By Alan Caruba
Who said this and when?
”…it would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes…No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States.”
It was George Washington during the course of the first inaugural address. Having led the army of the Revolution from June 15, 1775 to December 23, 1783, eight long years, Washington had returned to Mount Vernon to live out his life as a private citizen, but he was called back to public service as the nation’s first President from 1789 to 1797.
In so many ways, Washington set the tone for the presidency and the nation as someone guided by his faith garnered from the Old and New Testaments. This is in sharp contrast to our present President who invariably refers to “the holy Koran.”
America has always worn its belief in the Creator as a badge of honor and was established, as the Puritan leader John Winthrop said, to be “a shining city on a hill.”
The Constitution, however, was achieved only with a major compromise regarding slavery; one that would require a Civil War to end the abhorrent practice. Most of the Founders knew this. Many had been born into or ascended to the planter class in an era when slavery was the accepted order of the day and they opposed it. It deeply offended their personal sense of morality even if this source of labor was deemed necessary at the time.
Thomas Jefferson said, “Bigotry is the disease of ignorance or morbid minds…Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both." It is the unfortunate legacy of his era that racism remains a potent force in American life to this day.
Men are imperfect creatures, subject to their passions, and through civilization’s long history of Judeo-Christian beliefs they have turned to religion to tame their baser instincts and to reinforce their better ones. Americans most affirmatively embraced faith-based religion and, in particular, tolerance as a national religion.
We have seen that Islam accepts no tolerance and demands global submission. Western civilization has been is locked in a war of survival with Islam since the seventh century.
For 236 years America has sought to set the example to the world of the blessings of liberty and freedom as “one nation under God.” The nation began with the Declaration of Independence that asserts that “all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”
The tens of thousands who turned out for Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day are testimony to the push-back occurring in America today. It troubles many Americans that there are dark forces at work to diminish their freedom to express their faith in God and their religion’s codes of ethics and behavior.
A moment of prayer, a simple act of piety, has been banished from our schools. Demands that symbols of faith be removed from the public square have increased. Efforts to silence the clergy who minister to our armed forces are underway. Separation of Church and State—found no where in our Constitution—has been twisted into efforts to diminish the public role of the churches and synagogues when it most emphatically does not mean freedom from religion.
The most solemn belief in the sanctity of human life, particularly of the Catholic Church, has come under attack with the passage of Obamacare.
Many faithful believe that a president who endorses same-sex marriage is endorsing the destruction of the moral heart of our nation and society.
As American principles, anchored in religious faith and commonly held moral teachings, come under attack, Americans are increasingly aware of the two forces that remain the greatest enemies of morality as defined by Western civilization. One is communism and the other is Islam, the antithesis of Judeo-Christian values.
As Americans of all faiths approach the national elections in November their vote may prove a tipping point toward America’s continued slide into the darkness, into the slavery of communism, into the further encroachments of Islam, into a moral abyss, or it can be the day that Americans renew their faith in what America stood for in the past and the values it can champion in the future.
© Alan Caruba, 2012
5 comments:
When my oldest son was 18 I read an article that stated that over 80% of all the children under 18 had no religious training....at all!
He will be 36 this year and I wonder what that percentage is now. So many have been washed back and forth by every new philosophical tide that swept their way...usually leaving havoc in its wake because society has been left with no universal understanding of right and wrong any longer. The “relativists” have won. It is difficult to see how a society with no firm moral underpinnings can fix itself.
As for the religious training the other 20% have gotten; well I wonder what value that really holds when entire religious movements such as the Anglicans, Lutherans and Methodists ….and others ….promote moral values that are clearly condemned in what is supposed to be their foundational text commonly known as The Holy Bible. The only conclusion one can have is that they don’t read it and don’t believe it. Which comes to the next obvious questions: What good are they doing? Why do they bother?
Education, religion, government; all formed to create stability in society; so many of them now exist only to destroy the very foundations that are essential for that stability…the nuclear family….and that is only a man, a woman, who are married, and their children. When we start to argue that as the basic structural foundation for a stable society we have lost our minds.
Society can’t be far behind. I am not optimistic.
I am waiting for the outcome of the November elections to determine the fate of the nation. It obama is reelected, he will destroy what is left of the economy and everything else.
The Chick-fil-a by us STILL had a line around the building today. Talk about a smear campaign backfiring ... I'll bet they break all sales records this week, and gain thousands if not millions of new customers. I've never been to a Chick-fil-a but I can't wait to try them out now ...
Every individual must sooner or later (and maybe not in the present life) grow out of religion and into an intimate appreciation of that higher reality known as spirituality. That was Christ's real message: to cast off the rigid dogmas and rituals of organized religion, and LIVE in the knowledge of YOUR SPIRITUAL FATHER. A living relationship with Him (and no human being can know enough to even insist it is "Him", rather than "Her", or "The One", or "The Creator") is the goal, and it is also the generally unrecognized reality each person really inherited in being born. We are all here to LEARN, ever more--of what this world has to teach us, and of our true being, in spirit--not to be "happy", or to "succeed", or to win over others, or even to survive (take note Scientologists: none of us will survive physically anyway--but we CANNOT die as spirit, any more than God can). The ancients knew--were informed, actually; they (each and every people, worldwide) didn't invent the idea on their own--that man was really a soul, a spiritual being, but largely unaware of itself, bound to the Wheel of Life here on Earth, of continued, successive lives and deaths, until he learned enough of his true being and his true Father to escape that wheel.
The bottom line is, whatever is destroyed in this life, your soul will go on, and that--and only that, Jesus and his spiritual brothers have always taught--should be your only real (or lasting) concern.
It would seem that a human without morality, ethics, and a belief in a Superior Being is nothing more than an animal.
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