>
<blockquote>There are more women in the total population of the United States than men and there are more poor women than poor men in the United States. The total population of the United States is 266,218,000 and of that number 135,865,000 are females and 130,353,000 are males. The total population of poor in the United States is 36,529,000 which is 13.7% of the total population. There are 20,918,000 females that are poor which is 15.4% of the total female population and 57.2% of the total poverty population. There are 15,611,000 males who are poor which is 12.0% of the total population of males and 42.7% of the total poverty population. [...] gender plays a role in the poverty profile and women are more likely to be poor than men.<br /><a href="http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/5705.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.ohioline.osu.edu/</a></blockquote>
<p>In a report by Sam Middlemiss, Senior Lecturer in Law, The Robert Gordon University states: <cite> "The term coined in the United States to cover this type of behaviour is lookism and in the UK is aesthetic labour." [...] Defined in the sixth edition of the Collins English Dictionary as “the hiring of employees for their appearance or accent in an attempt to enhance the image of the company." </cite><br /><a href="http://www.law.gla.ac.uk/dbase/slsa2004/abstracts/eur_middlemisss.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.law.gla.ac.uk</a></p>
<p>Middlemiss goes on to state:</p>
<blockquote><cite>“A survey of skills needs in hotels, restaurant, pubs and bars, indicated that 85% of employers ranked personal presentation and appearance in third place - above initiative, communication skills or even ability to follow instructions.”</cite></blockquote>
<p>Far too much emphasis is placed upon appearances of individuals, whether it be their race, gender, their attractiveness or lack thereof, in the job market. [This would include one's skin color]. People should be judged as individuals based on their qualifications versus their exterior appearance. Perhaps, as the old saying has it, “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Meaning, individuals who know their opportunities for employment in a stable and rewarding career are limited, perhaps feel less motivated to attempt acquiring the skills necessary to compete."</p>
<p><strong>RACE FACTOR IN EMPLOYMENT</strong><br />According to an expirament that was performed by <em>Poverty Action Lab</em>, with race in mind, the final results revealed an overwhelmingly apparent discrimination based on race. Resumes were submitted for the jobs listed in newspaper classifieds under sales, administrative, and clerical positions. Part of the resumes submitted contained information leading the employer to believe the submission was from a minority applicant, for instance submitting the application under a name likely to belong to a minority "Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones". Poverty Action Lab concluded:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>1. Resumes with white names received 50% more callbacks than those with black names.</p>
<br />
<p>2. There is evidence that the returns to improving credentials for whites is much higher than for blacks. Specifically, for resumes with white names, higher quality resumes received 30% more callbacks than low quality ones. For resumes with black names, the higher quality resumes did not receive significantly more callbacks.</p>
<br />
<p>3. Federal contractors and employers who list "Equal Opportunity Employer" in their ad discriminate as much as other employers.</p>
<br />
<p>4. Whites living in richer, more educated, or whiter neighborhoods have higher callback rates, but blacks do not benefit from this neighborhood effect.<br />In Chicago, employers located in black neighborhoods discriminate less against blacks.<br />Source: <a href="http://www.povertyactionlab.com/projects/project.php?pid=3" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.povertyactionlab.com</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>SUGGESTED TACTICS FOR SUCCESS FOR WOMEN AND MINORITIES</strong><br />In an interview with Chandra Prasad, author of <em>Outwitting the Job Market: Everything You Need to Locate and Land a Great Position</em>, Mrs. Prasad suggested tactics which may help women and minorities work around the discrimination obstacles that exist in the job market.</p>
<p>Chandra's first suggestion, for those who are in search of employment is for college students to ask their career service center about any potential companies that may be stopping by campus to interview potential employees, and to submit a resume in advance. "Also ask what scholarships and internships are available specifically for women and/or minorities."</p>
<p>Her second suggestion for locating a company that is truly diversity-friendly "is to speak with someone within the organization." If you know somebody who works in the organization you can ask questions, otherwise be "observant". Some of the questions Chandra advises to ask:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>1. Look around as you’re on your interview—do you see a diverse staff or a homogenous one?</p>
<cite><cite><br /></cite></cite>
<p>2. Are the executive level and board of directors comprised of only white men? That should send you a message right there.</p>
<cite><cite><br /></cite></cite>
<p>3. If you establish a comfortable rapport with your interviewer and decide you want to out-and-out ask about diversity within the company, listen carefully to his response. Does your interviewer give a pat and insubstantial answer? Or does he provide real and compelling proof that the company is committed to diversity by citing actual percentages of women and minorities who are employed or by offering details on programs and initiatives aimed at the recruitment and retention of these groups?</p>
<cite><cite><br /></cite></cite>
<p>4. Another way to check on a company is to scan the web site of the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission). Each month the site posts reports on major litigation settlements by various employers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Chandra also covers the importance of mentors for women and minorities in the job marker, as experienced workers may have contacts that lead to more job opportunities, and can offer the encouragement necessary to achieve one's career goals. The article states:<br /><em>A survey by Catalyst, a nonprofit research organization focusing on women in business [...] found that of 368 women of color, 69% who had a mentor in 1998 had at least one upward career move by 2001 compared to 49% of those who didn't have a mentor.</em></p>
<p><strong>ON A BRIGHTER NOTE</strong><br />Chandra concluded her interview with IM Diversity to say:<br /><em>The future looks very bright. Many companies are getting the message that the American demographic has shifted and will continue to shift. According to “Futurework: Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21st Century,” a report from the Department of Labor, by 2050 minorities will rise from being one in every four Americans to one in every two. Of course, smart companies know that to serve a diverse clientele they need a diverse staff. That is why we see minority and female hiring on the rise and why this trend will certainly continue. The next test, I think, is not women and minorities succeeding in the workplace, but climbing to the highest ranks in substantial numbers—and helping others up.</em></p>
<p>Source: <a href="http://www.imdiversity.com/Villages/Careers/articles/prasad_outwitting_interview_0604.asp" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.imdiversity.com</a></p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-90407030583812091202012-03-25T13:16:00.000-07:002019-09-03T04:30:33.887-07:00Imprecatory Prayer and Capitol Hill<p>I'm not exactly sure what "disturbs" people about the discussion of "hate" in the Bible. If you want to find verses about love you can find those too. But any student of the Bible should also realize how Luther and Calvin, for instance, dealt with the verses on love. They agreed that to love one's neighbor was fine, so long as God and His word weren't concerned, but if one's neighbor was blaspheming God or denigrating "the Word," then Luther and Calvin wouldn't give such a person even a glass of water if they were about to die of dehydration (Luther put it in those literal terms himself, see my quotations in chapter two of Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists avail at www.amazon.com because by helping a blasphemer they would be helping to tear down God and the Bible, and "the Bible says we must serve God rather than man." I'm not saying that's the one and only possible interpretation of how Christians should act, but Luther and Calvin cited verses from BOTH testaments that certainly COULD be interpreteted that way, and since they held a very DEGNIGRATING idea of the power and sway of "original sin" on mankind, they believed that most of mankind was doomed anyway, while the rest required DISCIPLINE of a strict CHRISTIAN sort to try and keep them away from "sin." Today, people have a less denigrating idea of original sin and just nonchalantly sum up the doctrine as "well, we're all sinners, ha." So natually, they don't go about stressing the need to "hate those whom the Lord hates, with perfect hatred," and they don't stress that they need to "serve God rather than man," and hold hard line views on disciplining their children and society.</p>
<p>IN SHORT, the ATTITUDES of people toward original sin and toward each other have changed since Luther and Calvin's day, and hence the BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION changed as well. And that makes one realize how dependent biblical interpretations are on the cultures and attitudes of the people doing the interpreting. The same could be said of the question of interpretation of the pro-slavery passages in the Old and New testaments, and how the times changed, and THEN the interpretation changed.</p>
<p>Anyway, here's some more recent news concerning "imprecatory prayer," it's not restricted to three essays by home schooled children on the web.</p>
<p>In 1994 the Capitol Hill Prayer Alert, a Washington D.C.-based prayer group, produced a list of twenty-five Democratic incumbents, and urged prayer partners to petition God to bring evil upon the people on that list. "Don't hesitate to pray imprecatory Psalms over them," wrote one of the group's founders, Harry Valentine, in the group's newsletter. Imprecatory means to "call down evil upon." Such Psalms include: "Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow." (Ps. 109:8,9) "Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into Sheol." (Ps. 55:15)</p>
<p>"The righteous shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance: he shall wash his own feet in the blood of the wicked."<br />(Ps. 58:10) (How is this different from sticking pins in voodoo dolls, or whipping up a witch's brew and mumbling curses?<br />I guess it's all right for Christians to "curse" people so long as they use a "Biblically sound" method. - Skip)<br />- Skipp Porteous, "Election '94 Observations," Free Inquiry, Winter 1994/95</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-47391336041168120342012-03-25T12:10:00.000-07:002019-09-03T04:28:54.392-07:00The Brain of the Believer<center><a href="http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/videos/brain-on-bibles/bible-bookmarks.jpg"><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/videos/brain-on-bibles/bible-bookmarks.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></center>
<p><a href="http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/videos/brain-on-bibles/bible-bookmarks.zip">bible-bookmarks.zip</a>, 119 k</p>
<center><a href="http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/videos/brain-on-bibles/brain-on-bibles.jpg"><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/videos/brain-on-bibles/brain-on-bibles.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></center>
<p><a href="http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/videos/brain-on-bibles/brain-on-bibles.zip">brain-on-bibles.zip</a>, 155 k</p>
<center><a href="http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/videos/t-shirt-designs/faith-is-trying.jpg"><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/videos/t-shirt-designs/faith-is-trying.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></center>
<p><a href="http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/videos/t-shirt-designs/faith-is-trying.zip">faith-is-trying.zip</a>, 51 k</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-54051330468542423892012-03-19T20:36:00.003-07:002019-09-03T04:24:13.491-07:00George W. Bush goes Ape<table style="width: 104px; height: 300px;" border="2" cellspacing="0" align="center">
<tbody style="font-size: 11;">
<tr>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush00.gif" alt="bush00.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush17.gif" alt="bush01.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush02.gif" alt="bush02.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush03.gif" alt="bush03.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush04.gif" alt="bush04.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush05.gif" alt="bush05.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush06.gif" alt="bush06.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush07.gif" alt="bush07.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush08.gif" alt="bush08.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush09.gif" alt="bush09.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush10.gif" alt="bush10.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush11.gif" alt="bush11.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush12.gif" alt="bush12.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush13.gif" alt="bush13.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush14.gif" alt="bush14.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td bgcolor="#ffffff"><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush15.gif" alt="bush15.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush16.gif" alt="bush16.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush20.gif" alt="bush17.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush18.gif" alt="bush18.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
<td><center><img src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/babinski/w_goes_ape/bush19.gif" alt="bush19.gif" align="baseline" border="0" hspace="0" /></center></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="5"><center><br />Images originally compiled by "Rick"<br /><br /></center></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>"A preacher thundering from his pulpit about the uniqueness of human beings with their God-given souls would not like to realize that his very gestures, the hairs that rose on his neck, the deepened tones of his outraged voice, and the perspiration that probably ran down his skin under clerical vestments are all manifestations of anger in mammals. If he was sneering at Darwin a bit (one does not need a mirror to know that one sneers), did he remember uncomfortably that a sneer is derived from an animal's lifting its lip to remind an enemy of its fangs? Even while he was denying the principle of evolution, how could a vehement man doubt such intimate evidence?"<br /><br />SALLY CARRIGHAR, WILD HERITAGE<br /><br /><br />"1996 presidential contender, Pat Buchanan, said something along the lines of `You may believe that you're descended from monkeys, but I believe you're a creature of God.' I guess that Buchanan hadn't considered that one of the basic tenets of Christianity is that God is the Creator of everything, including `monkeys.' It seems to me that one of the basic reasons behind the so-called `creationism' is the feeling that somehow parts of God's creation are not worthy of being our ancestors."<br /><br />TOM SCHARLE (scharle.1@nd.edu)<br /><br /><br /><br /></p>
<p><strong>Related Link</strong><br /><br />Carl Zimmer: <a href="http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/2005/08/02/a_question_for_the_president.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener">A Question For the President</a><br /><br />Mr. President, I would ask, how do you reconcile your statement that Intelligent Design should be taught alongside evolution with the fact that your administration, like both Republican and Democratic administrations before it, has supported research in evolution by our country's leading scientists, while failing to support a single study that is explicitly based on Intelligent Design? The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and even the Department of Energy have all decided that evolution is a cornerstone to advances in our understanding of diseases, the environment, and even biotechnology. They have found no such value in Intelligent Design. Are they wrong? Can you tell us why?</p>
<p>I think the majority of human male primates on this planet are muscle bound testosterone driven brutes who commonly seek either psychological or physical domination over other males, females, and children. Males continue to fill our prisons more than women do. Just google up all the major horror stories reported by the news any day of the year and males continue to make bold verbal threats and murder and wage wars. Males continue to murder males galore even in their own coutries in gang warfare, organized crime, family disputes, robberies, and of course rape, torture and murder of females and children as well.</p>
<p>And holy books continue to contain verses about females being there to "serve and obey" males, which is also the message of the apes of the secular world as well. Even Hinduism preaches that being reincarnated as a female is not equal to being reincarnated as a male. Actually, I suspect the reverse is nearer the truth and that being reincarnated as a female is something more Hindu males ought to aspire to. I also suspect that more Muslim and Christian male ought to listen to females and make plans together with them rather than continue to inculcate in the female mind the necessity of "serving and obeying" them.</p>
<p>Still, even in an ideal world without males being physically and psychologically more dominating due to the effects of testosterone, I imagine that communication would remain difficult, as it often is even between two females, or two males. So there is no obvious solution to all the world's difficulties in reaching agreements. Also, some males are quite good at science and technology and at devoting themselves toward fixing some of the world's problems. Other law abiding males are relatively benign in the effects they have on society. Still others make mistakes and ask to be forgiven. So, the domineering and violent tendencies of male human beings in general must not be confused with every male--that would be a case of irrational prejudice.</p>
<p>In the end the only real resource we have for the future of humanity is the education of both males and females, both being allowed to pursue the quest for knowledge and a higher education and creativity as far as they each can go.</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-48640181087595408572012-03-18T17:32:00.002-07:002019-09-03T04:24:29.040-07:00World on Edge of Crisis<p>I was just at <a href="http://www.dieoff.com/page125.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Michael Crichton's official website</a>. Lets some of my standard stuff on the environment:</p>
<p>Subject for Crichton's next novel? How about Hoyle's prediction?</p>
<p>"It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.<br /><br />- Hoyle, 1964; emphasis added</p>
<p>Hoyle neglects to add that after about 25 million years the world will have produced more oil. But what will civilization have become in the meantime? *smile*</p>
<p>I agree with Crichton that global warming is probably exaggerated as a concern, but since it is a possible danger that may affect the globe, it's important that scientists at least keep an eye on things and what we can do in case such a danger exists. What concerns me more, however, is the way that the failure of "global warmers" to impress everyone else with their fears is being used as an excuse to turn a blind ear to many other environmental concerns unrelated to global warming.</p>
<p>Far more alarming are the facts of big fish being fished out, dead zones in the oceans and seas from fertilizer run offs, apes going extinct, amphibians going extinct, bird species diminishing, coral reefs dying, rain forests being cut down, levels of mercury in nature and other pollutants seeping into the ground water (even toxins in discarded electronic devices seeping into the ground water, and leaky Super Fund sites that will cost billions to clean up), none of which is in dispute.</p>
<p>Last of all, I can't help noticing that America spends a billion dollars a day making things that go boom, more than all other nation's military budgets combined, and the Pentagon lost track of a trillion dollars as it admited at its last major audit in 2000. This spending is also being done during a time when we need a new Mahattan project to boost the alternative energy biz, because companies are seeking short term profits, squeezing the last dime out of oil, but future oil discoveries may have reached Hubbert's Peak, especially since consumption and demand for more petroleum--for plastics, synthetic fibers, computer parts, fuel, to run generators, automobiles, even to manufacture lots of drugs and pesticides--keeps increasing, especially in China and India. So less new oil discoveries are occuring but the demand keeps increasing. Yet we and other nations, keep spending money on things that go boom.</p>
<p>Hoyle once mused that perhaps after the petroleum is used up, if a civilization doesn't have alternative means of energy firmly in place, then we may have to revert to a Medieval type of lifestyle akin to the Amish. There's a novel for Crichton to write about!</p>
<p><strong>WHAT DOES AMERICA AND THE REST OF THE WORLD SPEND ON ARMS TODAY?</strong><br /><br />"For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," Jesus said in Matthew 6:19-21. The United States, the most Christian nation on earth, has placed its treasure in destruction and death. As Associated Press' Dan Morgan reports (June 12 2004, Tallahassee Democrat), the Pentagon "plans to spend well over $1 trillion in the next decade on an arsenal of futuristic planes, ships and weapons with little direct connection to the Iraq war or the global war on terrorism." The 2005 defense budget - the word "defense" has become a joke in the post Cold War world - will reach $500 billion (counting the CIA), $50 billion higher than 2004. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next ten years, the armada of aircraft, ships and killer toys will cost upwards of $770 billion more than Bush's estimate for long-term defense. Morgan reports that Bush wants "$68 billion for research and development-20 percent above the peak levels of President Reagan's historic defense buildup.Tens of billions more out of a proposed $76 billion hardware account will go for big-ticket weapons systems to combat some as-yet-unknown adversary comparable to the former Soviet Union." The mantra heard in Congress, "we can't show weakness in the face of terrorism," fails to take into account the fact that when the 9/11 hijackers struck, the US military--the strongest in the world--failed to prevent the attacks. So, logically one would ask, how does a futuristic jet fighter defend against contemporary enemies, like jihadists who would smuggle explosives into a train station or crowded shopping mall?</p>
<p>Saul Landau, "<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/landau06252004.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2006 Pentagon Budget as Sacrilege</a>--Bush Invests National Treasure in Death and Destruction," Counterpunch, June 25, 2004</p>
<p>____________________________</p>
<p>One industry that has done particularly well during the Bush administration has a strong interest in the outcome: the arms industry. A new report from the World Policy Institute tracks how this critical sector has exerted influence over administration policies, and how it is 'voting with its dollars' in the 2004 campaign. "These have been boom years for the arms industry, with contracts for the top ten weapons contractors up 75% in the first three years of the Bush administration alone," notes William D. Hartung, the co-author of the study and the director of the Institute's arms project. "While some of this funding is related to the war in Iraq or the campaign against terrorism, much of it relates to Cold War relics like the F-22 combat aircraft or nuclear attack submarines that have little or no application to the threats we now face or the wars we are now fighting."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/TiesThatBind.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Arms Industry Influence</a> in the Bush Administration and Beyond: A World Policy Institute Special Report by William D. Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca, October, 2004</p>
<p>____________________________</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cdi.org/press/021302PR.cfm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">More than 100 countries</a> have military budgets of less than $1 billion, roughly what the Pentagon spends in one day. The U.S. and its allies, including Australia, account for more than 70 percent of the world's military spending whilst so-called "adversary" powers--Iran, Iraq, North Korea --account for an absolutely trivial amount.</p>
<p>____________________________</p>
<p><a href="http://www.country-liberal-party.com/Pan-Americanism/pages/Pan-Americanism.b.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Graph showing annual military expenditures</a> of U.S. and allies in proportion to the annual military expenditures of communist and "rogue nations." Be prepared to be surprised</p>
<p>____________________________</p>
<p>Amount of money that the United States Defense Department has lost track of, according to a 2000 report by its inspector general:<br />$1,100,000,000,000 (One trillion, one hundred billion dollars).<br /><br />Source: U.S. Department of Defense</p>
<p>Ratio of the above amount to the rest of the world's military budgets combined: 2:1. <br /><br />Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies<br /><br />--Harper's Index, August 2003 (see Harper's magazine online or in print)</p>
<p>____________________________</p>
<p><strong>MAKING THINGS THAT "GO BOOM"</strong><br /><br />America's biggest single business might be the one that "makes things that go boom," and produces and sells weapons not only to the American military, but also to the rest of the world. America's military expenditures exceed those of the next highest 23 nations' combined, probably more nations than that by the time this is written. Perhaps war has been humanity's greatest business all along? Hasn't history up till now, consisted largely of a list of wars fought, and a record of how<br />rulers have employed their armies? Wasn't one of the most expensive and intensive projects in American history the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear bomb?</p>
<p>Today we need to shift gears, and begin another massive project because the consumption of energy as well as clean fresh water continues to rise around the world. In fact, one-fourth of the planet is expected to suffer severe water scarcity by the year 2025. [Peter Swanson, Water: The Drop of Life] (Granted there remains plenty of water in the oceans, but to extract the salt and any other impurities from it so it can be used by cities, farms and factories, will require desalination plants and filtration apparatus galore, and add fees to nearly everything we buy, including food and clothing.)</p>
<p>Perhaps it's time that we as a species called a truce to all wars so we can face the coming energy shortages and fresh water shortages together, and save civilization. That is, if we can restrain ourselves from spending inconceivably huge sums of money simply making more "things that go boom," and thus reduce humanity to a state of continual warfare over dwindling energy and water reserves. For instance, India is planning to damn northern rivers to divert more water toward India, but that will diminish the amount of water reaching already parched Pakistan, and elevate tensions between those two nuclear powers.</p>
<p>Here's to the new project. Instead of the "Manhattan Project" let's call it the "Do It Or Die Project."</p>
<p>E.T.B.</p>
<p>____________________________</p>
<p>The World Game Institute has estimated that 30% of the world's annual military expenditure would be enough to significantly heal the world's gravest wounds, including overpopulation, starvation, disease, lack of safe drinking water, inadequate housing, lack of education, and environmental deterioration.</p>
<p>Based on information gathered by The World Game Institute</p>
<p>____________________________</p>
<p>The world's major ecosystems are buckling under the strain of human activity. So says an exhaustive, two-year study by 175 scientists from the World Resources Institute and several UN agencies. They say half the world's wetlands have disappeared in the past century; forestry and agriculture have gobbled up half the world's original forests; and fishing fleets are 40 percent larger than the ocean can sustain. [In 2003 it was reported that 90% of the world's big fish reserves had been depleted. Fishing fleets continue to grow, and fish-finding sonar leaves the fish no place to hide.--E.T.B.] World Resources 2000-2001 warned, "Halting the decline of the planet's life-support systems may be the most difficult challenge humanity has ever faced."</p>
<p>"This Week: Science and Technology News," New Scientist, No. 2235, April 22, 2000</p>
<p>____________________________</p>
<p><strong>DEAD ZONES</strong><br /><br />Scientists warn that dead zones are increasing in the world's coastal waters. The biggest culprit is fertilizer pollution, which causes decreases in the oxygen of bottom water and creates low-oxygen, or hypoxic, zones. Most sea life can't survive under these conditions: fish and other creatures swim away, while other aquatic life like shellfish, suffocate. Forty-three of the world's 146 dead zones occur in U.S. coastal waters, the second largest of which is in the Gulf of Mexico (as much as 21,000 square kilometers). The world's largest dead zone is in the Baltic Sea, spanning up to 70,000 square kilometers.</p>
<p>Karen Ann Gajewski, "Worth Nothing," The Humanist, Sept./Oct. 2004</p>
<p>____________________________</p>
<p>We are now, slowly, becoming alarmed at the state of the planet. For a century, we have been breeding like a virus under optimum conditions, and now the virus has begun to attack its host, the earth. Sensible people grow alarmed, but many Sky-Godders are serene, even smug. The planet is just a staging area for heaven. Why bother to clean it up?</p>
<p>Gore Vidal, "(The Great Unmentionable) Monotheism and its Discontents," essay</p>
<p>____________________________</p>
<p><strong>THIS JUST IN...</strong><br /><br />Per capita, we Americans use up more of the world's natural resources and produce more of the world's pollution and industrial waste than any other nation. Meanwhile, America's Super Fund toxic waste dump sites are leaking into the ground water, and the estimated cost of clean up is a trillion dollars. Nearly every river and lake in America is currently so polluted that the government has warned against eating fish caught in them, while "dead zones" have appeared in coastal waters, due to fertilizer run offs from the land into rivers and oceans.</p>
<p>More than half the world lives in conditions that the average American would consider "poverty level" or below. For instance, over 60 percent of the world does not have access to a toilet. 70-80 percent of the world does not have access to clean drinking water; more than a million people die each year just from drinking bad water. One-fourth of the planet is expected to suffer severe water scarcity by the year 2025. [Peter Swanson, Water: The Drop of Life]</p>
<p>Globally, more than 800 million people suffer from malnutrition--with 7 million children under the age of five dying each year.</p>
<p>Diseases and parasites torment significant portions of mankind, with Malaria, TB, and Staph, making comebacks, and AIDS plaguing Africa and continuing to spread in Russia and China.</p>
<p>The life expectancies of people living in the most impoverished parts of the world are far lower than those living in the wealthiest (the life expectancy of a Japanese female born today is 83 years, while that of a Ugandan male is only 41 years). In large regions of the world human beings continue to reproduce at a rate greater than the ability of many nations to care for them via economic growth and environmentally sustainable long-term programs, thus leading to increased incidents of water scarcity, energy scarcity, starvation, poverty, ignorance, pollution, disease and war.</p>
<p>More people despise America than ever before, and more nations have weapons of mass destruction that could find their way into the hands of those people. Yet America continues to spend more money on manufacturing, using, and selling things that "go boom" all over the world, instead of spending more money on developing alternative energy resources that could make America a source of greater blessings instead of more extensive and expensive "booms."</p>
<p>Now here's Ted with the weather; it looks like another beautiful weekend.<br /><br />And later, Florence will show us how to stuff a turkey until it gobbles for mercy.<br /><br />And don't forget to stick around after the news for the HOME SHOPPING NETWORK!</p>
<p>E.T.B.</p>
<p>____________________________</p>
<p>In North America we are entrapped in an economic system whose very success depends on waste, gluttony, over-consumption, and debt. And like all systems, it is driven by a spirituality:<br /><br />"You get what you deserve," is its invocation; <br /><br />"You have what you horde," its doxology, <br /><br />"You are what you can buy," its benediction.</p>
<p>K.L.S., "Giving Good Gifts: Ideas and Resources for Avoiding the Malls: Third Edition," Peace Work (Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, Charlotte, N.C.) No. 4-5, 2001</p>
<p>____________________________</p>
<p><strong>WE'RE SO VAIN</strong><br /><br />What about the sin of vanity? I wonder just how much time, intelligence and resources are wasted each year by the industries that produce, advertise and sell products to enlarge breasts, lengthen penises, fight baldness, hide wrinkles, and keep your lips glossy in 100 different shades of color? Not to mention branches of the various luxury industries that sell outrageously priced homes, cars and clothing. I recently read that the luxury car industry is booming, they can't produce enough cars priced $100,000 or above for all the wealthy people who want one, so there's a waiting list. "Step right this way to the end of civilization. No waiting. We were so vain."</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-27898170876237657542012-03-18T14:44:00.006-07:002019-09-03T04:24:44.715-07:00Leaving Iraq with Honor<p>Lately I can't get out of my head the military-industrial-religious extremism that led to the U.S. intervention in Iraq. We can't stay there indefinitely, we're not settlers, we're not going to wipe out the indigenous population like we did the Indians, and have Americans settle there permanently and forge a democracy. (Aside from the attraction of the oil, it's only sand and some marshland over there.) Eventually we have to send lots of troops home because they live in America not in Iraq, and because we can't afford to maintain a huge occupying force there indefinitely since it costs the U.S. government too much money. So time and money continue to run out.</p>
<p>Iraq also remains divided. The Kurds want their own nation in northern Iraq. The Shiites, empowered by their Iranian cousins, want to get a Shiite religious leader voted into office at the first Iraqi elections. The Sunni minority in Iraq hate the Shiites and are killing election personnel. Both Sunnis and Shiites hate ex-Baath party police and soldiers. And everybody hates the Americas since we've spilled the blood of 100,000 civilians in Iraq along with the blood of untold numbers of "insurgents," that must exceed 100,000 easily. So we have enraged or driven to despair countless wives, children, brothers, cousins and uncles. The police in Iraq are poorly trained and often leave right after receiving their first paycheck. So more people are currently joining insurgent groups than joining the police force. And the insurgents are far more dedicated than the ragtag under equipped police force in Iraq.<br /><br />Furthermore...</p>
<p>In post-Saddam Iraq many children are being educated in private Islamic fundamentalist schools where they lear n to memorize the Koran, rather than being prepared for a world of complex diverse knowledge and higher paying jobs. Therefore, such schools breed further misunderstandings between world cultures, as well as perpetuate poverty, which in turn perpetuates anger. Moreover, as pointed out by professor W. Andrew Terrill (professor at the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, and the top expert on Iraq there), "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency in Iraq. If you are a Muslim and the community is under occupation by a non-Islamic power it becomes a religious requirement to resist that occupation. Most Iraqis consider us occupiers, not liberators. There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents." -- W. Andrew Terrill, [Cited by Sidney Blumenthal, sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com, "Far graver than Vietnam," The Guardian, Thursday September 16, 2004]</p>
<p>In the end the neo-con dreams of forging a democracy in Iraq, and then forging one in Iran, appear doomed. But the Republicans and Religious Right will find someone else to blame the doom on. They will blame it on unbelievers like me. However it was the Republican government that had control of both the presidency and the congress, and who decided to go to war with the "army we had" which Rumsfeld and others feared might be insufficient to begin with. Yet Bush and Rummy went to war anyway, so it's their own Republican-neo-con war machine fault. I guess all of President Bush's talks with God will eventually prove to have been in vain.</p>
<p>The war is costing approximately half a trillion U.S. tax dollars, or more if the insurgency continues fighting. And that's only the money we know about because according to a U.S. Dept. of Defense report in 2000 by its own inspector general, that Dept. is capable of losing track of amounts as high as "one trillion one hundred billion dollars") If I had half a trillion to fritter away, like Bush frittered away on this war, I would have spent it on homeland security first, and then on beefing up our intelligence agencies, and then on alternative energy development, instead of handing it over to the makers of "War Inc." who make "Things That Go Boom," and spread hatred, fear and suspicion of America around the globe. It was America whose CIA backed the Fascist Baath party of Iraq to begin with, the party from which Saddam arose. It was America who sold Saddam many of his weapons including some of the ones he used to gas Iranians (in the war with Iran) and the Kurds. And it is American weapons that the Saudis buy and that maintain their monarchy--instead of allowing the people to vote and have a democracy in Saudi Arabia which the Saudis fear would lead to religious leaders getting voted into office. Yet we are going to allow Iraq to vote? This will be interesting. Whoever gets in is gonna have to dodge bullets and bombs. And we're going to have to leave eventually.</p>
<p>I suppose America's leaders have a plan. I assume the plan involves pumping oil like mad. Suck, suck, suck that oil up. And then leave as soon as drilling new wells grown unprofitable. Of course Iraq will receive a bill to pay all of those nice American companies for doing the sucking, and for rebuilding Iraq. Then we'll leave with our profits and discount oil. The question is can we pump all that oil out of there before the American people want the troops returned home, or before our government goes broke paying for the occupation of Iraq to continue?</p>
<p>And when we leave, the Iraqi people will be left oilless and jobless in an arrid angry land, except of course for jobs that involve becoming policemen (human targets from people on all sides who hate them). Americans will have taken all the major building contracts and profits home with them, while more Iraqis will be left starving and jobless than ever before.</p>
<p>In the end, the Iraqis and many in the rest of the world will continue to hate us. We will have sucked the country drier of oil, and milked it for more cash than Saddam ever could have in his wildest dreams. And left the people with more "freedom" than they know what to do with--the "freedom" to eat sand and continue fighting with one another with American made weapons in their hands by that time, purchased with the money they earned from the last of their oil.</p>
<p>Why did we go there in the first place? What will we have gained? There are questions the U.S. government did not fully consider, instead they waved a flag and cried "freedom!" The motion of flag waving must have blown all of the reports that contained "long term forecasts" right off the president's desk. Now that we are there it's like getting involved in a heated argument with someone and both sides want to have the last word, neither will either side back down. We have become "Israel" to the insurgents' "Palestine," and you know how irresolvable that conflict has been.</p>
<p>If there is a solution it doesn't appear that either "prayer" or "flag-waving" on either side, is going to provide it. We need people intensely skilled in the arts of language, communication and diplomacy, people with unbloodied and graft-free hands, and who have intelligence but not wealth (which is always supicious), and who had nothing to do with the fighting (on either side). Moderates of some sort, for these most immoderate of times. I say, let's find these people and put them on TV all over the Middle East, people who know the language, who have suffered, and can show tears, but yet who can still forgive. People who can remind us that all sides win when no one dies. Sunnis with Shiite neighbors, Kurds and friendly neighbors. Christians with Muslim neighbors. There must be some people in Iraq who still speak kindly and think kindly of one another, or who did so in the past, and wish the past to be rekindled once again. Stories of neighborly behavior ought to be broadcast and made known. And if we can assure the people of Iraq that for every week a truce between all sides is successful, we will remove a certain number of troops, and after the first successful month of truce, we will open the financial books of American corporate profits in Iraq to inspection from all sides, and will pay back any illegitimate over charges that such corporations have made, maybe then, we can leave with some honor left intact.</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-83999921874209527482012-03-17T21:28:00.004-07:002019-09-03T04:25:01.771-07:00Divorce and Abortion<p><strong>QUOTATIONS ON DIVORCE</strong></p>
<p>1999 SURVEY RESULTS<br /><br />Baptists are more likely than members of any other Christian denomination to be divorced. according to a national survey by the Barna Research Group. Nationally, 29 percent of all Baptist adults have been divorced, the Barna survey said. The only Christian group with a higher divorce rate are those who attend non-denominational Protestant churches, with a 34 percent divorce rate.</p>
<p>Mormons, who emphasize strong families, are near the national average at 24 percent, Barna reported.</p>
<p>Among those who describe themselves as born-again Christians, 27 percent are currently or have previously been divorced, compared to 24 percent among adults who do not describe themselves as born-again.</p>
<p>"While it may be alarming to discover that born-again Christians are more likely than others to experience a divorce, that pattern has been in place for quite some time," said George Barna, president of Barna Research Group.Alabama, which has more than one million Southern Baptists and a majority of evangelical Protestants in a population of 4.3 million, ranks fourth nationally in divorce rates, according to U.S. government statistics. It ranks behind Nevada, Tennessee and Arkansas among top divorce rates.</p>
<p>The Rev. Stacy Pickering, minister of young married adults and director of counseling at Shades Mountain Baptist Church, said the statistics are skewed because Baptist churches encourage young people to get married--sometimes when they're not properly prepared--rather than have pre-marital sex or co-habitate. <br /><br />Greg Garrison, News staff writer, The Birmingham News, 12/30/1999</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>BORN AGAIN CHRISTIANS JUST AS LIKELY TO DIVORCE AS ARE NON-CHRISTIANS</strong><br /><br />September 8, 2004 <br /><br />Although many Christian churches attempt to dissuade congregants from getting a divorce, the research confirmed an earlier finding by Barna a decade ago (further confirmed through tracking studies conducted each year since): born again Christians have the same likelihood of divorce as do non-Christians. Among married born again Christians, 35% have experienced a divorce. That figure is identical to the outcome among married adults who are not born again: 35%.</p>
<p>"Born again Christians" were defined in the survey as people who said they have made "a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today" and who also indicated they believe that when they die they will go to Heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. Being classified as "born again" was not dependent upon church or denominational affiliation or involvement. [Those who were not "born again" probably included nominal Christians, Christians unsure of their beliefs, guilt-ridden, backslidden Christians, believers in heterodox forms of Christianity who might not describe their beliefs as Barna did, as well as Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agers, Wiccans, agnostics and atheists. In other words, the "hell-bound." Yet their divorce rates equaled those of the "Born Agains."--E.T.B.]</p>
<p>The survey showed that the percentages of those who were divorced varied somewhat according to denominational religious affiliations (or lack thereof): Catholics (25%), atheists and agnostics (37%), Protestants (39%). Further subdividing the Protestants into their respective major denominations revealed that Presbyterians had the fewest divorces (28%), and Pentecostals had the most (44%).</p>
<p>George Barna noted that one reason why the divorce statistic among non-Born again adults is not higher is that a larger proportion of that group cohabits, effectively side-stepping marriage--and divorce--altogether. "If the non-born again population were to marry at the same rate as the born again group, it is likely that their divorce statistic would be roughly 38%--marginally higher (<3%) than that among the born again group, but still surprisingly similar in magnitude."</p>
<p>Barna also noted, "The data suggest that relatively few divorced Christians experienced their divorce before accepting Christ as their savior." [Does that mean most Christians experienced their divorce after accepting Christ as their savior?--E.T.B.] Research also indicated that a surprising number of Christians experienced divorces both before and after their conversion. Multiple divorces are also unexpectedly common among born again Christians. Barna's figures show that nearly one-quarter of the married born agains (23%) get divorced two or more times. <br /><br />Source: <a href="http://www.barna.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.barna.org</a></p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>MORE 2004 SURVEY RESULTS</strong><br /><br />"BIBLE BELT" HAS NATION'S HIGHEST DIVORCE RATE<br /><br />The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1. But don't take the U.S. government's word for it. Take a look at the findings from the George Barna Research Group.George Barna, a born-again Christian whose company is in Ventura, Calif., found that Massachusetts does indeed have the lowest divorce rate among all 50 states.</p>
<p>More disturbing was the finding that born-again Christians have among the highest divorce rates.<br /><br />The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated, "The divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people." The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.</p>
<p>How to explain these differences? The following factors provide a partial answer:</p>
<p>More couples in the South enter their first marriage at a younger age.</p>
<p>Average household incomes are lower in the South.</p>
<p>Southern states have a lower percentage of Roman Catholics, "a denomination that does not recognize divorce." Barna's study showed that 21 percent of Catholics had been divorced, compared with 29 percent of Baptists.</p>
<p>Education. Massachusetts has about the highest rate of education in the country, with 85 percent completing high school. For Texas the rate is 76 percent. One third of Massachusetts' residents have completed college, compared with 23 percent of Texans, and the other Northeast states are right behind Massachusetts. The liberals from Massachusetts have long prided themselves on their emphasis on education, and it has paid off: People who stay in school longer get married at a later age, when they are more mature, are more likely to secure a better job, and job income increases with each level of formal education. As a result, Massachusetts also leads in per capita and family income while births by teenagers, as a percent of total births, was 7.4 for Massachusetts and 16.1 for Texas. The Northeast corridor, with Massachusetts as the hub, does have one of the highest levels of Catholics per state total. And it is also the case that these are among the states most strongly supportive of the Catholic Church's teaching on social justice issues such as minimum and living wages and universal healthcare.</p>
<p>William V. D'Antonio [Professor emeritus at University of Connecticut and a visiting research professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.], "<a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial%5Fopinion/oped/articles/2004/10/31/walking%5Fthe%5Fwalk%5Fon%5Ffamily%5Fvalues/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Walking the Walk on Family Values</a>," The Boston Globe, October 31, 2004<br /><br />© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>One of the interesting features of the current efforts by the Christian Right to attack gay marriage is that their rhetoric about saving families doesn't match their actions. Why not, for example, invest similar attention to something like divorce or spousal abuse? These affect far more people and marriages than gay marriage ever could. <br /><br />--Austin Cline, "Pharisees Gathering Stones"</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>Half of heterosexual marriages in our society end in divorce. We heterosexuals are doing a lousy job of "defending" marriage. Adultery is a big part of the reason. So if we're going to rewrite our Constitution to "protect" marriage from sin because it is the "God-ordained bedrock of society," then I would think that adultery would be a much better target. The Florida Constitution should be amended to say that there can be no marriage licenses for anyone who has ever had sex outside marriage.<br /><br />--Howard Troxler, columnist, St. PetersburgTimes, November 14, 2004</p>
<p><strong>QUOTATIONS ON ABORTION</strong><br /><br />A study published by an affiliate of Planned Parenthood says almost a quarter-million abortions are performed each year in the U.S. on women who identify themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. Approximately 1.37 million abortions are performed in the United States each year. According to a startling and little publicized survey by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 37.4% of those abortions are performed on Protestant women--approximately one-half (about 18%) of whom profess to be born-again believers. That 18% of the estimated annual total accounts for 246,600 aborted babies each year in America. <br /><br />--"Study Shows High Percentage of Abortions Performed on Evangelicals; Pro-Lifers Picket Calvary Chapel's Headquarters in California" by James L. Lambert and Fred Jackson July 11, 2001 (Agape Press)</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>The Rev. Pat Robertson, founder of the "700 Club" religious TV show and Christian news program, and a leader of the national anti-abortion movement, said leaders in China who are forcing women to have abortions are "doing what they have to do." In an interview Monday night on CNN's "Wolf Blitzer Reports," Robertson said the United States should not interfere with China's policy. "Well, you know, I don't agree with it, but at the same time, they've got 1.2 billion people and they don't know what to do," said Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition. "If every family over there was allowed to have three or four children, the population would be completely unsustainable." "So I think that right now they're doing what they have to do. I don't agree with the forced abortion, but I don't think the United States needs to interfere with what they're doing internally in this regard."<br /><br />--Associated Press, 2001</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>NUMBER OF ABORTIONS GROWS DURING RELIGIOUSLY CONSERVATIVE PRESIDENT'S FIRST TERM</strong><br /><br />Based on data from the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, the Guttmacher Institute, and reporting by individual states, U.S. abortion rates had declined 17.4% in the 1990s to a 24-year low by the time President Bush first took office. Many expected that downward trend to continue under the conservative president, but instead, 52,000 more abortions occurred in 2002 than would have been expected under the pre-2000 conditions, and abortion has risen significantly in those states reporting multi-year abortion statistics.</p>
<p>Dr. Glen Harold Stassen argues that there are three contributing factors:</p>
<p>First, two thirds of women who abort say they cannot afford a child (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life Web site). In the past three years, unemployment rates increased half again. Not since Hoover had there been a net loss of jobs during a presidency until the current administration. Average real incomes decreased, and for seven years the minimum wage has not been raised to match inflation. With less income, many prospective mothers fear another mouth to feed.</p>
<p>Second, half of all women who abort say they do not have a reliable mate (Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life). Men who are jobless usually do not marry. Only three of the 16 states had more marriages in 2002 than in 2001, and in those states abortion rates decreased. In the 16 states overall, there were 16,392 fewer marriages than the year before, and 7,869 more abortions. As male unemployment increases, marriages fall and abortion rises.</p>
<p>Third, women worry about health care for themselves and their children. Since 5.2 million more people have no health insurance now than before this presidency--with women of childbearing age overrepresented in those 5.2 million--abortion increases. He also says that this should not be unexpected: The U.S. Catholic Bishops warned of this likely outcome if support for families with children was cut back.</p>
<p>We can also look abroad for confirmation of this: nations that provide easy access to abortion have far lower abortion rates than those that criminalize abortion. Are the lower rates due to the fact that abortion is legal? Although that might play some role, it's surely not a coincidence that the nations that provide easy access to abortion services also provide easy access to a wide range of social and medical services. They have larger and more comprehensive social safety nets than the nations where abortion is criminalized. <br /><br />Yuba Net, and also, <a href="http://atheism.about.com/b/a/120408.htm?nl=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">atheism.about.com</a></p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>ABORTION AND THE UNITED NATIONS</strong><br /><br />Despite the misinformation campaign led by the far right, who claim that the United Nations Population Fund supports forced abortions, the truth is that by denying family planning services to those who need them, we are setting in motion 800,000 more abortions than would normally occur. In Hungary, the introduction of modern contraception led to a 60% reduction in abortions. Similar results can be seen in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, South Korea, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.<br /><br />--The Population Institute, "What Can Make the World More Secure?" [Pamphlet]</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>A COUNTRY WITH SOME OF THE HARSHEST ANTI-ABORTION LAWS IN THE WORLD</strong><br /><br />Nepal's prohibition of abortion was one of the harshest in the world: it did not allow exceptions even in cases of rape, incest, and<br />life-threatening situations, and simply classified abortion as infanticide. As a result of that law, hundreds of women served prison terms. Two-thirds of all women in prison were there for "garbaphat," the Nepalese term for abortion and infanticide. In addition to those in Nepalese prisons for abortion, thousands more suffered, and often died, after resorting to extremely dangerous back-street methods. It had been estimated that six women died every day in Nepal due to poorly administrated abortions. Finally, in 2002, King Gyanendra of Nepal signed into law a bill that legalized abortion in addition to bringing about sweeping changes in many other discriminatory laws.<br /><br />--E.T.B.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>NATURE THE ABORTIONIST, PART 1</strong><br /><br />Many conceptions do not mature properly and are naturally aborted. And a fairly high percentage (20-30% or more?) of people born as single individuals used to be twins in the womb but one of them was reabsorbed into the womb or into the other twin.</p>
<p>Even the pro-lifer, Dr. John Collins Harvey, admits, "Products of conception [often] die at either the zygote, morula, or blastocyst stage. They never reach the implant stage but are discharged in the menstrual flow of the next period. It is estimated that [this]occurs in more than 50 percent of conceptions. In such occurrences, a woman may never even know that she has been pregnant." <br /><br />(Regardless of whether you believe that Jesus "loves all the little zygotes in the world," apparently that love does not include giving them all a whole and healthy start in life.--E.T.B.)<br /><br />--"Distinctly Human," Commonweal, Feb. 8, 2002</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>NATURE THE ABORTIONIST, PART 2</strong><br /><br />There are dangers to the lives of women during childbirth, which only a hundred and fifty years ago claimed the lives of both woman and child far more frequently than childbirth does today. Of those children who are born, some suffer birth defects, a few of which are invariably fatal.</p>
<p>There are also dangers posed by childhood diseases. Two hundred years ago the French naturalist, Buffon, lamented, "Half the children born never reach the age of eight." They died of diseases like smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, the flu, pneumonia, cholera, tuberculosis, meningitis, chicken pox, tetanus and staphylococcus infections. In fact a high percentage of the young of all animals and plants die from bacterial or viral infections. In the end, nothing is as disrespectful of higher life forms as the tiny microbes that hungrily devour the children of all species.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, picketing Mother Nature solves nothing. Neither do Christians dare blame "God" for having created "nature" this way.<br /><br />--E.T.B.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>HOW PRO-LIFE IS THE BIBLE? PART 1</strong><br /><br />According to the Bible, God is ready, willing and able to abort fetuses:</p>
<p>Their fruit shalt Thou destroy from the earth, and their seed from among the children of men.<br /><br />- Psalm 21:10</p>
<p>The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they are born...let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.<br /><br />- Psalm 58:3,8</p>
<p>As for Israel, their glory shall fly away like a bird, and from the womb, and from the conception...Give them, O Lord: what will Thou give? Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts...they shall bear no fruit...<br /><br />- Hosea 9:11-16</p>
<p>Notice that the prophet Hosea is pleading with his God to punish the Israelites by murdering their unborn babies. The Bible never really provides a logical rationale as to why fetuses, babies, and children must be punished for the sins of their parents and others. Some would suggest that for God to kill unborn babies for their parent's sins is somewhat misdirected retribution.<br /><br />--Gene Kasmar, WHY.The Brooklyn Center High School Bible Challenge. Part 1: The Evidence</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>HOW PRO-LIFE IS THE BIBLE? PART 2</strong><br /><br />Every living thing on the earth was drowned [by the Hebrew LORD--which included pregnant women and babies]...Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.<br /><br />- Genesis 7:23</p>
<p>Thus saith the LORD...Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling.<br /><br />- 1 Samuel 15:3</p>
<p>Joshua destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD commanded.<br /><br />- Joshua 10:40</p>
<p>The LORD delivered them before us; and we destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones.<br /><br />- Deuteronomy 2:33-34</p>
<p>Kill every male among the little ones.<br /><br />- Numbers 31:17</p>
<p>The wind of the LORD shall come up from the wilderness, and his spring shall become dry, and...Samaria shall become desolate...they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.<br /><br />- Hosea 13:15-16</p>
<p>With thee will I [the LORD] break in pieces the young man and the maid.<br /><br />- Jeremiah 51:22</p>
<p>Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.<br /><br />- Psalm 137:9</p>
<p>According to the Bible, God gave orders to kill children and to rip open the bodies of pregnant women. The pestilences were sent by God. The frightful famine, during which the dying child with pallid lips sucked the withered bosom of his dead mother, was sent by God. God drowned an entire world with the exception of eight persons. Imagine how such acts would have stained the reputation of the devil!<br /><br />--Robert G. Ingersoll</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>HOW PRO-LIFE IS THE BIBLE? PART 3</strong><br /><br />According to the God of the Bible it was more important to stone a woman to death if she should "entice you to follow after other gods," than it was to rescue the life of any fetus she might have been carrying.</p>
<p>It was more important to stone a woman to death the day after her wedding night "if she was discovered not to have been a virgin," than it was to wait and see if she might have conceived new life that night.</p>
<p>It was more important to stone a woman to death for "adultery," than to wait and see if she might be pregnant.</p>
<p>It was more important to stone a woman to death for "failing to cry out while being raped within earshot of the city," than it was to spare the life she might have conceived during that ordeal, during which the rapist may have held a knife to her throat, or strangled her into silence and submission.</p>
<p>And what about the test of "bitter water" mentioned in chapter five of the book of Numbers? The test consisted of mixing dust from the floor of the Hebrew tabernacle with "holy water" to make a concoction that a woman drank to test whether or not she had committed adultery. If she had, it says, "her belly will swell and her thigh will rot." Scholars have pointed out that "thigh" is a euphemism for sexual organs. So if the woman had committed adultery and had conceived as a result, then the "bitter water" would induce an abortion ("her thigh would rot"). (I wonder if this means that Bible-believing women who are accused of having affairs ought to swallow some dirt from the floor of their church mixed with "holy water?" Or better yet, swallow an abortion pill like RU-486 in front of the whole congregation?)</p>
<p>And what about children who "curse their parents?" The Bible says, "Kill them!" (Ex. 21:17; Lev. 20:9; Mat. 15:4; Mark 7:10) The Bible does not say how old the child has to be, but it does emphatically state they must "surely be put to death" should they "curse their parents."</p>
<p>Ah, the good old days, when God fearing people had higher priorities than "saving fetal lives." They were too busy stoning whomever enticed them to worship other gods, stoning adulteresses, stoning women who weren't virgins on their wedding night, stoning women who "failed to cry out" during rape, and stoning sassy children. In other words they were too busy with all of those higher priorities to worry about "the fate of fetuses."<br /><br />--E.T.B.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>HOW PRO-LIFE IS THE BIBLE? PART 4</strong><br /><br />Abortion as such is not discussed in the Bible, so any explanation of why it is not legislated or commented on is speculative.</p>
<p>A key text for examining ancient Israelite attitudes [toward the fetus] is Exodus 21:22-25: "When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman's husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe." Several observations can be made about this passage.</p>
<p>The Hebrew text at v. 22 literally reads "and there is no harm," implying that contrary to current sensibilities, the miscarriage itself was not considered serious injury. The monetary judgment given to the woman's husband indicates that the woman's experience of the miscarriage is not of significance, and that the damage is considered one to property rather than to human life. This latter observation is further supported by the contrast with the penalties for harm to the woman herself. <br /><br />--Drorah O'Donnell Setel, "Abortion," The Oxford Guide to Ideas and Issues of the Bible, ed. by Bruce Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (Oxford University Press, 2001)</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>WHAT HAPPENS TO THE SOULS OF FETUSES THAT DIE? </strong></p>
<p>THEOLOGICAL OPTION #1 <br /><br />THE SOULS OF ALL DEAD FETUSES GO TO HEAVEN<br /><br />This first option is the most optimistic, loving, and forgiving, but seems to turn abortions into "altar calls" with 100% assurance of eternal salvation for each and every aborted fetus.</p>
<p>But what do YOU believe?</p>
<p>THEOLOGICAL OPTION #2<br /><br />THE SOULS OF DEAD FETUSES GO TO WHEREVER GOD ORDAINS THEM TO GO, EITHER HEAVEN OR HELL<br /><br />According to various Bible verses, God "ordains" all things, including the premature deaths (including executions) of fetuses, pregnant women, and children. In other words, each soul in this world "gets" what God has "ordained" for it, regardless if they are aborted in the womb, or reach old age.</p>
<p>But what do YOU believe?</p>
<p>THEOLOGICAL OPTION #3<br /><br />THE SOULS OF ALL FETUSES THAT ARE NOT BAPTIZED BEFORE THEY DIE, GO TO HELL<br /><br />Theologians from Augustine to Jonathan Edwards considered it right for God to send fetuses that were not baptized before they died, to hell. Their doctrine was called "infant damnation" and it was taught by Christian churches for centuries. So, all fetuses that are not baptized before they die, go to hell.</p>
<p>But what do YOU believe?</p>
<p>THEOLOGICAL OPTION #4<br /><br />THE SOULS OF ALL FETUSES THAT ARE BAPTIZED BEFORE THEY DIE, GO TO HEAVEN<br /><br />Baptism spiritually cleanses the fetus' "original sin," ensuring that it goes straight to heaven should it die. Therefore, Catholics devised a plan hundreds of years ago, to even baptize fetuses by inserting a syringe filled with water into the womb in cases where the life of a fetus and/or the mother was at risk. The option of syringe baptism continued to be taught to Catholic seminarians right up till Vatican II in the 1960s.</p>
<p>Attempting to counteract such Catholic excesses, as he viewed them, the Protestant Christian, John Calvin, forbade mid-wives (or anyone else for that matter) from hastily baptizing sickly newborn infants, because Calvin believed in waiting a few days until a proper baptism ceremony in church could be conducted. According to Calvin, it was God's choice, not man's effort, that determined who would wind up in heaven or hell, and if the fetus or newborn didn't survive long enough to have a proper baptism ceremony, it was God's will that it die prematurely and/or suffer in hell for eternity.</p>
<p>Which of the four cases above do YOU believe is true?</p>
<p><strong>SPEAKING OF SOULS, WHEN DOES "SOUL-LIFE" BEGIN? </strong><br /><br />If the life of a person's eternal soul begins at conception yet you freeze a human egg right after it is fertilized then is that a "soul on ice?" This is not a merely theoretical question, because it happens all the time in fertilization clinics. They mix human sperm and eggs in test tubes, and store the fertilized zygotes in a freezer sometimes for years before they are implanted in a woman's uterus. But if "souls" can be kept on ice indefinitely, then maybe "soul-life" does not begin at conception? The prominent Catholic theologian, Thomas Aquinas, argued that "soul-life" began several months after conception.<br /><br />--E.T.B.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>TWO RADICALLY DIFFERENT VIEWS ON HOW TO OBTAIN "HEAVENLY REWARDS"</strong><br /><br />"I expect to get a great reward in heaven. I am looking forward to glory."<br /><br />- Paul Hill, who murdered an abortion doctor and his escort, Washington Post, 2003</p>
<p>Pro-lifer (Outside an Abortion Clinic): What if your mother had decided not to have you?<br /><br />Clinic Defender: I'd be in clover, I'd be in heaven experiencing ecstasy that I never earned or deserved.<br /><br />- John E. Seery, Los Angeles Times</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>IMPROVING THE LIVES OF CHILDREN WHO HAVE BEEN BORN</strong><br /><br />The death rate of children under the age of 15 has fallen by 95 percent since 1900 in the United States. The child death rates in just the past 20 years have incredibly been halved in India, Egypt, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, South Korea, Israel, and scores of other nations. Almost all of the major killer diseases before 1900--tuberculosis, typhoid, smallpox, whooping cough, to name a few--have been all but eradicated.<br /><br />- Stephen Moore and Julian Simon, It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years</p>
<p>Much more still needs to be done for the world's children, to feed and fully nourish them in the womb and soon after birth, because deficiencies in salt, minerals, vitamins and protein are still crippling children both physically and mentally throughout the world (sometimes killing them as well), yet in most cases it takes only pennies a day to provide what is lacking for each child. Meanwhile in the wealthiest countries like America we think nothing of spending ten thousand dollars or more at a fertilization clinic just to try and conceive a child, or spend a million dollars or more in hospital fees to sustain the life of a single child (one that has been born prematurely). Such extravagances in the wealthier parts of the world must make those in the poorer parts of the world look askance.</p>
<p>One might also consider contrasting the "needs of the unborn" with those children who are already born throughout the world and who require medicine, education, and a chance to rise out of poverty. Bringing too many children into a city or country that cannot support them is not going to improve matters in that country but increase suffering and strife. Poverty and insufficient nutrition lead to a rise in the rate of spontaneous abortions, back-street abortions and therapeutic abortions, as well as an increase in the mortality rate of children already born. <br /><br />- E.T.B.</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-2723038009629671012012-03-17T20:40:00.004-07:002019-09-03T04:25:18.439-07:00Death Penalty and Abortion Facts and Figures<p><strong>DEATH PENALTY DIALOGUE</strong> (Facts and Figures)<br /><br />FOLLOWED BY ABORTION DIALOGUE</p>
<p>TIM (Timothy):<br /><br />When those racists in Texas hooked that Black man up to their truck and dragged him to his death, the people of Texas (without hate crime legislation) showed their disapproval of violent racism by giving the killers the ultimate penalty.</p>
<p>ED: <a href="http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0760750.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Texas also showed its disapproval</a> of retarded murderers by executing them too. Texas is an equal opportunity executor. Has been for over a century. Back in 1930 Texas led by executed 633 people. Next closest state was Georgia with 402 executions. Then in 1977 Texas executed 336 people. Next closest state was Missouri with 61.</p>
<p>But even being the leader by far in executions has not made Texas the safest state to live in.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0922223.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Most dangerous states</a> to live in, in 2005: Texas is the 11th most dangerous state out of 50.<br /><br />In the year 2000 Texas had the 8th highest total Crime Index [per capita].<br /><br />For <a href="http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/txcrime.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Violent Crime</a> Texas ranked the 13th highest occurrence for Violent Crime among the states.</p>
<p>As of 2003 The Texas murder rate was 6.4, tied for 8th highest murder rate in the nation, while the states with equal or higher murder rates were:<br /><br />Arkansas, 6.4<br /><br />Alabama 6.6<br /><br />Tennessee 6.8<br /><br />Illinois 7.1<br /><br />Georgia 7.6<br /><br />Maryland 9.5<br /><br />Louisiana 13.0<br /><br />DC 44.2<br /><br />All the other states had lower murder rates in 2003.</p>
<p>Here's some more interesting figures:</p>
<p>Serious <a href="http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance.htm#Crime" target="_blank" rel="noopener">violent crime levels</a> have declined since 1993.<br />The number of prisoners under sentence of death at year end 2003 decreased for the third consecutive year.<br /><br />In 2004, only 59 inmates were executed in the entire U.S., 6 fewer than in 2003.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>TIM: 70% of America supports the death penalty!<br /><br />ED: [from the web] Of the 38 U.S. states that employ the death penalty, Colorado has executed one prisoner since 1976 (the year that the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty), while Texas executed 309 in that same period.<br /><br />Since the Supreme Court decision in 1976, 506 inmates in 12 southern states have been executed, compared to 121 elsewhere in the nation, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.<br /><br />Texas leads the nation with 211 executions and 458 death row inmates, followed by Virginia with 76 executions and 32 inmates and Florida with 46 executions and 393 death row inmates, as of March 31.<br /><br />The other Southern states are Louisiana, with 25 executions and 85 inmates; South Carolina, 24 and 69; Georgia, 23 and 130; Oklahoma, 23 and 152; Arkansas, 21 and 41; Alabama, 21 and 182; North Carolina, 15 and 221; Mississippi, 4 and 62; and Kentucky, 2 and 39.<br /><br />Studies have shown that southern states support the death penalty because of a biblical belief in retribution or vengeance.<br /><br />Southern states perform 80 percent of the executions in the country and repeatedly have the highest murder rate, according to federal Bureau of Justice statistics. The Northeast, which has less than 1 percent of all executions in the U.S., has the lowest murder rate, the BOJ reports. In 1997, the last year that the statistics cover, the South's murder rate was 8.4 per 100,000; the Northeast's was 4.8 per 100,000.</p>
<p>Does it prevent crime?<br /><br />Some studies suggest that the death penalty may actually increase the number of murders rather than deter them, according to "Homicide Studies," a 1997 publication.<br /><br />A 1995 study by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found the average annual increase in homicides in California was twice as high during the years executions were carried out than in years when no one was executed.<br /><br />The study compared homicide rates during 1952-1967, when an execution occurred on an average of every two months, with the homicide rates between 1968 and 1991, when no executions occurred. The study showed that the average percentage increase in murder rates was 10 percent when executions were occurring and 4.8 percent when they were not.<br /><br />Another study of executions in New York from 1907 to 1963, when the state was executing more than any other state, found that, on the average, homicides increased in the month following an execution, according to "Deterrence or Brutalization: What is the Effect of Executions?"</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>TIM: Critics of the death penalty say that it has not lowered crime in America, but that's because America does not use the death penalty in such a way that it would lower crime. Only a very tiny fraction of convicted killers is given the death penalty, and even then, it usually takes 10 years or more to kill the guy, long after most everyone has forgotten about the crime (except, of course, for the victims' families). Even then, liberals amass enormous legal, media, and economic forces to prevent the execution.</p>
<p>ED: You want people executed quicker and more often and for all to see? That was tried already. Public executions for everything from stealing to murder were the sole most grisly form of public entertainment for much of human history. Yet crimes continued, as did wars, torture, etc.</p>
<p>As for quickening up the pace and number of executions, you don't want the wheels of justice to move so swiftly that somebody gets lynched an hour after each murder in town is committed? There has to be some happy medium as to how fast or slow the wheels of justice turn and how justly and thoroughly each case is examined by judges, lawyers and forensics experts, right?</p>
<p>Neither is justice "simple" when wealthy people are being tried. They can pay to have the "most" justice, the most thorough lawyers, the best counter arguments.</p>
<p>As things stand, crime has gone down since 1993, not up, and the rate of executions has likewise gone down, as I pointed out above. At least we can both be happy about those figures.</p>
<p>Let me add that in the great ages of faith, execution (preceded sometimes by torture to make the person confess) was used for not only murder, but for other crimes as well, including theft; not showing one's lordship the correct respect; blasphemy; or being a witch. They didn't have large prisons to keep people interred for a long time. They tortured you and/or killed you, and that was that. Did it lower crime? Travellers continued to be set upon by thieving highwaymen who might kill them so the highwaymen couldn't be identified and convicted of the crime, the streets had roving bands of theives, the poor revolted against their lords even in Luther's day during the Peasant uprising. And in the 17th century Christians killed Christians in the greatest (death per capita) war that Europe has seen to this day.</p>
<p>Moreover, if a person hates another person so much, or is so demented as to think murdering others is a turn on, or is so desirious of killing others for either their wealth, or to "even the score," or to "set justice right," then I don't think that fear of punishment, eternal or otherwise, is going to deter them.</p>
<p>As I said, the death penalty was more widely used during the great ages of faith, yet there was still criminality back then, even with PUBLIC EXECUTIONS, which also where the only major form of grisly entertainment back then, since they didn't have adventure movies, or horror movies or shoot and slash video games, and few could read back then. Besides even if you could read and/or write, the church and governments both censored books and burnt the ones they found disagreeable.</p>
<p>QUOTE: Salvianus, a priest of Marseilles of the fifth century, deplores the vanished virtue of the pagan world and declares that "The whole body of Christians is a sink of iniquity." "Very few," he says, "avoid evil." He challenges his readers: "How many in the Church will you find that are not drunkards or adulterers, or fornicators, or gamblers, or robbers, or murderers--or all together?" (De Gubernatione Dei, III, 9) Gregory of Tours, in the next century, gives, incredible as it may seem, an even darker picture of the Christian world, over part of which he presides. You cannot read these truths, unless you can read bad Latin, because they are never translated. It is the flowers, the rare examples of virtue, the untruths of Eusebius and the Martyrologies, that are translated. It is the legends of St. Agnes and St. Catherine, the heroic fictions of St. Lawrence and St. Sebastian that you read. But there were ten vices for every virtue, ten lies for every truth, a hundred murders for every genuine martyrdom.<br /><br />--Joseph McCabe, How Christianity Triumphed</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>TIM: Any punishment, to be effective, must be consistent, and it must come as soon after the deed to be punished as possible.</p>
<p>ED: Then I guess fear of eternal hell is not a major deterent since it comes too late, after the murderous deeds are already done, and only at the very end of one's own life. Actually fear of hell serves mainly to keep people in whatever religion they belong to, more than anything else.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>TIM: Convicted murderers who are released from jail or on parole are more likely to kill than anybody else. Moreover, convicted killers can, and have, killed prisoners and/or guards in prison. By not putting a premeditated killer to death, we risk the lives of every person that killer comes into contact with, even when we send him to jail.</p>
<p>ED: That's a great question. Though some guards are probably killed by people sent to prison for crimes other than murder, or killed during general prison uprisings when lots of prisoners go ape at once. As for murderers that murder guards, who ever said being a guard was easy, or that the prison system in general was easy? It's like being a combat soldier, and nobody is forced to be a prison guard.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>TIM: But forgiveness on the personal level does not absolve the state of administering due justice. Surely no one would argue that there should be no more jails, because for now on all the victims should just forgive the criminals!</p>
<p>ED: That's common sense of course. Both Martin Luther and John Calvin would agree that trying to turn Jesus's commands to love one's enemy, not store up treasure on earth, give to all who ask, and ask nothing in return, into LAWS, doesn't seem possible. However the Old Testament commands were expected to suit an entire nation.</p>
<p>I might add that just as you pointed out that "forgiveness on the personal level does not absolve the State from administering due justice," Luther and Calvin pointed out that "forgiveness on the personal level does not absolve the State from administering due justice to heretics and blasphemers." They said that the Sermon on the Mount did not apply to the necessity of killing blasphemers and heretics as ordered by God in the Old Testament. Luther even said that he could forgive his personal enemies for hating him as a person, and that he would even hand his personal enemies a drink if they were dying of thirst to help spare their lives, exactly as he was taught to do by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. BUT... if that person should not be merely a personal enemy, but also be an enemy of God or a blasphemer of the Bible, then it was each Christian's duty to serve God rather than serve man, and not help God's enemies in any physical way, but lay Biblical curses upon them, since to help blasphemers and heretics was tantamount to helping evil to fourish, which would lead to God being insulted and more people damned. Also, since the Old Testament says that a father may kill a man threatening his son's physical life, how much more justified is a Christian in killing a heretic who threatens the ETERNAL life of his son by spreading lies about God and his holy word?</p>
<p>I cite the verses from Luther and Calvin where they say such things, and interpret the Sermon on the Mount that way in chapter two of Leaving the Fold, "Fundamentalism's Grotesque Past." Calvin and Beza his student in Geneva each wrote books on the necessity of public magistrates to punish heretics according to the teachings of the Bible.</p>
<p>ANOTHER VERY IMPORTANT idea to consider concerning the death penalty is that having the authority to execute people is having a form of absolute power over people's lives, and like all such power it can corrupt. Having such power over others' lives or deaths can indeed corrupt those who wield it. Evidence can be manipulated to get the "right" people executed.</p>
<p>Hitler was at first praised for instance for clearing the streets of Germany of all its criminals. Even Southern Baptists praised Hitler, which I read in an old issue of the Baptist Courier. Even people in America and Britain at first praised Hitler. Later, whomever Hitler designated as a "criminal" was cleared from the streets. Such a temptation is diminished only if the authority to execute other people is diminished, and the civil power remains questioned by others, and if people in prisons are allowed to continue to live and speak and present new evidence.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p><strong>ABORTION</strong><br /><br />TIM: If murdering millions of innocent children is not a crime, then what is?</p>
<p>ED: If there is "murdering" of millions of "children" taking place, please keep in mind that nature "murders" far more "children" than therapeutic abortions do. The pro-lifer, Dr. John Collins Harvey, admits, "Products of conception [often] die at either the zygote, morula, or blastocyst stage. They never reach the implant stage but are discharged in the menstrual flow of the next period. It is estimated that [this] occurs in more than 50 percent of conceptions. In such occurrences, a woman may never even know that she has been pregnant." Yet do I hear pro-lifers moved by that inconceivably hudge natural disaster just as everyone is whenever children are murdered by other natural disasters, like tsunamis and earthquakes? Do pro-lifers struggle with the natural disaster that continues to befall billions of zygotes each year around the world? I haven't seen anyone crying about all the "murdered children" in that case, nor raising their eyes to heaven and saying, "Why, God, why?" Does Jesus really "love all the little zygotes/children in the world?"--apparently only enough to give far less than 50 percent of all conceptions a whole and healthy start in life.</p>
<p>Do pro-lifers picket fertility clinics where they store thousands of frozen zygotes and demand that they all be removed from the freezer and implanted inside women, and given birth? Do pro-lifers complain that the fertility clinic that gives previously infertile couples new pregnancy options, has to fertilize lots of eggs at once and simply tosses away a lot of fertilized eggs in the process of fulfilling each couple's dream of conceiving a child of her own? No, apparently not.</p>
<p>However Pro-lifers DO cry out or weep whenever they see pictures of late term therapeutic abortions, pictures that they prize like manna from heaven. Well, I'm moved by such pictures too, but at least I know that late term abortions are the rarest kind, and those pictures do not reveal what health problems drove the women to have a late term abortion, because late term abortions are dangerous, and normally only performed if the woman's own health is in sufficient danger.</p>
<p>Conversely, most therapeutic abortions are first term abortions, and the woman's chances of dying from them are statistically lower than dying from carrying a fetus to full term.</p>
<p>And with morning after pills there is even less risk statistically of a woman dying than in the case of a first term abortion or carrying a fetus to full term. Morning after pills that make it so that the zygote never attaches to the uterine wall in the first place. It's a ball of cells at that point. No memory, no feeling of pain, and not a "child" except in chromosome number. Neither is it an individual at that point, because up till about 14 days after conception is when most twinning takes place. Each zygote is a potential pair of individuals or even six individuals, rather than being a potential individual. So we can't even say a zygote is an individual.</p>
<p>ALL FOR NOW.</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-30858057019386465552012-03-17T20:27:00.004-07:002019-09-03T04:25:34.765-07:00Christians Have as Many Abortions as Everyone Else, Catholics Have More
<p>A new study by The Center For Reason (www.CenterForReason.com) finds that Christians have just as many abortions as their non-Christian counterparts. The study concludes that in the year 2000, Christians were responsible for 570,000 abortions. Catholics were found to be the worst offenders, with abortion rates higher than the national average.</p>
<p>San Francisco, Calif. (PRWEB) March 12, 2006 -- With over one million abortions being performed in the US each year, this issue has dominated the political landscape. In recent years the rhetoric has escalated, with the pro-life movement becoming a flagship for Christian morality and ethics. The prevailing Christian doctrine--that abortion is murder--has polarized the issue, firmly placing the vast majority of Christians on the pro-life side of the debate.</p>
<p>Incendiary comments by some of the more outspoken Christian figureheads have sought to portray abortion as an “evil” perpetrated by the non-Christian left. In response to this, The Center For Reason, a private research group, undertook a study to test the premise: “Christians have fewer abortions than non-Christians”. The results disproved the premise.</p>
<p>The study, available as a downloadable report, reveals that Christians have just as many abortions as non-Christians. Data analyzed for all fifty states show that the rate of abortion is the same in the most-Christian segments of the population as it is in the least-Christian. The most-Catholic segments, on the other hand, showed significantly higher abortion rates.</p>
<p>All data sources used in the study are publicly available, and are referenced in the report. All raw data and calculated values are tabulated in the report, to allow full verification of the results.</p>
<p>The report, titled “<a href="http://www.CenterForReason.com/reports.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Landscape of Abortion</a>”, may be downloaded.</p>
<p>This research was undertaken to test the premise: “Christians have fewer abortions than non-Christians”. This topic was chosen in response to the very-public stance of certain far-right Christian groups, who assert that abortion is an evil perpetrated by the non-Christian left.</p>
<p>The results disproved the premise. It transpires that Christians have just as many abortions as their non-Christian counterparts. The study concludes that in the year 2000, Christians had approximately 570,000 abortions. Within the Christian segment, Catholics were found to have abortion rates significantly higher than the national average.</p>
<p><a href="http://centerforreason.blogspot.com/2006/03/landscape-of-abortion.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">posted by Center for Reason</a> at Friday, March 10, 2006</p>
<p>------------</p>
<p><strong>Abortion Law, History & Religion</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.cbctrust.com/history_law_religion.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Abortion Has Always Been With Us</a></p>
<p>In 1955, the anthropologist George Devereux demonstrated that abortion has been practised in almost all human communities from the earliest times.1 The patterns of abortion use, in hundreds of societies around the world since before recorded history, have been strikingly similar. Women faced with unwanted pregnancies have turned to abortion, regardless of religious or legal sanction and often at considerable risk.2 Used to deal with upheavals in personal, family, and community life, abortion has been called “a fundamental aspect of human behaviour”.3</p>
<p>In primitive tribal societies, abortions were induced by using poisonous herbs, sharp sticks, or by sheer pressure on the abdomen until vaginal bleeding occurred. Abortion techniques are described in the oldest known medical texts.2 The ancient Chinese and Egyptians had their methods and recipes to cause abortion, and Greek and Roman civilizations considered abortion an integral part of maintaining a stable population. Ancient instruments, such as the ones found at Pompeii and Herculaneum, were much like modern surgical instruments. The Greeks and Romans also had various poisons administered in various ways, including through tampons.</p>
<p>Socrates,4 Plato and Aristotle2 were all known to suggest abortion. Even Hippocrates, who spoke against abortion because he feared injury to the woman, recommended it on occasion by prescribing violent exercises.2 Roman morality placed no social stigma on abortion.</p>
<p>Early Christians condemned abortion, but did not view the termination of a pregnancy to be an abortion before "ensoulment", the definition of when life began in the womb. Up to 400 AD., as the relatively few Christians were widely scattered geographically, the actual practice of abortion among Christians probably varied considerably and was influenced by regional customs and practices.5</p>
<p>Evolving Position of the Christian Church</p>
<p>St. Augustine (AD 354-430) said, “There cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation”, and held that abortion required penance only for the sexual aspect of the sin.6 He and other early Christian theologians believed, as had Aristotle centuries before, that "animation", or the coming alive of the fetus, occurred forty days after conception for a boy and eighty days after conception for a girl. The conclusion that early abortion is not homicide is contained in the first authoritative collection of canon law accepted by the church in 1140.6 As this collection was used as an instruction manual for priests until the new Code of Canon Law of 1917, its view of abortion has had great influence.6</p>
<p>At the beginning of the 13th century, Pope Innocent III wrote that “quickening” —the time when a woman first feels the fetus move within her— was the moment at which abortion became homicide; prior to quickening, abortion was a less serious sin. Pope Gregory XIV agreed, designating quickening as occurring after a period of 116 days (about 17 weeks). His declaration in 1591 that early abortion was not grounds for excommunication continued to be the abortion policy of the Catholic Church until 1869.</p>
<p>The tolerant approach to abortion which had prevailed in the Roman Catholic Church for centuries ended at the end of the nineteenth century.7 In 1869, Pope Pius IX officially eliminated the Catholic distinction between an animated and a nonanimated fetus and required excommunication for abortions at any stage of pregnancy.</p>
<p>This change has been seen by some as a means of countering the rising birth control movement, especially in France,8 with its declining Catholic population. In Italy, during the years 1848 to 1870, the papal states shrank from almost one-third of the country to what is now Vatican City. It has been argued that the Pope's restriction on abortion was motivated by a need to strengthen the Church’s spiritual control over its followers in the face of this declining political power.8</p>
<p>Early Legal Opinion</p>
<p>Historically, religious beliefs coloured legal opinion on abortion. From 1307 to 1803, abortion before the fetus moved perceptibly or "quickened" was not punished under English common law, and not regarded by society at large as a moral problem.9 Because most abortions took place before quickening, punishment was rare.10 Even if performed after quickening, the offense was usually considered a misdemeanour.2 This was the case until the nineteenth century; the entry of the state into the regulation of abortion has been relatively recent.11</p>
<p>Two prominent legal cases from fourteenth century England illustrate prevailing practices at that time. In both the "Twinslayer's Case" of 1327 and the "Abortionist's Case" of 1348, the judges refused to make causing the death of a fetus a legal offence. The judges were, in this pre-Reformation period, all Roman Catholic.</p>
<p>In 1670, the question of whether or not abortion was murder came before the English judge, Sir Matthew Hale. Hale decided that if a woman died as a result of an abortion then the abortionist was guilty of murder. No mention was made of the fetus.12</p>
<p>This tolerant common-law approach ended in 1803 when a criminal abortion law was codified by Lord Ellenborough. The abortion of a "quick" fetus became a capital offence, while abortions performed prior to quickening incurred lesser penalties. An article in the 1832 London Legal Examiner justified the new laws on the grounds of protecting women from the dangerous abortion techniques which were popular at the time:</p>
<p>"The reason assigned for the punishment of abortion is not that thereby an embryo human being is destroyed, but that it rarely or ever can be effected with drugs without sacrifice of the mother's life."12</p>
<p>In the United States, similar legislative iniatives began in the 1820’s and proceeded state by state as the American frontier moved westward. In 1858, the New Jersey Supreme Court, pronouncing upon the state’s new abortion law, said:</p>
<p>“The design of the statute was not to prevent the procuring of abortions, so much as to guard the health and life of the mother against consequences of such attempts.”12<br /><br />During the nineteenth century, legal barriers to abortion were erected throughout the western world. In 1869 the Canadian Parliament enacted a criminal law which prohibited abortion and punished it with a penalty of life imprisonment. This law mirrored the laws of a number of provinces in pre-Confederation Canada; all of these statutes were more or less modelled on the English legislation of Lord Ellenborough.13</p>
<p>Pressure for restrictions was not coming from the general public. Physicians were in the forefront of the crusade to criminalize abortion in England,14 the U.S.15 and Canada.16 They were voicing concern for the health of women and the destruction of fetal life. However, “there is substantial evidence that medical men were concerned not only for the welfare of the potential victims of abortion but also to further the process of establishing and consolidating their status as a profession.”17 Women were turning to midwives, herbalists, drug dispensers and sometimes quacks to end their pregnancies, and doctors wanted to gain control over the practice of medicine and elevate the status of their profession.18</p>
<p>Race and class were also factors in the passage of the new wave of anti-abortion laws. Abortion was increasingly being used by white, married, Protestant, middle and upper class women to control their family size. “Nativists” (those who were “native-born” to the new country) in Canada, for instance, voiced their concern about what they called the “race suicide” of the Anglo-Saxon population9 in relation to the burgeoning French-Canadian and “foreign” immigrant populations. Anglo-Saxon women who refused maternity by employing contraception or abortion were condemned as “traitors to the race”. Accordingly, the Canadian parliament made contraception illegal in 1892, following the example of the U.S.</p>
<p>Another interpretation of the trend toward more restrictive abortion legislation focuses on nation states’ demographic concerns. Powerful social pressures for population increase meant that “the concern was perhaps more for the quantity of human beings than for the quality of human life.”19</p>
<p>In the words of the authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves:</p>
<p>“.just at a time when women’s increasing understanding of conception was helping them to avoid pregnancy, certain governments and religious groups desired continued population growth to fill growing industries and new farmable territories.”20</p>
<p>Despite its criminalization, women continued to regard induced miscarriage before the fetus “quickened” as entirely ethical, and were surprised to learn that it was illegal.21 Women saw themselves as doing what was necessary to bring back their menses, to “put themselves right”. In the words of historians Angus and Arlene Tigar McLaren,</p>
<p>“Doctors were never to be totally successful in convincing women of the immorality of abortion. For many it was to remain an essential method of fertility control.”21</p>
<p>Women continued to have abortions in roughly the same proportions as they had prior to its criminalization.5 After it was criminalized, abortion simply went underground and became a clandestine and therefore much more dangerous operation for women to undergo.</p>
<p>During the latter part of the nineteenth century, European views on the restriction of abortion were spread by the colonial powers throughout Africa, Asia and beyond.2 The strict prohibitions of Spain are reflected in many statutes decreed in South America, for example. Toward the end of the 19th century, China and Japan, at the time under the influence of Western powers, also criminalized abortion for the first time.2</p>
<p>American historian James C. Mohr makes the point that from an historical perspective, the nineteenth century’s wave of restrictive abortion laws can be seen as a deviation from the norm, a period of interruption of the historically tolerant attitude towards abortion.22</p>
<p>Twentieth Century</p>
<p>“From the second half of the 19th century, through World War II, abortion was highly restricted almost everywhere. Liberalization of abortion laws occurred in most of the countries of Eastern and Central Europe in the 1950s and in almost all the remaining developed countries during the 1960s and 1970s. A few developing countries also relaxed their restrictions on abortion during the same period, most notably China and India.”23</p>
<p>A number of factors have been recognized as contributing to this liberalizing trend.24 Attitudes toward sexuality and procreation were changing, and the reduced influence of religious institutions was a related factor.24 In some countries, rubella epidemics and thalidomide created awareness of the need for legal abortion. In others, there was concern about population growth. Illegal abortion had long been a serious public health hazard,25 and eventually women being injured or dying from unnecessarily dangerous abortions became a concern. Arguments were made in favour of the right of poor women to have access to abortion services. More recently, women’s right to control their fertility has been recognized.24</p>
<p>While the pace of abortion law reform has slowed, the overall movement is still in the direction of liberalization. Recently, however, restrictions have increased in a few countries.24</p>
<p>“As often happens when rapid social change occurs, the movement to legalize abortion has generated resistance and a counter movement. Strenuous efforts are being made to increase restrictions on abortion and to block further liberalization of laws, especially in the United States. [and] the former Communist countries,.but [anti-abortionists] are also highly visible in Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy. and other developed as well as developing countries.”24</p>
<p>The degree of liberalization has varied from country to country. Abortion laws are usually grouped according to “indications”, or circumstances under which abortions can be performed. The most restrictive laws either completely ban abortions or restrict them to cases where the pregnancy poses a risk to the woman’s life. Other laws also consider risks to the physical and mental health of the woman or her fetus. Some also allow abortion for social-medical or economic reasons, as in the case where an additional child will bring undue burdens to an existing family. The broadest category allows abortion on request (usually within the first trimester).</p>
<p>ENDNOTES<br /><br />1. George Devereux, “A Typological Study of Abortion in 350 Primitive, Ancient and Pre-Industrial Societies”, in Therapeutic Abortion, ed. Harold Rosen, New York: The Julian Press Inc., 1954.</p>
<p>2. H.P. David, “Abortion Policies”, in Abortion and Sterilization: Medical and Social Aspects, J.E. Hodgson, ed., Grune and Stratton, New York, 1981, pp.1-40.</p>
<p>3. Nan Chase, “Abortion: A Long History Can’t Be Stopped”, Vancouver Sun, May 1, 1989.</p>
<p>4. Wendell W. Watters, Compulsory Parenthood: the Truth about Abortion, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1976, p.52.</p>
<p>5. Deborah R. McFarlane, “Induced Abortion: An Historical Overview”, American Journal of Gynaecologic Health, Vo. VII, No. 3, May/June 1993, pp.77-82.</p>
<p>6. Jane Hurst, “The History of Abortion in the Catholic Church: The Untold Story”, Catholics for a Free Choice, Washington, D.C., 1983.</p>
<p>7. Wendell W. Watters, p.79.</p>
<p>8. Ibid, pp.92-3.</p>
<p>9. Alison Prentice et al, Canadian Women: A History, Harcourt Brace</p>
<p>Jovanovich, Canada, pg.165.</p>
<p>10. Donald P. Kommers,”Abortion in Six Countries: A Comparative Legal Analysis,in Abortion, Medicine and the LawFourth edition, J.D. Butler & D.F. Walbert, eds., Facts on File, N.Y.1992, p.312.</p>
<p>11. Janine Brodie et al, The Politics of Abortion, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1992, p.9.</p>
<p>12. Jimmey Kinney.Ms., April 1973, p.48-9.</p>
<p>13. A. Anne McLellan, “Abortion Law in Canada”, in Abortion, Medicine and the Law, op. cit, p.334.</p>
<p>14. Donald P. Kommers, p.317.</p>
<p>15. James C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.</p>
<p>16. Constance Backhouse, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and the Law in Nineteenth Century Canada, Women’s Press, Toronto.</p>
<p>17. Terry, “England”, in Abortion and Protection of the Human Fetus 78, (S. Frankowski and G. Cole, eds., 1987).</p>
<p>18. James C. Mohr, p.244.</p>
<p>19. Wendell W. Watters, p. xv.</p>
<p>20. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1971), p.216-7.</p>
<p>21. Angus McLaren and Arlene Tigar McLaren,The Bedroom and the State: The Changing Practices and Politics of Contraception and Abortion in Canada 1880-1980, M & S,Toronto.,1986, p.38-9.</p>
<p>22. James C. Mohr, p.259.</p>
<p>23. Stanley K. Henshaw, “Induced Abortion: A World Review, 1990”, Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 22, No. 2, March/April 1990, p.78.</p>
<p>24. Stanley K. Henshaw, “Recent Trends in the Legal Status of Induced Abortion”, Journal of Public Health Policy, Summer, 1994, pp.165-172.</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-25461648406146636672012-03-17T19:44:00.003-07:002019-09-03T04:25:49.265-07:00Factcheck: "Good" Things Clinton Did vs. "Bad" Things Bush Did<p>There is an email going around that compares the "good" reactions liberals had to things Clinton did, with the "bad" reactions liberals had to the things Bush did. It aims to equate the things Clinton and Bush did, and show that Bush's decisions were as "good" as Clinton's, or at least no "worse."</p>
<p>I fact-checked some of the numerical claims.</p>
<p>Cheers, Edward T. Babinski</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><br /><em>Clinton spends 77 billion on war in Serbia - good</em>..</blockquote>
<p>ED: The cost of the war in the Balkans during the Clinton administration appears to have been far less than "77 billion." Clinton at first asked Congress for "6 billion" to wage the war from April to Dec 1999. Even a conservative commentator admits that the cost of the war in the Balkans under Clinton amounted to $15 billion, not "77 billion": "What about <a href="http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31969" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Clinton-led incursions</a> in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina? Intervention in the Balkans during the '90s cost the United States about $15 billion."</p>
<p>For additional views of the costs see Congressman Duncan's Remarks From The Congressional Record AIR WAR AGAINST SERBIA March 27, 2000<br /><br />Source: www.house.gov/duncan/floor106/fs_000327_airwar.html</p>
<p>And it was not a unilateral war like Bush's invasion of Iraq. It was a coalition fought war, and the NATO coalition also supported rebuilding costs.</p>
<p>Furthermore, U.S. casualties were either extremely low, or nonexistant, if I recall correctly.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><br /><em>Bush spends 87 billion in Iraq - bad</em>...</blockquote>
<p>ED: Bush spent far more than "87 billion" (in fact, the Bush administration even misappropriated billions of dollars that it had originally asked Congress to spend on the <a href="http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/articles/afghanistan.html">war in Afghanistan</a>, diverting that money instead to its war chest against Iraq). Here are some indications of the cost of war in Iraq, which continue to climb:</p>
<p>So far, <a href="http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=253" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the bill for the war in Iraq</a> is under $120 billion, according to the Office of Management and Budget. But there's little question that the Iraq war and its bloody aftermath will cost $200 billion, eventually.</p>
<p>At present, over $150 billion, but will be higher as the Bush Administration requests further spending later this year. <br /><br />Source: www.nationalpriorities.org/Issues/Military/Iraq/CostOfWar.html</p>
<p><a href="http://www.costofwar.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">$142 billion and rising</a></p>
<p>Also, the true extent of US casualties in Iraq are still unknown. This has fuelled suspicion that the administration may be hiding the true human cost of the war and its aftermath. <br /><br />Posted 9/7/2003 -- <a href="http://www.channel4.com/news/2004/02/week_2/10_iraq2.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Monthly costs of Iraq, Afghan wars approach that of Vietnam</a> -- By Dave Moniz, USA TODAY -- WASHINGTON -- The monthly bill for the U.S. military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan now rivals Pentagon spending during the Vietnam War, Defense Department figures show. The Pentagon is spending nearly $5 billion per month in Iraq and Afghanistan, a pace that would bring yearly costs to almost $60 billion. Those expenses do not include money being spent on rebuilding Iraq's electric grid, water supply and other infrastructure, costs which had no parallel in Vietnam. During the first war against Iraq under president Bush Sr., the United States was reimbursed for much of the cost of Operation Desert Storm by Saudi Arabia, from which the operation was launched, and Kuwait, which had been invaded by Saddam's troops.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><br /><em>Clinton imposes regime change in Serbia - good</em>...</blockquote>
<p>ED: Clinton's "imposition" was not a unilateral action, but a NATO decision, it was backed and supported by a coalition of European powers.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><br /><em>Bush imposes regime change in Iraq - bad</em>...</blockquote>
<p>ED: Bush told Sadam, we know you are hiding "WMDs," so you must leave Iraq. When Sadam responded, "But I don't have any WMDs," Bush imposed regime change, and then looked for the hidden WMDs, which haven't been found, and were in fact destroyed in the 1990s according to the latest weapons inspector's extensive report.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><br /><em>Clinton bombs Christian Serbs on behalf of Muslim Albanian terrorists - good</em>...</blockquote>
<p>ED: The "Christian Serbs," you mean the ones with their tanks and machine guns, invading Bosnia and killing Muslim men women and children en masse and driving most of Bosnia into refugee camps in nearby countries?</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><br /><em>Bush liberates 25 million from a genocidal dictator - bad</em>...</blockquote>
<p>ED: Unfortunately, even with Saddam gone, things are not better. They may get better of course if we continue to pour billions into the country. But that's true of any country on earth if we deposed its regime and spent $200 billion or more on it. Right now the minority Christians in Iraq are fleeing their brutalized homes, shops and towns, since Saddam is no longer able to keep the Muslim majority from expressing itself. The different religions and ethnics groups don't like each other. The Kurds want to form their own country. The Muslim Shiities think their Muslim Sunnis cousins are going to hell. Right now the factions are united only by their mutual hatred of the Americans in their country.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><br /><em>Clinton bombs Chinese embassy - good</em>...</blockquote>
<p>ED: Nobody ever said that was "good."</p>
<blockquote><br /><em>Bush bombs terrorist camps - bad</em>...</blockquote>
<p>ED: If the bombs ONLY hit "terrorist camps," good, but what about collateral damage? You can look up the figures of Afghani and Iraqi CIVILIAN casualties of those wars on the internet, a figure far more numerous than the number of Chinese killed in Clinton's embassy bombing mistake, and which he admitted was a horrendous error.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><br /><em>No mass graves found in Serbia - good</em>...</blockquote>
<p>ED: Of course there were no mass graves found in Serbia. "Christian" Serbs invaded Bosnia, massacred Muslims there, and left them lying in mass graves in BOSNIA. Just google, "mass graves" BOSNIA and read about them. Just a few entries at random on a google "news" search:</p>
<p>Bosnian Serb commission publishes final report on Srebrenica ... San Diego Union Tribune, CA - Oct 14, 2004 ... UN and Muslim experts have found the remains of about 5,000 victims from mass graves in eastern Bosnia and discover new remains every month.</p>
<p>Bosnian Serbs admit scale of Srebrenica massacre for first time Channel News Asia, Singapore - Oct 14, 2004 BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina : Bosnian Serb authorities admitted for the first time that Serb forces slaughtered more than 7,000 Muslims in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since World War II. "I am confirming that the number (of victims) is higher than 7,000. I cannot reveal the exact figures. It is up to the government to do it," an official from a special investigative commission told AFP Thursday on condition of anonymity. In June the Bosnian Serb government admitted for the first time that Serb forces had committed the massacre and tried to cover up the crime, but it avoided giving a definite figure on the number of victims. The commission included the figure of more than 7,000 victims -- a number which conforms to most independent assessments -- in a report it presented to the Bosnian Serb government on Thursday. "I think that the commission made the most objective and the most correct list of those killed in Srebrenica," commission member Djordje Stojakovic told AFP, without revealing the figures. "We had more than 30 sources of information but the list is not final. I'm not sure that there will be a final list ever."</p>
<p>More Muslim Bodies in Bosnia Mass Graves Islam Online, UK - 12 hours ago ... Children as young as 15 were among the dead, he added. Some 372 bodies from of Muslim victims had been found in mid September in two mass graves in Bosnia . ...</p>
<p>Note, I am not denying that Muslims have also pulled the old switchero and killed Christians en masse in the past. In fact, not many years before Hitler began employing his "final solution" toward the Jews, the Turks had killed Christians in their country en masse, yet neither America nor other countries of the world made it a point to discipline or provoke Turkey with harsh words, since Turkey proved to be an ally against Hitler. (At least I hope I got that story straight, I'm working from memory on that one.)</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<blockquote><br /><em>No WMD found Iraq - bad</em>...</blockquote>
<p>ED: Yes, extremely bad, since the case for going to war was built around Saddam having WMDs in his palaces, on trucks, everywhere in fact.</p>
<hr style="width: 50%; height: 1px;" align="left" />
<p>Our president looked us in the eye and said that bin Laden was wanted dead or alive and he was going to "smoke em out." Six months later, when he wanted to finally attack Iraq , a plan he had on day one of his administration, bin Laden was an afterthought. The facts surrounding allowing bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora are just that, facts. Instead our president decided to invade Iraq . He again came to us and looked us in the eye and swore that Iraq was an imminent danger to us all. We were regaled with tales of 3,000 liters of anthrax, 50,000 munitions with mustard gas, and mobile Iraqi weapons labs. The politics of fear were taking root. Deciding to push the envelope, Bush and his cohorts decided to invoke images of mushroom clouds to try to scare us into support. We began to hear about how Saddam was working with al Qaeda and it was certainly implied, many times over, that Saddam had some hand in 9-11. These tales all became fairy tales this year however. The republican led 9-11 commission, despite being stacked and compromised, still had to conclude that there was never a working relationship between Iraq (Saddam) and al Qaeda (bin Laden). This fact was, of course, relatively well known in the intelligence community and most of the world. Bin Laden, a strict fundamentalist, despised the secular Iraq that Saddam led. In fact, it is certainly obvious that by invading Iraq and deposing Saddam, Bush actually did bin Laden and al Qaeda a huge favor. <br /><br />Bush continues to point to the intelligence that both he and Kerry looked at to decide to go to war but he omits two important points. One, is that John Kerry granted the president the war powers only if he tried to bring in the world to the cause and if the danger was imminent. This is a crucial point and I urge all to read the speech that Kerry gave on the floor of the Senate when he granted this. The <a href="http://www.independentsforkerry.org/uploads/media/kerry-iraq.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">link to the transcript</a>.</p>
<p>The second point is that what Kerry and the Senate were not told is that the intelligence they were looking at was "cooked" by the Office of Special Plans, led by top war-hawk, neocon, Douglas Feith. Realizing that Bush needed a justification for the war he wanted, Bush placed this secret cell within the Pentagon with the express purpose of developing the "intelligence" Bush needed to convince us all that Iraq was a necessary war. This of course is backwards logic as usually you find intelligence and then analyze it, as opposed to deciding what outcome you want and then creating intelligence to support it. <br /><br />The second important factor that has emerged is <a href="http://www.opednews.com/wade_102704_hope_fear.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the Deufler Report</a> exposed the fact that the entire reason to go to war was wrong. This report confirmed that not only did Iraq not have WMD; they had not had them in over ten years. TEN YEARS. There never were any weapons, no nuclear ambitions, and no imminent threat.</p>
<p>It seems to me that the more frightening the state of the planet (economically, environmentally, politically) becomes; and the more that people recognize how tiny and fraglie our teensy planet is, a mere lifeboat hanging in space), that the greater the appeal of fundamentalisms of all sorts. I see the fundamentalist phenomenon as growing, not declining. I just heard on the radio a preacher reminding his listeners that there's no need to worry once you've got Jesus, or Allah, the world is fine.</p>
<p>But all of that is moot when you consider that our species may have already reached Hubbert's peak, the point at which rising oil consumption in the world and diminishing returns from wells is reached, after which <a href="http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the price of oil</a> will continue to do nothing but rise, and an enduring world-wide recession will begin.</p>
<p>Hoyle once mentioned that if the oil goes, and we have not developed alternative sources of energy, then we'll probably slip backward to the middle ages kinds of lifestyle. Oil is also important for running generators, cars, factories, all different types of machinery, including oil rigs, plastics, synthetic clothing, fertilizer, insecticides, etc. See the above website.<br /><br />Glenn Morton also has an <a href="http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">oil crisis website</a>, he's another professional oil geologist.</p>
<p>If I had to spend $200 billion it would not be in invading Iraq or even Afghanistan. I'd spend it on homeland security and on building windmills in the plains states, to generate electricity for the whole country. Wasting the money on Iraq is the greatest farce I've ever heard of. If Sadam really tried building a nuclear power plant, we could have bombed it out like the Israelis did before the first Gulf war. If Osama was wandering around Afghanistan, we could find him via satellites and robot planes, and bomb the heck out of his location, whichever hole he ran to. We should have been thinking about securing America's energy future, the future of civilization itself, not spending so much money on changing regimes and rebuilding entire countries, and pouring increasing funds into companies that simply build things that go boom, and backrupting our own government for the sake of full scale wars and rebuilding. Spending the money on alternative energy technologies, which will INEVITABLY be necessary in the near future, is far more important, and new energy technologies will help produce more jobs and bless the world far more in the long run than dropping a few bombs is going to bless the world.</p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8727819747499652518.post-10630459098407180962012-03-17T19:08:00.003-07:002019-09-03T04:26:17.513-07:00America's Military Spending, and the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars in Fiscal Perspective<p><strong>PART 1: NUMERICAL PERSPECTIVE</strong><br /><br />OVERHEARD ON THE INTERNET: <br /><br />There were 39 combat related killings<br /><br />in Iraq during the month of January...<br /><br />In the fair city of Detroit there were<br /><br />35 murders in the month of January.<br /><br />How's that for perspective!<br /><br />PASS THIS ON!</p>
<hr style="height: 1px; width: 50%;" align="left" />
<p>HOWEVER, BEFORE YOU "PASS ON" THE ABOVE INFORMATION, please note the following responses on the internet:<br /><br />DETROIT VS. IRAQ<br /><br />Detroit, total population from 2000 Census: 951,000<br /><br />Detroit, Total Murders in 2003: 366<br /><br />Average Murders per month: 30.5<br /><br />Monthly Murders / Total Population: .000032<br /><br />Monthly per capita likelihood of being murdered in Detroit: .000032 %<br /><br />Detroit average monthly murders Per 10,000 people: [point].32</p>
<p>US TROOPS IN IRAQ<br /><br />Average total US troops in Iraq: 138,000<br /><br />Number of US Casualties in Iraq Since March, 2003: 1114<br /><br />Average US fatalities, per month: 58.6<br /><br />US Monthly Fatality rate per capita: .00042<br /><br />Average Monthly Fatalities per 10,000 troops: 4[point].2<br /><br />Ratio of likelihood of dying as a US soldier in Iraq as by murder in Detroit:<br /><br />25 : 2<br /><br />Therefore, a US serviceman in Iraq is 12.5 times more likely to die than someone in Detroit is likely to be murdered.</p>
<hr style="height: 1px; width: 50%;" align="left" />
<p>OR COMPARE THE NUMBER OF MURDERS IN BOTH DETROIT AND WASHINGTON D.C. WITH THE NUMBERS OF U.S. TROOPS KILLED IN IRAQ, PER THE SAME TIME PERIODS AND PER EVERY 10,000 CITIZENS OR 10,000 TROOPS<br /><br />According to the Post, there were 248 murders in DC in 2003.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61306-2004Oct25.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.washingtonpost.com</a><br /><br />Washington, DC, and Detroit<br /><br />Wash. DC Pop, 2000 census: 572,000<br /><br />Detroit Pop, 2000 Census: 951,000<br /><br />Total pop of two cities: 1,523,000<br /><br />Year Total Murders in Detroit, 2003: 366<br /><br />Year Total Murders in Wash DC, 2003 : 242<br /><br />Year Total Murders in both, 2003 : 608<br /><br />Year Tot Murders / Tot pop (608 / 1,523,000) : 0.00039<br /><br />Month Tot Murders / Tot Pop : 0.000033<br /><br />Avg Monthly Murders / 10,000 pop: [point].33</p>
<p>US TROOPS IN IRAQ<br /><br />Total Servicemen in Iraq, Avg: 138,000<br /><br />Total fatalities since March 19, 2003: 1114<br /><br />Total fatalities/ total servicemen: 0.008<br /><br />Month fatalities/ servicemen (19 Months Since March 19, 2003): 0.00042<br /><br />Average Monthly Fatalities per 10,000 troops: 4[point].2<br /><br />CONCLUSION<br /><br />Ratio of likelihood of dying as a US soldier in Iraq as compared with being murdered in both of the nation's murder captials, Detroit AND Washington DC:<br /><br />4[point].2 : [point].33<br /><br />which is the same as 13 : 1 (rounded)<br /><br />SO<br /><br />You are @13 TIMES more likely to die as a serviceman in Iraq than as a murder victim in Detroit or DC.<br /><br />Yes, compared to WWII, the casualty rate of U.S. troops in the war in Iraq is low. But the Iraq war is not WWII, neither is the Iraq war as noble a pursuit. The Iraq war was a war of choice, and the deaths of troops and civilians must be weighed accordingly. Iraq is not a struggle to save Western civilization against the massive marauding armies of a powerful fascist enemy. Iraq was a resource-grab against a tiny Middle Eastern state, isolated and impoverished by a decade of sanctions.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.musicplayer.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=24;t=004161;p=" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.musicplayer.com</a></p>
<hr style="height: 1px; width: 50%;" align="left" />
<p>An expert at "Google Answers" performed slightly different calculations than the above, but I believe the google expert may not take into consideration the "per 10,000" ratio in both cases. Even so, the google expert still concluded that "Iraqi insurgents are 33% more lethal to U.S. troops than Detroit's murderers are to the people of Detroit." <br /><br /><a href="http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=398411" target="_blank" rel="noopener">answers.google.com</a></p>
<hr style="height: 1px; width: 50%;" align="left" />
<p>Someone else on the web wrote: <br /><br />"How's this for perspective? How many Afghani and Iraqi CIVILIANS died in the U.S. wars in those countries compared with the 3,000 U.S. CIVILIANS that died in the terrorist attacks on 9/11?"<br /><br />Here's the numbers: <br /><br />AFGHANI CIVILIANS KILLED (not including the thousands of Talibaners the U.S. bombed and killed): "The report places the death toll of Afghani CIVILIANS at 3,767, lists the number of civilian casualties, location, type of weapon they were killed with, and source of information. It is a conservative estimate, and the genuine death toll could be as high as 5,000."<br /><br /><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1740538.stm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">news.bbc.co.uk</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.cursor.org</a><br /><br />IRAQI CIVILIANS KILLED (not including the thousands of insurgents the U.S. has killed): 100,000 CIVILIANS have been killed by the U.S.'s actions in Iraq according to the latest in-depth report published in The British medical journal, The Lancet, Oct. 2004. And let's not forget the 600 tonnes (from two wars) of depleted uranium dust in the air and water in Iraq, the discarded radioactive ammo bins for that ammo (that some Iraqis have used to carry milk and food stuffs in), and the discarded radioactive bullet shells that children and adults pick up off the ground.</p>
<p><strong>CONCLUSION</strong><br /><br />Al Qaeda kills 3,000 Americans in 9/11 terror strike. <br /><br />In retaliation the U.S. goes to war and kills well over a thousand Al Qaeda members (who knows how many?), kills several thousand Talibaners in Afghanistan (who knows how many?) who were not even members of Al Queda and had nothing to do with 9/11, kills thousands of Iraqi insurgents who had nothing to do with 9/11, and also kills around 103,000 CIVILIANS in Afghanistan and Iraq, all of whom had nothing to do with 9/11.<br /><br />Are we "even" yet? <br /><br />America is also building over a dozen new permanent military bases in Iraq, America retains all rebuilding contracts for American companies, America maintains substantial control over Iraq's oil. And the American government is more broke than it has ever been in U.S. history, making America less "secure" than it has ever been financially, and more in danger of financial collapses than terrorist ones. America continues to spend less than it should on defending its homeland boarders. (See articles below.) The U.S. grows weary apparently of inspecting its own boarders but feels energized when we are killing nameless folks in foreign lands outside our boarders. (Kind of like how Al Qaeda must feel too when it strikes at nameless folks living in foreign lands.)</p>
<p>America had the world's sympathy after 9/11. America also had satellite photographs, killer robot spy planes, and missles with cameras in the tip that allow you to view the missle's progress and direct its aim! We could have put an enormous bounty on the head of Osama, a couple hundred million dollars, and kept scanning the internet and radio waves, via satellites and other survaillance equipment on the ground and in high flying survaillance planes, and paid off informants, and brought him in, or brought him down, with patience, and at a far less steep price than what we actually paid for. We could have spent money on vitamin D tablets for taliban women forced to cover their bodies from the sun and hide under burkas, and we could have had moderate Muslims dialoging with the Taliban about the medical illnesses of Taliban women, and why they needed greater access to medical treatment and why compassion for women was important even according to the Koran, and we could have paid for that medical treatment, setting up hospitals. With NATO we could have continued to enforce no-fly zones over Iraq and UN weapons-search teams on the ground. All of those things would have been less costly, monetarily, and less destructive, and shown a different side of the U.S., a far more "Christian" side. Instead, Afghanistan and Iraq were bombed to heck, and cities in Iraq shelled to heck, and Afghanistan has rejoined the ranks of the world's leading poppy producers (from which opium is made), and the warlords are still in place. While in Iraq, the old frictions between rival religious groups and political groups and ethnic hatred are due to errupt as soon as the U.S. turns the state over to "the people." We have solved nothing.</p>
<p>And America continues to exceed the world at spending money simply on "things that go boom." The military and industry and government are so tight in bed together that they cannot even begin to conceive of new ideas or plans other than continuing to make things that go boom, and whinning and dinning politicians so that they spend ever more money on such things.<br /><br />-- E.T.B.</p>
<hr style="height: 1px; width: 50%;" align="left" />
<p>Amount of money that the United States Defense Department has lost track of, according to a 2000 report by its inspector general:<br />$1,100,000,000,000 (One trillion, one hundred billion dollars). That is not the amount the Defense Department spent, but merely the amount they "lost track of." <br /><br />Source: U.S. Department of Defense</p>
<p>Ratio of the above amount to the rest of the world's military budgets combined: 2:1.</p>
<p>Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies<br /><br />- Harper's Index, August 2003<br /><br /><a href="http://www.harpers.org/HarpersIndex2003-08.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.harpers.org</a></p>
<hr style="height: 1px; width: 50%;" align="left" />
<p>"For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also," Jesus said in Matthew 6:19-21. The United States, the most Christian nation on earth, has placed its treasure in destruction and death. As Associated Press' Dan Morgan reports (June 12 2004, Tallahassee Democrat), the Pentagon "plans to spend well over $1 trillion in the next decade on an arsenal of futuristic planes, ships and weapons with little direct connection to the Iraq war or the global war on terrorism."</p>
<p>The 2005 defense budget - the word "defense" has become a joke in the post Cold War world - will reach $500 billion (counting the CIA), $50 billion higher than 2004. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next ten years, the armada of aircraft, ships and killer toys will cost upwards of $770 billion more than Bush's estimate for long-term defense. Morgan reports that Bush wants "$68 billion for research and development-20 percent above the peak levels of President Reagan's historic defense buildup. Tens of billions more out of a proposed $76 billion hardware account will go for big-ticket weapons systems to combat some as-yet-unknown adversary comparable to the former Soviet Union." The mantra heard in Congress, "we can't show weakness in the face of terrorism," fails to take into account the fact that when the 9/11 hijackers struck, the US military--the strongest in the world--failed to prevent the attacks. So, logically one would ask, how does a futuristic jet fighter defend against contemporary enemies, like jihadists who would smuggle explosives into a train station or crowded shopping mall?<br /><br />-- 2006 Pentagon Budget as Sacrilege -- Bush Invests National Treasure in Death and Destruction by SAUL LANDAU, Counterpunch, June 25, 2004<br /><br /><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/landau06252004.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.counterpunch.org</a></p>
<hr style="height: 1px; width: 50%;" align="left" />
<p>"One industry that has done particularly well during the Bush administration has a strong interest in the outcome: the arms industry. A new report from the World Policy Institute tracks how this critical sector has exerted influence over administration policies, and how it is 'voting with its dollars' in the 2004 campaign.<br /><br />"These have been boom years for the arms industry, with contracts for the top ten weapons contractors up 75% in the first three years of the Bush administration alone," notes William D. Hartung, the co-author of the study and the director of the Institute's arms project. "While some of this funding is related to the war in Iraq or the campaign against terrorism, much of it relates to Cold War relics like the F-22 combat aircraft or nuclear attack submarines that have little or no application to the threats we now face or the wars we are now fighting." <br /><br />-- Arms Industry Influence in the Bush Administration and Beyond: A World Policy Institute Special Report by William D. Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca, October 2004<br /><br /><a href="http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/TiesThatBind.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.worldpolicy.org</a></p>
<hr style="height: 1px; width: 50%;" align="left" />
<p>More than 100 countries have military budgets of less than $1 billion, roughly what the Pentagon spends in one day. The U.S. and its allies, including Australia, account for more than 70 percent of the world's military spending whilst so-called "adversary" powers--Iran, Iraq, North Korea--account for an absolutely trivial amount.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.cdi.org/press/021302PR.cfm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.cdi.org</a></p>
<hr style="height: 1px; width: 50%;" align="left" />
<p>Graph showing annual military expenditures of U.S. and allies in proportion to the annual military expenditures of communist and "rogue nations." Be prepared to be surprised:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.country-liberal-party.com/Pan-Americanism/pages/Pan-Americanism.b.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.country-liberal-party.com</a></p>
<hr style="height: 1px; width: 50%;" align="left" />
<p>The occupation of Iraq is a drain on financial resources necessary for homeland security. The U.S. government spends more every three days on the Iraq war than it has in three years on the security of the country's 361 commercial seaports. <br /><br />As Pentagon spending boomed to wage war in Iraq, the administration's 2004 budget cut $2 billion from crime prevention and public safety programs. The proposed 2005 budget slashed $805 million from emergency responders. An estimated full two-thirds of the increases in the Pentagon budget since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks funded programs and activities largely irrelevant to homeland security or counterterrorism operations, according to the Center for Defense Information. <br /><br />The price is too steep for the results we are getting in President Bush's campaign against terrorism, today's author says. <br /><br />In August, President Bush made a revealing comment, arguing that "we can't win the war on terrorism." <br /><br />His instincts were right - but for the wrong reasons. A "global war on terror" is, by its nature, unwinnable. <br /><br />First consider the words of Bush's own secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. In a memo dated Oct. 16, 2003, Rumsfeld wrote: <br /><br />"We lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" <br /><br />How might we answer Rumsfeld's question? The International Institute for Strategic Studies, the best-known and most authoritative source of information on global military capabilities and trends, estimates worldwide al-Qaida membership now stands at 18,000, with 1,000 active members in Iraq. <br /><br />According to the IISS, which operates out of England, the conflict in Iraq has "accelerated recruitment" for al-Qaida. So the answer to Rumsfeld's question is no. <br /><br />Second, we must understand that terrorism is a strategy, a tactic, used by states and non-state groups alike to advance political goals and objectives. Declaring a war on terrorism is as if President Franklin Roosevelt had declared a war on blitzkrieg. <br /><br />-- John Gershman, "Let's Rethink This," The Albuquerque Tribune, October 5, 2004 <br /><br /><a href="http://www.fpif.org/media/opeds/2004/1005gershman-terror_body.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.fpif.org</a></p>
<hr style="height: 1px; width: 50%;" align="left" />
<p><strong>OVERKILL "NOT MORALLY VALID," HIGGS ARGUES</strong><br /><br />In response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which killed more than 3,000 people, President George W. Bush ushered in a "war on terrorism" to, as he put it, "bring to justice" those behind the attacks or who pose a similar threat to innocent people.</p>
<p>By even conservative estimates, Bush's campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have led to at least as many innocent lives lost. What is the moral status of this?</p>
<p>According to Independent Institute senior fellow Robert Higgs, Bush's military response -- especially the use of aerial bombing -- is "not morally valid."</p>
<p>In a new op-ed published in the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, Higgs argues that the sheer magnitude of "collateral damage" caused by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq should give Americans pause.</p>
<p>* Nearly 3,800 Afghan civilians were killed between Oct. 7 and Dec. 7, according to economist Marc Herold (Univ. of New Hampshire), who calls his estimate "very, very conservative."</p>
<p>* At least 3,240 civilians were killed by April 20th, based on an Associated Press survey of 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals, although data from other hospitals and deaths that families did not bother to report to the hospitals surveyed surely raise the civilian death count.</p>
<p>"If we take as reasonable lower-bound estimates 2,000 Afghan and 4,000 Iraqi civilian deaths [The number of Iraqi civilian deaths have since been researched and shown to be far higher, around 100,000. See the news that hit in Oct./Nov. of 2004 based on research in Iraq that was published in the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet. -- E.T.B.], then we can conclude that the U.S. forces already have inflicted at least two undeserved deaths for every death the terrorists caused in the Sept. 11 attacks," writes Higgs. "Many of the dead in Afghanistan and Iraq are women and children. Moreover, many of the thousands of Iraqi army personnel killed in the invasion arguably ought to be regarded as essentially innocent, because as conscripts they were fighting only under duress (and only in defense of their homeland). Thus, in a grotesque mockery of justice, the Bush administration has taken several innocent lives for each innocent life lost at the hands of the terrorists.</p>
<p>"One might say -- as many do -- that the two killing sprees are not comparable, because the terrorists set out to kill the innocent, whereas the U. S. forces killed the innocent 'by accident.' I greatly doubt, however, that this argument can hold water. When U.S. forces employ aerial and artillery bombardment -- with huge high-explosive bombs, large rockets and shells, including cluster munitions -- as their principal technique of waging war, especially in densely inhabited areas, they know with absolute certainty that many innocent people will be killed. To proceed with such bombardment, therefore, is to choose to inflict those deaths.</p>
<p>"If you or I settled our scores in our neighborhoods in such a fashion, neither moral authorities nor the legal system would countenance our slaughter of innocent bystanders as excusable. Nobody can gain moral absolution merely by labeling his killing spree a<br />'war.' It's not a morally valid way out for you and me, and it's not a morally valid way out for George W. Bush, either."<br /><br />See "Not Exactly an Eye for an Eye" by Robert Higgs (SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, June 23, 2003) <br /><br /><a href="http://www.independent.org/tii/news/030623Higgs.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">www.independent.org</a></p>
<div class="separator" style="text-align:center"><iframe src="https://edwardtbabinski.us/related-content/related-content-27.html" style="margin-bottom:0em; margin-left:0em; margin-right:0em; height:400px; width:600px; border:0px"></iframe></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0