MF>RP>DH> The first Amendment does state that Congress shall not establish a
MF>RP>DH> religion.
MF>RP>It says Congress shall make no law establishing one.
MF> KK> No, it says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
MF> KK> of religion.  Your suggestion, that the God of the Bible must be
MF> KK> put firmly in charge of this country, is about as obvious an
MF> KK> example of our government respecting an establishment of religion
MF> KK> as I've ever heard.
MF>According to James Madison, who wrote the First Amendment, the 
"Establishment
MF>Clause" was only designed to say that Congress was forbidden to establish 

MF>national church or religion, and that no one single denomination, sect, 
cult,
MF>etc. could be placed in a position of preferred legal status.
Right.  I agree with that.
MF>      The Founding
MF>Fathers were, for the most part, Bible believing Christians who, IMHO, 
could
MF>not know of the religious diversity we have in our country today.
I'm afraid Mr Jefferson might disagree with you there.  Here he was
writing in the context of the Enlightenment, in which it was
acknowledged that such thinkers as Galileo and Newton had produced
ideas that outraged the orthodox Christianity of their time, yet
actual observation had borne them out:
    "Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before
     them ... Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your
     inquisitors?  Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private
     as well as public reasons.  And why subject it to coercion?
     To produce uniformity.  But is uniformity of opinion desirable?
     No more than of face and stature ... Is uniformity attainable?
     Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction
     of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we
     have not advanced an inch towards uniformity.  What has been the
     effect of coercion?  To make one half the world fools, and the other
     half hypocrites.  To support roguery and error all over the earth.
     Let us reflect it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people.
     That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion.
     That ours is but one of that thousand.  That if there be but one
     right, and ours is that one, we would wish to see the nine hundred
     and ninety-nine wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth.
     But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force.
     Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments.
     To make way for these, free inquiry must be indulged; and how
     can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves?"
            -- Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia"
MF>       I believe
MF>that the only way our country can be saved is to return to the principles 
our
MF>country was founded upon.
Right.  And one of those principles is that government will provide
freedom for all religions without favoring any one of them.
MF>        Surprisingly enough, you will find these principles
MF>in virtually every major religion today, certainly in Christianity, 
Judaism a
MF>Islam.
Right.  But that very fact suggests that they are universal human
rules rather than being the exclusive property of any one religion.
When Robert Plett gets furious at me for objecting to having the
Ten Commandments in a Federal courtroom, he thinks I'm arguing
against the basic commonsensical morality in the TC.  No; I'm arguing
against government favoring the artifacts of a particular religion.
The few remaining Stone Age tribes on this planet have moral rules
not too far from the TC too.  But interestingly, every identity group,
whether it be a nation, tribe, religion or whatever, believes that
those rules of simple decency only apply to members of the in-group.
As for the out-group down the road, it is well known that they are
a bunch of heathen dissolute preterite accurs'd scumbags, --
in short they are a repository of all the behaviors we refuse
to acknowledge in ourselves.  Do you see a pattern here?  We project
onto the out-group everything about ourselves we cannot handle,
and since they're such scumbags, there is no need to use the rules
of common decency when dealing with them.
 * SLMR 2.1a *   Forgive your enemies.  They HATE that!
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