To the Editor,
What is Steve Earle talking about? Did Steve just tell Thomas Lemay that our Constitution is based on Christian values. It is not and if Mr Earle can find one thing in the Constitution that reflects Christian values, he will be the first to do so. As most historically educated people know, the Constitution's foundations lie mostly in Greco-Roman and Enlightenment thought. In fact, the Sixth article's ban on religious tests for oaths of office is an Godless affront to the First Commandment. The First Amendment is also antithetical to the first four commandments. The first four commandments are unconstitutional as American law, because as law they would violate the first amendment's free exercise clause. Furthermore, the United States Senate unanimously declared in 1797 in the Treaty of Tripoli that "the Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion". Clear enough?
On the matter of slavery, it is part of God's social order in the Bible as it was in most bronze and iron age cultures. When abolitionists demanded the end of slavery, the anti-abolitionists, north and south, held up their Bibles to defend slavery. Anti-abolitionists used the same arguments that our right wingers use; if you're against tradition then you have to be a an un-American socialist atheist. The same was true when women's suffragists demanded the vote for women. Anti-suffragists held up their Bibles and called suffragists unamerican atheists and socialists. Even today, there are people being elected who believe all the Bible's iron age dogma about women, gays, and religious government.
Mr Earle seems to think its just politics and not morality that fuels negativity towards religion. It is both. He thinks its resentment but its actually contempt because religion is beneath many people's ethics. In the political world, Christianity has become a political tool of the far right as it is in Muslim countries. Right wingers want a Christian nation just as right wingers in Iran want an Islamic country. But Christians don't realize that once you put your religion into the free political arena you lose all your immunity from being called out. When a religious position is made into a political one, it means anyone can attack the religion itself because it is now a debatable political platform. It doesn't get a free pass in the marketplace of ideas or legislative chambers. Of course, we can find good amongst the bad but the bad far outnumbers the good in the matters of religion. But even that is becoming irrelevant. In fact, a new study by Survation reveals that in Britain, more than half of Britons think that religion "does more harm than good," less than a quarter believe that "faith is a force for the good,", more than 60 percent said they weren't religious at all and 55 percent of those surveyed think that atheists are actually more likely to be moral than religious people. In the United States the fastest growing religious group is the 'nonreligious' so we are going the way of the UK.
Here is the latest in the USA: http://www.religionnews.com/2014/10/24/secularism-is-on-the-rise-as-more-u-s-christians-turn-churchless/ The breakdown is very interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment