Separation of church and state

Instead of quoting Madison's appointee, why not quote James Madison himself? You must already know what you would find.A few years before Madison drafted the First Amendment, his friends in Virginia asked for his help in opposing a state bill that would allocate tax money to the support of "teachers of Christian Religion"; ie, direct government support of religion. His response was to write a pamphlet, A Memorial and Remonstrance which raised so much public opposition to the bill that the Legislature dropped it and instead voted in Thomas Jefferson's The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom.

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2. Because Religion be exempt from the authority of the Society at large, still less can it be subject to that of the Legislative Body. The latter are but the creatures and vicegerents of the former. Their jurisdiction is both derivative and limited: it is limited with regard to the co-ordinate departments, more necessarily is it limited with regard to the constituents. The preservation of a free Government requires not merely, that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be invariably maintained; but more especially that neither of them be suffered to overleap the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people. The Rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants. The People who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them, and are slaves.

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Right there, 26 years before Jefferson's letter, a few years before Madison drafted the First Amendment, we have Madison describing the Wall of Separation. So much for your fiction. Certainly you remember the rise of the Religious Right in the early 1980's. You should also remember their harping on the Founders' "original intent." Well, we see here that original intent. A Wall of Separation, a Great Barrier, that neither Religion nor Government can be allowed to breach, lest we descend into tyranny.BTW, in the preceding paragraph, we have:

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1. Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, "that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence." The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men: It is unalienable also, because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considerd as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign. We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance. True it is, that no other rule exists, by which any question which may divide a Society, can be ultimately determined, but the will of the majority; but it is also true that the majority may trespass on the rights of the minority.

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You know, something has been puzzling me ever since the Religious Right started spewing their propaganda in the 80's. We get democracy not from the Bible, but rather from the pagan Greeks. And our republican form of government we get from the pagan Romans. So could you please explain to us exactly how those things are supposed to have originated in Christianity? Where exactly in the Bible does it describe democracy? Where exactly in the Bible does it describe a bicameral representative government, one of which is specifically called "The Senate"? Chapter and verse, please.

Then why are you looking to Patrick Henry instead of to the man who actually drafted the Bill of Rights, James Madison? Because you already know what he had written on the subject of church-state separation (AKA "the Great Barrier which defends the rights of the people", in Madison's own words)?A few years before Madison drafted the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, someone introduced a bill before the Virginia Legislature, entitled "A Bill establishing a provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion," and intended to pay Christian ministers with public tax money. Opponents of the bill, including Jefferson, convinced Madison to write a pamphlet against the bill. The resultant A Memorial and Remonstrance proved so successful that the bill was dropped without even coming to a vote and the Legislature instead passed Jefferson's The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom.In A Memorial and Remonstrance, Madison established that nobody, especially not the government, has any power over an individual's religious beliefs, that mixing religion and government had severe deliterious effects on both and results in tyranny, and warns against tyranny of the majority. He uses several examples to demonstrate the dangers of mixing religion with government, including religious wars and persecutions (the Spanish Inquisition, which began in 1492, was still in operation at the time).If you have not already read A Memorial and Remonstrance, then you need to. Follow the link I provided above.Oh yeah, Patrick Henry. He's part of that story too. Guess who it was who introduced that bill for paying Christian ministers with public tax money? That's right, Patrick Henry. Doesn't sound like he was any friend of religious liberty, let alone the Bill of Rights.Edited by dwise1, : punctuation

From 1954 to 1956, three bills passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by a Republican president:
1954 -- The words "under God" were inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance.
1955 -- The phrase "In God We Trust" was required to be on all our coins and currency.
1956 -- The National Motto since 1782, "E Pluribus Unum", was replaced by "In God We Trust".Now, the Pledge was written in 1892 and therefore a century after the Founding. Even though its author, Francis Bellamy, was a Baptist minister (and Christian Socialist), he did not include any religious references, including our "One nation indivisible". It is truly ironic that the insertion of a blatantly religious phrase, "under God", divides our nation both in the Pledge and in real life, as the mixing of government and religion always does.And the origin of that phrase, "In God We Trust", is uncertain, with the earliest known form being found in The Star-Spangled Banner written in 1814, decades after the Founding: "In God is our trust". Laws allowing that phrase to be placed on coins and currency started appearing in 1865 and that phrase had appeared sporadically until the 1955 requirement.But the National Motto does go back to the Founding and what the Founders had decided upon has been replaced by a new upstart phrase, "In God We Trust".So, since we have a clear and unambiguous case of a founding principle having been usurped, can we count on marc to support my reactionary cause of restoring the National Motto? And there are also the reactionary causes of restoring the Pledge and our money.No, I'm not going to hold my breath. While on the face of it, those three Republican laws of the mid-1950's do fly in the face of the Establishment Clause, the courts have upheld them by instead citing historical context, deciding that the use of religious terms by government has removed from those terms all religious meaning. Which is exactly what James Madison warned against, that mixing religion with government destroys religion. Similarly, putting religious references on filthy lucre (AKA money, as in 1 Timothy 3:3) has always struck me as going against what the NT says concerning God and money. Indeed, President Theodore Roosevelt was also opposed to putting "In God We Trust" on money because he considered it sacrilegious.So I guess we can take some small comfort in knowing that those religious attempts of the mid-1950's have instead had an opposite effect.

That change went in about a year before I reported to Kindergarten, so I was spared your trauma. Though I once noticed a guy sticking with the original "one nation indivisible" who then explained to his friend that he could never insert "under God" because the nuns would use their yardsticks on any kid who used the new corrupted form. That makes me wonder how much grass-roots resistence there was at the time.Though the other damage that has done has been to create an entire generation of right-wing know-nothings who think that the corrupted Pledge is the only one that has ever existed.Interesting bit of historical trivia: When the Know-Nothing Party dissolved, most of its members then joined the newly created Republican Party. Some things just never change.

Dr. Miller is a practicing Catholic. And a self-described creationist, since, as a practicing Catholic, he does believe in a Divine Creator.Now, there are those self-described "Christians", mainly of the fundamentalist or "conservative" persuasion, who absolutely deny that Catholics are Christians. I personally know one at my work place.With all due respect, those self-described "Christians" have their heads firmly embedded into their aft orifices.

From Scientific Creationism versus Evolution: The Mislabeled Debate by Kenneth R. Miller in Science and Creationism, edited by Ashley Montagu, 1984, pp 21-24:

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The Scientific Creationists
We begin with a dilemma. Who are the creationists? Simply stated, a creationist should be anyone who believes in creation, in a universe formed by a supreme being. In other words, a creationist as someone who believes in God. By that standard of ordinary usage, I am a creationist (I'm a Roman Catholic), and so is any other scientist who professes a religious belief. However, in the context in which I must write this article, ordinary usage will not do. We will be forced to use another definition for the word creationist, the definition which has been forced on us by the current of the political debate in the United States. In this sense, a creationist as someone who believes that each and every kind of living organism was directly created by a supreme being, and that no organisms have arisen by the process of decent with modification advanced by Charles Darwin more than a century ago. In short, a creationist is an antievolutionist.

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There are many groups who wear the creationist label with pride, and these groups often find themselves in agreement about little else other than the need to oppose evolution and the teaching of evolution. Some of these groups have moved so far beyond the limits of scientific inquiry as to make meaningful discussion absolutely impossible. ...

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... The majority of American biologists have recognized the creationists for what they are -- a religiously motivated group -- and dismissed them. However, the creationists, realizing that the enormous weight of scientific evidence is stacked in favor of evolution, have taken a different route, one which demands that kind of response that scientists are not accustomed to giving.

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The American creationist movement has entirely bypassed the scientific forum and has concentrated instead on political lobbying and on taking its case to a fair-minded electorate. And in so doing they have presented the interested and layperson with a convincing scientific case (which looks at least as good as a case that evolution is seen to be able to make), and asked, in the spirit of open-mindedness, for "fairness" or equal time in the presentation of what they call "creation-science" along with "evolution-science." ...

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In the public forum it is important to accomplish several things at once. First of all, each of the creationist arguments against evolution should be answered in a clear and precise way. Second, the creationist scheme of natural history must be clearly exposed (something creationists avoid doing at all costs), so that the remarkable contradictions between it and scientific fact are easily seen by anyone caring to look. And finally, the attempt by creationist that can lead evolution is an inherently atheistic theory (thereby calling all Christian citizens automatically to their camp) must be exposed in refuted. A critical fact which is often lost in the debate, namely the lack of conflict between modern science (including evolution) and belief in God, must be brought out. This final point must be made in order to expose the creationist for what they are -- not scientists trying to leave a place for religion per se in the teaching of human origins, but rather people trying to inject a specific religion, Christian Fundamentalism, into the schools in the guise of science and to the exclusion of all other religions.

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His essay is about 46 pages long, so I won't quote it at length. He makes a good case, but one known by everyone who has investigated creationist claims: those claims are false and deceptive.Dr. Miller is not the only Christian who opposes "creation science". Nor is he the only one who has self-identified himself as a creationist (in the original sense) and has complained that "creation science" creationists have co-opted that term and turned it into something bad.You seem to question how anyone who opposes creationists (in the narrow co-opted sense) could possibly be considered to be a Christian. But it certainly seems to me that one would have to ask how anyone who supports "creation science" could be considered Christian. What does truth mean to Christians? And truthfulness? And lying and deception? "Creation science" is full of lying and deception. What role is that supposed to play in Christianity? Are true Christians supposed to support and defend truth? Or are they supposed to embrace lies and deception? When Christians such as Dr. Miller speak out to defend the truth, why do "true Christians", apparently such as yourself, condemn him for it?What role do lies and deception play in Christianity? Lutherans are considered "mainstream" Protestants, meaning that they are not noted to hold to extremist views -- in general, which apparently does not speak for individuals within that faith. Fundamentalists, evangelicals, adventists, Witnesses, Mormons, and others not in the "mainstream" are known to hold such beliefs about Catholics not being Christians, whether officially held by the denomination or popularly held by the denomination's members. Even some of those who do not go that far (and even some that do) are known to identify the Catholic Church as being Revelations' "Whore of Babylon".While not mainstream, those groups and individuals are far from rare. In fact, during the rise of the Radical Religious Right in 1980's they were being courted and raised as a decisive voting block. No, they are not at all rare. Doesn't make them any less clueless.Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.