Thursday, October 11, 2012

We the People, not, We the Theocrats

In this age of PCness do they still put Bibles in hotel room drawers?  As I think about it I have not come across one in a while.  Although I haven't traveled all that much lately.  I do believe that when I was in Utah several years back there was a Book of Mormon along with a King James in the nightstand drawer.  And in a Cherry Hill, NJ hotel, I once found a Torah.  I'm kidding.  I only found a Chinese restaurant take out menu.
                                                                                    
Here is what I would like to find in my hotel room drawer: copies of the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States of America.  What could be more PC than that?  And more comforting.  To know my rights here on Earth are inalienable is what concerns me for the moment.  It is the one thing we Americans all  have in common.  Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists (no need to capitalize), Animists, Hindus, and others.  Listed in no particular order of relevance, importance, popularity, veracity, or net global worth.    If we were indeed founded as a Judeo-Christian Nation as more and more Americans seem to believe then why bother with a Constitution at all?  If Theology and Canonical Law are the primary sources of our morality and God's Law surpasses that of Man's Law then the only logical thing to do would have been to have a western version of  Sharia Law.  Why did James Madison, John Jay, John Adams, et al, not make it perfectly clear that the New and Old Testaments trump all?  Let me think, let me think..............Oh yes, the First Amendment specifically intones against that.  I am not arguing that there may or may not be a source of ethical and moral values greater than our own rule book.  I am only refuting this idea that the Framers intended for the Bible to be our day to day rule book, which you must  believe if we were founded as a specifically Christian nation.  For the Bible is the  Christian (and Jewish) rule book.

I agree that our morality system flows from a long tradition of western religious philosophical thought, but to specifically say we are a Christian Nation is a slap to the face of reason.  The Puritans and Calvinists, after all, might have founded a colony, but they certainly did not found a Nation.  Secularists and Religious alike did that.

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