[Vision2020] and speaking of religion in public places

[Donovan Arnold]

Sue,
   
  I invite you to read the Declaration of Independence in its entirety and come to the conclusion that the Constitution and nation is not derived and linked to God in its creation. And as I stated earlier, it is not possible for someone to believe in God given unalienable rights if they don't believe in a God. 
   
  I believe we studied a different version of US History. As I was taught, the US was still at odds with Britain for many decades after the Revolutionary War. The British attacked our ships, our ports, our land, took our men and forced them into combat against their enemies. They even tried to kill several of our Presidents and ransacked Washington DC and burned down the White House.
   
  I don't believe that the Constitution is the word of God, as you mistakenly seem to present my view. But I believe the men that wrote it were attempting to put his word in it. 
   
  Best,
   
  Donovan

Sue Hovey <suehovey at moscow.com> wrote:
          While a great many people believe in the Bible as the inerrant word of God, I have NEVER before met anyone who believed the U.S. Constitution was somehow some sort of later revelation.  Certainly the Constitution promotes the ideas of equality, unalienable rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from an unfair trial far beyond any hint of those freedoms that might be found in the Bible.  That's probably because they aren't found there.  
   
  Few women will tell you the Bible embraces equality between male and female.  The Constitution as a living document may reach that point someday. The framers of the Constitution blew it at the outset when they invited John Adams and neglected to invite Abagail.  
   
  And those "fat, balding men" were often found to be hiding from each other--Adams and Jefferson did a bit of that; but not one of them was hiding from British authorities--when they started writing the Constitution the war was long since over and the United States of America was an entity under its own rule.  
   
  I have long believed, and I think this belief is fairly common: separate the Constitution from Christianity, and you still have a Constitution, capable of being upheld and believed in by any citizen--Christian, agnostic, or athiest.  Their religious ties may be entirely separate from their belief in the legitimacy of the Constitution. Neither does the Constitution depend for its legitimacy on the idea it is tied to religious faith.    
   
  And Donovan's argument otherwise "is a message of sound and fury signifying nothing."
   
  Sue 
    ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Donovan Arnold 
  To: nickgier at adelphia.net ; Paul Rumelhart 
  Cc: vision2020 at moscow.com 
  Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2007 12:53 PM
  Subject: Re: [Vision2020] and speaking of religion in public places
  

  Nick Gier and his cronies just don't understand what Sali is saying. 
   
  The principles of our Constitution are etched from the rock of Christianity. You cannot remove the rock without removing its authority. The Constitution is meaningless if it doesn't have Christianity as a bases of its authority, derived only because of Christianity.
   
  Who says all men are equal? Who says you have unalienable rights? Who says you have the right to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from unfair trial?
   
  Those rights are not granted to men by men, they are granted to men by God, the Christian God. And that is what gives the US Constitution its authority, its greatness, and truthfulness. Otherwise, the Constitution was written, and the rights granted us within, are not real rights, or moral principles of God's justice, but in fact, just something a bunch fat balding rich guys wearing white wigs came up with on a hot sweaty day in July at the turn of the 18th century hiding from the British authorities. 
   
  I believe certain rights are given to us by God, and that many of those rights are engraved into the Constitution. If you don't believe this too, then the only thing giving the Constitution, and your rights are men, men who decide arbitrarily what rights you have and don't have at any time or place. It makes the Constitution a document that is enforceable only by the threat of a gun and the will of the powerful men that yield it. 
   
  Best,
   
  Donovan
  

nickgier at adelphia.net wrote:
  Good Morning Visionaries:

Bill Sali just doesn't learn. He doesn't care about accuracy, because he's still spouting the nonsense about abortion and breast cancer.

Here is my response to Sali's rant in the Lewiston paper this morning. I'll post it on his DC website and mark once again "please answer," but I don't expect one because he has yet to answer a previous one about Muslim democracies.

I would like to join Sean in denouncing the quotation from Washington as false and referring readers to my published essay "Religious Liberalism and the Founding Fathers" at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/
foundfathers.htm.

I would also like for Sali to explain to us how basic Christian principles differ in any substantial way from Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, or Hindu principles. He should be warned that pronouncements from the extremists of these faiths will be not be recognized by their coreligionists.

When John Adams spoke of the principles of Christianity, he, just as did many of his contemporaries, meant basic moral principles. In a letter to Jefferson in 1813, he states: "Yet I believe all the honest men among you are Christians, in my sense of the word." Both he and Jefferson rejected religious conservatives such as Sali and denied the Trinity and the deity of Christ.

Sali is also doing a selective reading of Ben Franklin. He also rejected the deity of Christ and the Trinity and stopped going to church because of Sali-type preachers. 

In debates about the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, Franklin objected to the specific biblical references in the following statement: office holders were required to "acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration." Franklin failed to convince delegates that this would exclude Jews and Muslims. 

Please read my essay "Tolerance for Islam in the Early American Republic" at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/
AmericaIslam.htm for some striking proclamations about the acceptance of Muslims in America, even as the Muslim Barbary pirates=terrorists were capturing our citizens.

These early Americans would be shocked at Sali's ignorance and intolerance.

Nick Gier

=======================================================
List services made available by First Step Internet, 
serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994. 
http://www.fsr.net 
mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
=======================================================

    
---------------------------------
  Luggage? GPS? Comic books? 
Check out fitting gifts for grads at Yahoo! Search.     
---------------------------------
    
=======================================================
 List services made available by First Step Internet, 
 serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.   
               http://www.fsr.net                       
          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
=======================================================



       
---------------------------------
Pinpoint customers who are looking for what you sell. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20070826/57cf2856/attachment-0001.html