Justin, I think you have gone too far and are now personally attacking me for no reason. I have reported your post as harassment and I would appreciate if you would respect my wishes to not be harassed. You are not showing any type of respect and that's not how this forum is run.
The only thing I disrespect is your position. I don't disrespect you because I believe it's quite possible for you to gain a reasoned position which is in harmony with Christ. Between the two of us, the one who disrespects the other is you when you call me immoral for how I was born.
Well, George Washington is just plain wrong. In all seriousness, there's very good reason for the separation between church and state. The English pilgrims settled in America because they were being persecuted for religious differences, which I'm sure influenced the Founding Fathers' decision to include a clause about the separation of church and state. Furthermore, John Locke believed that individual beliefs were outside the authority of the government, and he also said that politicians aren't any more enlightened about the relationship between man and God than any normal citizen. So they have no right or authority to enforce their religious beliefs on others.
The current Separation of Church and State wasn't adopted until 1947, and even then it was misconstrued from a letter from Thomas Jefferson. The founding fathers firmly believed in religion being a pillar of our country. There is no separation of church and state in the Constitution.
I will keep my personal views on homosexuality to myself. But, I am happy that the government is no longer able to dictate who someone can marry. No matter what I think, if a person is happy with their life and preference, they should not be restricted by the government, especially one that preaches freedom so fervently.
It's in the First Amendment. The Establishment Clause ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...") states that the government can't set up a church or make/pass laws that benefit a certain religion.
...which has nothing to do with the government espousing Christian values. They don't oppose one another. John Adams said it best: "Suppose a nation in some distant Region should take the Bible for their only law Book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited! Every member would be obliged in conscience, to temperance, frugality, and industry; to justice, kindness, and charity towards his fellow men; and to piety, love, and reverence toward Almighty God ... What a Eutopia, what a Paradise would this region be." The people in government can have Christian values and still espouse freedom of others to practice their religion. That's what the Establishment Clause meant as written by the founding fathers.
The people in government can have Christian values. Government can not. From a religious perspective, this is a good thing. Tying church and state together creates legalism - what Christ fought against every time he faced off against Pharisees. We can have a Christian nation (as in truly reflective of the values of Christ) only if church and state are separate.
Our constitution was written, including the amendments, to broadly limit what the government can do. Those limits allow people to express their life, liberty, and property as they see fit. If leaders wish to espouse values of any kind, they are free to, as long as their beliefs do not infringe upon the protected individual rights.
“The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” John Adams, The Treaty of Tripoli History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. -Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.
I think both of these quotes (Wreybies and Cogito) say it well. I do feel optimistic. If you compare these matters now, to how they were handled, say, 50 years ago, there is a MASSIVE shift towards acceptance and normality. We may still have a 'black' president, but at least we've got one! Gay couples are now seen as "couples" when it comes to social interaction—at least in my circle of friends. Here in the UK, many politicians who have a lot of clout are openly gay, including the leader of the Conservatives here in Scotland. 50 years ago, this would not have happened. So we're on the right track, in my opinion. Another generation, and this will all be seen as perfectly ordinary. Which it is. I'd prefer we focus our collective (religious and secular) disapproval onto people whose actions truly do disrupt and destroy society. Greedy banking chiefs, corrupt politicians, drug lords, bigots, sexual predators ...hey, the list is huge. Pick one and go for it!
I agree with what Justin and maskedhero said about the government having and enforcing Christian values. For the issue of gay marriage, most of the people against it use religion to defend their claims. However, the government shouldn't take these arguments into account precisely because they are based on religion. By the way, I disagree with John Adams. I'll leave it at that.
This is a history re-write. One of the founding principles of many of the first colonies in the Americas was freedom of religion. Washington was a religious man in a different time. A smaller percentage of the population had figured out the Christian god was no more real than Zeus or Thor. But the founders of the country did understand the state should be separate from the church. Why do you think they didn't adopt the model from England were the Protestant Church was indeed part of the government? They could have chosen the Catholic Church, the Protestant, a shared government church, anything, but they very specifically did not, despite the role the church played in the governments in Europe.
I don't think this is true. Most of the American founding fathers were Deists, or Pantheists, certainly not Theists. Benjamin Frankin might have secretly been an Atheist, his pattern of thought certainly swings that way. At the time you couldn't come out and say it in public, even David Hume, who definitely was an Atheist - there isn't a doubt about it, couldn't come out and say it either. It just wasn't something you could do, this was a time when directly confronting the church was at best social suicide, at worst enough to attract an angry mob; and the latter actually happened quite often. The founding ideas that led to the American revolution come not just from John Locke, as thirdwind points out, but also the Scottish economist Adam Smith whose style of freemarket collectivism (yes, that's right, read Wealth of Nations, not just select paragraphs from it) where the liberal economic style demands no internal bias.
This sounds like something from Kirk Cameron's group of folks. It's just not accurate. While yes, most of the founding fathers were Christian, the country was not founded to be run by the church and they believed they should be kept separate for the good of both. Here are but a few examples from other founding fathers: James Madison: "The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state." Thomas Jefferson: “Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.” And one from John Adams: “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
What would have been better except it wasn't under the scope of the case, the SCOTUS to abolish the government's recognition of marriage altogether. That would be actual separation of religion from state, as marriage is rightfully a religious & spiritual issue undeserving of secularization.
I don't see why this would be desirable. There are secular benefits to marriage. One can be married in a civil ceremony, with no religion or spiritual attachment.
Marriage is not just a ceremony or union for the religious or spiritual and it's desirable on the basis that the government can still issue civil unions just fine - it just has no authority to recognize an inherently-religious issue - while marriage being returned to a religious and spiritual issue, would rightfully be governed only by those that have the explicit right to govern it, the inherently religious or spiritual. Or in simpleminded terms, marriage is neither a civil nor secular union and as such is not the place of government to recognize to begin with. (This brings up something else: do you only support a separation of church and state when you see it as "desirable"? Such a stance is even worse than from where JJ_Max stands.)
You're making a semantics argument. The problem with that is the term 'marriage' has legal meaning. This was part of problem with DOMA, the legal definition in the federal tax code used the word, marriage. And even if that was changed to 'civil union' you have all these other places like employment and health insurance contracts. Common law marriage laws still exist. Those would get more muddy with more roommates suing for half the house when told to move out. (Not saying they'd all win in court, but it would cause confusion.) There are two solutions that come to mind, all states and the fed can recognize 'civil unions' and give the word, 'marriage', back to the churches, or, stop letting the definition of marriage be dictated by certain religions. Not every church or religion considers homosexuality a sin, not every church forbids marrying gay people in their church. The obvious problem here is excluding gay marriage because of a thinly veiled argument that the 'institution' would be harmed. That's ludicrous and really amounts to an argument to support a religious view. Jerry Falwell led an effort by Evangelicals to inject religion into the state, promoting laws his group deemed "Christian" and using religious issues to gin up single issue vote turnouts. It actually started with a lot of people, some preceding Falwell, but he's the leader associated with formalizing the effort. It's where this whole history narrative re-write was born claiming the US government was a Christian government until recently. It's not an evidence based belief, but that hasn't stopped the campaign from being successful in convincing people otherwise. People readily absorb information that reinforces beliefs they like. The pendulum has swung just about as far as is tolerable in their direction and the weight of that pendulum now presses to swing back, albeit with somewhat uneven movement. Blue states (an oversimplification but easy to understand) are well on their way swinging back, red states are mixed with the religious factions still holding considerable political power. We will now see the Evangelical political activists moving to promote even more state laws that promote their religious beliefs just as they are doing pushing anti-abortion and anti-birth control laws at the state level. And as well, these issues will be used regularly in fund raising campaigns. Single issue voters and single issue campaign donors are alive and well. But in this case, I don't think they are as successful as they've been with other issues.
You have your own definition of marriage I don't think is supportable. It might be what the definition should be, but it's not what the definition actually is. In other words, your position makes sense but it fails on a number of long standing levels.
Sorry Lemex, I respect your viewpoint, but it's not 100% accurate. (I think we've pointed out in a few threads that nothing is ever black and white, there's a lot of gray.) The issue is that people seem to think that a overtly Christian government would be a persecuting body, which it wouldn't. There's nothing saying that a religious government can't espouse freedom for all religions, while still adhering to certain moral virtues such as honesty, humility, faith and selfless love. This is what the founding fathers imagined. Do you really think that the founders of this country wanted to travel around the country, fighting to remove Christmas trees from town squares and not allowing moments of silence in school? No, they wouldn't. Even a cursory study of the acts and actions of our government beginnings would show that our founding fathers weren't seeking eradication of all religion from government, but a freedom of government to practice their religion and allow others to practice their religion as well. This is the freedom they espoused. Just a quick tour: Patrick Henry in 1775: In 1777 the Continental Congress appointed a day of prayer and summoned Americans to "penitent confession of their manifold sins . . . and humble and earnest supplication that it may please God, through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot [their transgressions] out of remembrance." Washington's inaugural address in 1789: Washington's farewell address in 1796: Let's move on to John Adams. John Adams issued a declaration for a national fast in 1798 and called on citizens to ask God, "through the Redeemer of the world, freely to remit all our offences, and to incline us, by his Holy Spirit, to that sincere repentance and reformation which may afford us reason to hope for his inestimable favor." John Adams: John Adams inaugural address in 1797: What about the founding Supreme Court? John Jay, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1797: Samuel Adams in 1775: John Quincy Adams: Andrew Jackson: How about Fisher Ames, the man who authored the First Amendment? Okay, that's just 1% of all the texts and quotes and speeches from the men who built this country, I could go on for volumes. So, as an intelligent thinker, I cannot accept the revisionist history taught by the leftists and atheists in this country. I am so thankful that the words and deeds of the founders of this great country are still available for us to study and learn from, even if it may be too late for the United States.
Marriage only has a legal meaning because of government recognition. Hence why the only real solution is to stop government from recognizing religion. Just as you have the right to believe that there's nothing wrong with homosexuality, religious (and non-religious) folk like JJ Max have the same right to not support that homosexuality is acceptable. This doesn't matter, at all. Again with the irrelevance here. Blue vs Red is nothing more than a division scheme. The libertarian position is the only position that supports the tolerance of all sides equally. You want your civil union benefits, people like JJ Max want their sanctity of marriage. Separate the church from the state works both ways, as it is meant to - the state has no right to tell the religious what they may or may not believe, and the religious have no right to lock people up for violating their morality.
That's all I ask. And yes, I can certainly agree about there always being a huge gray area. In fact, that's actually the first thing I was taught at university. True, but for the record, I don't want to remove Christmas trees from town squares either. There isn't an official 'atheist' line on things, and those atheists who do want to remove Christmas trees annoy me as much as I imagine they annoy you. I must admit I've never read or heard of those quotes, but I am an ignorant Brit I suppose. This post is very interesting, makes me really want to delve more into the subject actually. I'll take back my assertion that all the founding fathers were not theists though, I shouldn't jump into these things so hastily. Though I am still convinced at least some of them were Deists.
Yes, but said legal meaning has more than 2 centuries of traditional usage. What I'm saying is your point is taken but totally unrealistic. It's not going to happen, whereas the government recognizing church has it's foot in the state door in this case is something that can be addressed.
I'm not concerned with something supposedly being 'unrealistic'. Nothing realistic happens unless it's done, and plenty of things considered unrealistic happen through action. Meanwhile, all good things start small... etc.
