Quote:
|
Originally Posted by BrainSmashR
He's a common criminal and deserves to do time for being a habitual offender.
Of course, Christians understand equality about as well as nuclear science....
|
The Established Church of England was to them repugnant less as an attempt to impose Christianity than as a symbol of royal power and its intrusion into every sphere of social life. Moreover the ‘no establishment’ clause was meant as a limitation on the powers of Congress, and not on the powers of the individual States. The Founders surely did not intend the clause to authorize Congress to intrude on the State of Massachusetts, for example, which at the time had an absolute ban against Roman Catholicism – a ban which the Federal Government made no effort to lift.
Yet that is not how the ‘no establishment’ clause is interpreted today. It is invoked as an absolute command against religion in the public arena throughout the Union, and as authority for the radical secularization of all social institutions that depend upon the state, or which exercise an authority that derives from the state. It has been regarded as a violation of the ‘no establishment’ clause that a court should display the Ten Commandments, or that public schools should begin the day with prayers. Such decisions do not convey a desire to protect religious freedom, but a desire to marginalize religion – indeed, to deprive religion of the place that it naturally demands in the public life of a Christian nation. Nobody was forcing children to take part in the public prayers at school, or forcing anyone to genuflect before the Ten Commandments in the courtroom. Yet there are currents of opinion in America which do not only take offence at school prayers and doctrinal icons, but which believe that it is part of the spirit of democratic freedom to forbid them. Religion, for such people, is not just a private affair: it is something to be privatised, to be confined within the home like some shameful habit that cannot be displayed in public.
It might reasonably be objected that religious freedom, so defined, is actually a forbidding of religion, since it removes the freedom to practice religion in the way that faith demands: in other words, the first part of the ‘no establishment’ clause, strictly interpreted, enters into conflict with the second. The principal demand that the Christian religion makes of its adherents is that they should bear witness to the faith in their life and work, and that they should invite others to join them in worship and prayer. If those things are forbidden, then it is difficult to see that American citizens really are free to be Christians. I think this point bears heavily on the situation of teachers in public schools, many of whom find themselves in the position of being the sole educative influence on children who are not going to obtain the good news of their salvation from any other source.
Isaac