[Vision2020] [Bulk] Re: Famous Speeches

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Hi Jeff,

First, I would take public political and military speeches that refer to God with a grain of salt.  Even the least religious of our presidents would have it in their addresses for window dressing.  Give me excerpts from the private writings or personal statements on good authority.

George Washington, however, had the courage to stick by his guns and the Constitution.  Once a speech writer gave him a draft of a talk to the Delaware Indians and he crossed out "God" and replaced it with "Great Spirit Above."  Bully for you, George!  Too bad our current George is not as perspicacious, not that he would know the meaning of this word.

Washington usually used Providence, the most impersonal word for deity possible, to refer to God.  This God is theological light years away from a God whose "task" it is to go to war or to build a gas pipeline from Alaska to Canada.  Palin clearly crosses a constitutional line of appropriate use of theological language and she should be condemned for it.  

In previous post you refer to classical Christianity and its imperative that we are to discern the will of God, but Washington would warn us that this is for one private or church affairs, not for the affairs of state.  And as Paul Rumelhart has so nicely pointed out: if God wills all events as God wants them to be (I personally reject this type of theology), then God willed the 9/11 attack and willed that the Russians build all their pipelines to Europe. This type of God is therefore responsible for all the evil as well as the good in the world.  Human free-will goes down the tubes as well.

Preachers that Palin favors still say that 9/11 was America's punishment for allowing abortions and gays to marry, and a guest speaker at Palin's church in Wasilla declared that terrorism against Israelis is punishment for their sins.  McCain was finally forced to disown his newly found friends on the Religious Right (he once called them "agents of intolerance") and now Palin will have to cut the strings to her own religious fanatics. See my column on McCain's phony religion at www.home.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/McCainReligion.htm.
 
Jeff, you must have missed my e-mail to Crabtree about the God of the Declaration of Independence.  The phrases "Nature's God and God's Nature" are just as impersonal as Providence and appear to be drawn from the deist Lord Bolingbroke.  Again Palin's God is interventionist and partial, definitely not the deist embodiment of the natural and moral laws of the universe.  And please remember that the Constitution, the only document for the laws of our land, does not mention God at all. 

Republican leader Jesse Fell and close friend of Lincoln stated that he “maintained that law and order, not their violation or suspensión [as in Palin's theology], are the appointed means by which . . . Providence is exercised." David Davis, Lincoln’s presidential campaign manager, maintained that Lincoln "had no faith, in the Christian sense of the term,” but that he “had faith in laws, principles, causes and effects," just as a good deist would believe.  

These lines are taken from a column I wrote last year celebrating Lincoln's birthday.  You can read this column as well as my article "Religious Liberalism and the Founding Fathers" at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/lincoln.htm and /foundfathers.htm.

In closing I ask you to read the following passage from Lincoln's Second Inaugural Ardess.  Given Lincoln's well documented religious liberalism, I ask you to consider the real possibility that if the U.S. were somehow still at war with the Muslim Barbary pirates, Lincoln would have said the same thing, namely,that the soldiers on each side read their own scriptures and still "their prayers are unanswered."  He would never have said, as that clown Gen. Lieutenant-General William G Boykin did in dress uniform, that "Our God is bigger than your God."

>From Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: 

"Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes."

How dare Palin presume that it was God's will that we invade Iraq or that the pipeline she negotiated was God's plan.  This is preacher talk (bad theology to boot), not presidential talk. If God exists, God would allow his creatures to choose their own ways and take the consequences for their own actions.  I would not consider believing in a God that didn't allow this freedom.

Here is a passage from John Fowles, one of my favorite authors: 
"The novelist is still God, since he creates. . . . What has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority. . . . There is only one good definition of God: one freedom that allows other freedoms to exist" ("The French Lieutenant's Woman," filmed to perfection and starring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep).

Thanks for the dialogue,

Nick