America, we need to talk

America, sit down.   We need to have a talk.  I have to be brief now, but we’ll talk again soon.

America was built on the idea that people have unalienable rights, rights that precede and supersede government, rights that the government cannot restrict, regulate, or deny.  We fought a war in order to be able to establish a government that would protect those rights.  If it failed to do so, we were told to alter or abolish it and institute new government.

Unalienable rights require a Higher Power.  Government cannot give you unalienable rights.  They come from God, and specifically the God of the Bible. Islam does not know of unalienable rights, nor Buddha, Krishna, or any other God or religious system. 

You were told that we are a secular nation, where all religions are considered equal, and the government is uninvolved in any.

That is not true.  Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights.  You only have what rights the government gives you, just like every other country in the world.  And these rights are different from unalienable rights.  Unalienable rights have to do with freedom.  Government rights are generally things to which you are entitled and that require enormous amounts of money and government oversight to see that you get them.

Unalienable rights are the cornerstone of freedom and liberty.  But freedom and liberty require a high moral code, otherwise it will lead to anarchy.  For almost 200 years, our moral code was that of the Bible: the Ten Commandments, Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

Now the moral code is tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  The only moral responsibility for individuals is tolerance, which need mean nothing more than to ignore your neighbor.

America, this is the reason our county is in so much turmoil.  You are being pulled into two very different directions.  You have a lot of questions.  But at least we need to have this conversation.

Buying cigarettes and voting in Illinois

I keep writing on this issue. and the newspaper keep avoiding the issue.

Your editorial (November 26) wanted state legislators to override Governor Rauner’s veto on raising the age for buying cigarettes to 21 in Illinois.

I especially liked the part where you say:

Because the brain doesn’t fully mature until around 25, teens may shrug off the consequences of smoking.  What seems like a really good idea at 17 or 18 can bring intense regret at 30 or 40.

You didn’t mention the fact that these same teens can vote at 18, and overwhelming so for the political party.

We gave 18 year olds the right to vote, because we were taking them to fight a war we weren’t really trying to win.  That is long gone, and if we think they are too immature to make the right choices for themselves, then they surely are too immature to make the right choices for our country.

So if you really want to raise the age for buying cigarettes, I expect you to demand to raise the age for voting and for the same reason: “public health.”

What to do about the war in Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan has gone on way too long.  It should end.

But it should end in victory, not stalemate, not defeat, not stupid peacetalks that won’t mean a thing after we leave.

We are making the same mistake we made in Viet Nam.  We want to train the home army and let them win the war.  It didn’t happen in Viet Nam, and it’s not working here.

We are there not because the Taliban is a threat to Afghanistan, but because it is a threat to our country as well.  This is where Osama bin Laden planned 9/11.  We were told that about 20 other terror groups are also headquartered there now too.

We should make it our fight and destroy them.  They should surrender before we leave, like Germany and Japan did after WW2.  Anything less and they will just come back and threaten everyone again.

 

But what about Afghanistan?  If the threat is only a local one, then they need to decide if they want to deal with it.  If the threat is bigger and they can’t or won’t deal with it, then the nations that the threat does affect have a right to come in and end the threat.  Afghanistan can figure out what they want to do about that. 

Now the Administration wants to sit down with the Taliban.  Wrong move.  Destroy them, or have them unconditionally surrender, like Germany and Japan.  That’s the only way you will end the problem, otherwise it will just keep on coming back.

Why I Am Not Sold on Climate Change

I know that the media and many people in the government consider climate change a big danger to all of us.

And, frankly, I’m not convinced.  And here are the reasons why:

1)         Accurate worldwide average temperatures were not even possible until the advent of satellites in probably the 1970s.  I’m not even sure when anybody even started caring.

Since the average temperature changes that is causing this deep concern is less than 2° Fahrenheit, and average temperatures before satellites are just guesswork, I think we have too little information over too short a period of time to draw serious conclusions of this magnitude.

2)         There are six known ice ages that scientists are sure about, the latest went from around 1000 A.D. to the 1500s.  That is why the Vikings didn’t do more with North America than they did.  They couldn’t if they had wanted to.

But the entire world warmed up after that, and this was way before the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels. 

Seems the average world temperature changes considerably over centuries without any help from us, and we just don’t know how the whole thing works.

3)         I understand that if all the recommendation of the climate accord in Paris were followed, the change in temperature at the end of the century would be minimal.  And I mean MINIMAL.

4)         I understand also that the United States is actually leading the world at this time in carbon emission reduction.  But we are only one country.  And if the rest of the world are big polluters (China, for example), our efforts will do very little, even less than MINIMAL. 

I have been trying to keep track of local weather reports.  I would like to compare their 5 and 7 day forecasts and see both day by day and week by week how often they are changed or wrong if not updated.  If we can’t be sure what the weather will be like next week, I think long term projections are too conjectural.  We see high pressure systems that might linger over an area for a month like in Texas a few years ago.  They had no idea why that happened.  They see how the jet stream changes, bringing artic air down to the states or not, and they don’t know why.

I am glad to see them working so hard to keep track of things, but I can’t help but think there is something else going on that is influencing their conclusions.

The single most important issue facing our country, and nobody is talking about it

Our country has never been more divided or in more turmoil than it is today.  I lived through the Civil Rights and Viet Nam eras, but those were more focused protests, while today we are divided on just about everything.

I wanted to figure out why.  I wanted to know how we got here

I read an article in the paper about what it means to be an American.  After reading the answer given and thinking about the overall divisions in the country, I knew something was missing from the discussion. 

Then I saw it, an issue so fundamental to everything that is going on, and nobody was even talking about it.  And what’s more, this is the issue that will determine the future of our nation in every way that matters.

The single most important issue facing our country is knowing what it is that makes America.  I have read a number of different definitions of what it means to be an American, but frankly they are missing the point, because they are not going back to the sources.

The best description of what America is is found in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

God gave human beings unalienable rights, rights that precede and supersede government, rights that the government cannot take away.

But wait a second.

What God, and how did the Founders know that God gave unalienable rights to people? 

Every nation in the world had their god(s) and their religion(s), but no other nation had unalienable rights.

It was the God of the Bible, and the Bible and Christianity were seen as the vehicles used by God to reveal Himself and His purposes to humankind.

God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  The courts would call that a religious opinion.  The Founders called it a fact.

If you separate Christianity from the foundation of our country, or if you deny the existence of God, or if you lump all the religions together as being equal with no religion being more important or more true than another, if our government cannot favor one religion over another, then you don’t have unalienable rights.  Unalienable rights require a Higher Power, an authority higher than our government that our nation as a whole accepts.  If there is no higher power, or if that Higher Power is not the God of the Bible, then you don’t have unalienable rights.  You only have what rights the government will give you, and those are two very different things.

Unalienable rights have to do with things that you are free to do without the government’s permission, interference, or restrictions.  This is what our Founders meant by liberty, or freedom. 

Government rights are rights that require the government to compel other people to do things for the sake of the people who have now been given certain rights.  Usually this will require enormous amounts of money. or it will require a curtailing of certain unalienable rights if they are seen to conflict with what the government wants to give other people.  For example: freedom of speech ends if your speech is considered offensive to someone else.  In other words, your freedom of speech is determined by someone else, so you better be careful what you say, lest you offend somebody and are held liable for your speech.

Our Founders also recognized that liberty requires high moral standards.  If people do not want to do what is right as a general rule, freedom will lead to anarchy and eventually back to despotism.

For 200 years, the moral code of our country was the Ten Commandments, Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, all from the Bible.  But that was ruled unconstitutional, because it was considered to be religious sentiments.

Now they have been replaced with secular values: tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  The only responsibility here for individuals is tolerance, which can mean nothing more than ignoring your neighbor.  The rest require the government to closely monitor society and people’s behavior to ensure that everyone complies with these new highest values.

The First Amendment cannot guarantee freedom of religion unless religion is consistent with the highest values of the land, otherwise conflicts will inevitably rise, and secular values will take precedence, because secular values are now higher than religious ones.  And that is what is happening today.

This proves that our nation was never intended to be a secular nation.  It also shows again that Christianity is at the root of our country, because religions all have very different value systems.  At that time, Hindus routinely burned widows alive on their dead husband’s funeral pyre, and Muslims then and now believe(d) in subjugating or killing those who will not subject themselves to Islam.  Our country fought its first war against Muslim countries in Africa.  Their leaders showed our leaders from the Koran that it is the duty of Muslims to enslave or kill the infidels

.

And, of course, the entire idea of establishment of religion in the First Amendment has been entirely misunderstood, because people have not read enough in the early documents. 

The Founders did not want a national Church as they had and still do in Europe.  That the First Amendment had nothing to do with our government recognizing God and Christianity is evidenced by the fact that most if not all of the original states had a State Church written into their earliest Constitutions.  They soon came to see that they were simply duplicating on a smaller scale the very thing many of them had fled from in Europe, so this omitted in later versions of those Constitutions.

To say that we cannot talk about God in our public schools is wrong, because how are we going to be able to teach our children about unalienable rights if we don’t talk about God?

The entire founding of our country is not being taught in our schools, at least the parts that are most important in establishing the true nature of our country, because it has to do with God.  And we certainly aren’t teaching it to the millions of people who have been moving to our country over the years.  Well, that would be culturally insensitive. 

When our children and the millions of immigrants start voting, getting elected to public office, and making our laws, they will not do it with the knowledge of what made the United States unique among the nations.

So over the course of a few generations, our country will change as surely as if there had been a war and we were taken over by a foreign power.  We will have lost everything that made us what we are.  But because it is happening slowly, over generations, nobody is alarmed.  All the changes that are happening in our country are seen as inevitable, good, a sign of progress, or as just another political debate as there have always been. 

Our country is at the tipping point.  This can be seen by how closely the election results are. 

More and more people will question why the religion question is that important.  Below are five inevitable changes that have followed on the heels of our secularization as a nation.

1..        Our country has no uniqueness, so we can and should follow the lead of other nations with regard to health care, gun laws, welfare, speech codes, globalization.  To think differently is considered to be arrogance and willful blindness.

2.         As a secular country, government now assumes the role that God used to play in people’s lives.  Government now is the provider, protector, and benefactor of the people.  This comes at an enormous expense to our country:

a)         This is why government spending will never be cut.

b)         This is why our federal debt has ballooned so much so quickly and will not come down.  People have a right to so many things that cost so much money.

c))        This is why socialism, or a version of it, is almost inevitable.  People have a right to be taken care of.

3.         What were unalienable rights now have become government-given rights.

a)         Freedom of speech has to be limited to protect people from hate and offense.

b)         Secular values are higher than religious ones, so religions freedom must be limited where religious values differ from secular ones.

c)         The right to life assumes the right to defend that life.  But the State believes it has the right and duty to restrict, regulate, and closely monitor that activity under the guise of public safety.

4.         Our new moral code is failing to restrict bad behaviors.  Our country has become an unsafe place.

a)         We may say that crime has not risen, risen that much, or even falling in some cases, but we are falling to acknowledge at what price.  We have made it much harder to get away with a crime at an incredible expense: the cost of technology, additional police personnel (salaries, enormous pensions).

b)         People are afraid to walk alone, at night, or in less public places.  Heck, they are afraid in our public schools.  It used to be common to leave cars and house unlocked.  We weren’t worried that someone was going to steal from or rob us.

c)         Guns must be restricted or banned for public safety reasons.  Your right to bear arms can be qualified: it is only for hunting, recreation, within your home, limited to only a few shots before reloading, and, of course, guns must always be unloaded or disassembled when not in use. 

d)         We now require security guards everywhere: schools, churches, all public places.  We have to keep hiring more and more police and install more and more cameras, all at great public expense.

e)         We have to be inspected, searched, and restricted for public safety in more and more places.

            1)         Schools are now locked down.

            2)         We now have to be screened to fly on an airplane, go to a ball game.  We are restricted on things we can bring in and at more places, e,g. liquids, backpacks.

5..        Our religious neutrality has allowed for the presence of a burgeoning Muslim population in our country.  To even express concern for this prompts a knee jerk reaction of horror, because we have become conditioned to think only of our common humanity.  Ideas are not relevant.  Religions are all equal.  Worldview is code for racism. 

            But:

a.         this is the only reason we now have airport security screening everywhere.

b.         While individual Muslims are just that, individuals who we are taught to judge and respect as individuals, the history of Islam and what it looks like in a Muslim majority country is plain for all to see.  We can see the future of our country in Europe today and in any of 50 Muslim majority countries.  If you like what you see, don’t worry, it’s coming to America.

c.         The fact is that Islam has a goal of making the entire world Islamic.  The basic strategy is mass migration to non-Muslim countries and then mass reproduction.  The West is not reproducing at even maintenance levels.  We are teaching our daughters that it is more important to have a career than a family.  It is only a matter of time before Muslims will have a majority in the various countries.

All of the above are natural and inevitable results of our country separating itself from our founding principles.  We need to have, I don’t want to say, a debate.  We need people to confront and challenge the system.  Jefferson said that if our government doesn’t secure our unalienable rights, we should alter or abolish it and institute new government. 

We’ve got to get this information into the public consciousness and get everyone talking about it.  It is not a debate, but it will look like it for a while.  We have to demand our country back.

There is no more important issue in our country at this time.  If we lose here, we lose everything.  

Aldermanic privilege and subsidized housing: a letter to a newspaper over the issue of whether aldermen had the right to nix 'affordable housing; in their wards

I would like to take issue with your lead editorial (November 23) on aldermanic privilege. 

First, I find the use of the expression ‘affordable housing’ deceptive, offensive, and actually dishonest.  It is an attempt to disguise the real nature of a matter by diverting your attention to something more acceptable, like when people talk about choice instead of killing babies.

Affordable housing is subsidized housing.  Somebody else is helping to pay that person’s rent.  And that help is not voluntary.  The government is taking other people’s money to spend in this way.  I understand those subsidies can be very generous.  The government can be very generous with other people’s money. 

I would also say that nobody who gets subsidized housing has a right to live anywhere they want.  I believe they give up that right when they expect other people to pay toward their housing.  If I can’t afford to live in a certain neighborhood, then somebody who is getting government assistance shouldn’t be able to either.

An Open Letter to the Supreme Court

We used to not worry about locking our doors, whether it was the car or the house.  We used to not worry about walking alone at night.  We felt safe, when we went to school or when we went to church.  Yes, there were “bad neighborhoods,” but they were only neighborhoods, and we avoided them.

Our country has never been more divided nor in more turmoil than it is now.  Yes, I lived through the Civil Rights and Viet Nam eras, but those were basically single-issue matters.  Now we are divided on everything.  What intrigues me is that our Founders fought a war in order to give us a government that would “form a more perfect union” and “ensure domestic tranquility” (Preamble to the Constitution).

I tried to figure out what is going on.  How did this happen?  What was the root cause behind all of this?  And then I did.  And what surprised me was that nobody is talking about it.  Nobody. 

The United States was founded as a unique nation in human history, based on the concept of unalienable rights, rights that precede and supersede government.  That uniqueness is best described by a paragraph in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

God gave people unalienable rights.  The courts today would call that a religious opinion.  The Founders called it a fact.

But wait a second.  What God gave people unalienable rights?  Every nation had their god(s) and religion(s), but none of them believed in these unalienable rights.

It wasn’t Allah, Krishna, or Buddha.  It wasn’t Moloch, Baal, or Thor.  It was the God of the Bible, and the Bible and Christianity were seen as the vehicles through which God revealed Himself and His purposes for humankind. 

If you separate Christianity from our nation as a core founding principle, then you don’t have unalienable rights.  Unalienable rights require a Higher Power, a higher power that the country as a whole accepts.  Without that higher power, then rights can only come from the government, just like in all the other nations.  The United States would then no longer be unique.  It becomes then simply a blending of all the nations. 

And a government that does not acknowledge and accept the God of the Bible will not believe in unalienable rights and will not protect them.  Such a government, Jefferson says, we should alter or abolish it and institute new government, one more likely to effect our safety and happiness. 

Since the Court ruled that our government cannot aid, favor, or essentially even acknowledge God or religion, thus essentially establishing our nation as a secular nation, the only rights anyone talks about now are government given rights.  Nobody calls them that, of course, because nobody today knows of any other kind.  So they just call them rights.  

But government-given rights are different from unalienable rights.  Unalienable rights are things that you can do, things you have a right to do, and that government does not have a right to stop them.  It has the power but not the right.  Government-given rights generally pertain to things that you have a right to have, things that generally require the government or other people to give to you, meaning that they require the government to compel the compliance of everybody else so that you get something.

Unalienable rights focus on freedom.  Government-given rights focus on the government and government power. 

And now that rights are seen as things that people are entitled to, the list of rights keeps expanding as politicians see them as ways to attract voters.  And since we started on this course, we have been unable to control government spending, and we are now so far in debt we can never get out of it.

If our government is supposed to be neutral toward all religions, favorable toward none, uninvolved in any (Did you know that we used to have church services for over a hundred years in our Capitol Building?), if our government removes God from the public sphere including our public schools, then we are denying the founding principle on which our country was built. 

If all religions are considered equal, then none of them can be considered true.  All religions purport to be descriptions of reality.  They believe themselves to be conveyors of truth, about how things really are in the world.  They cannot all be true, because they portray reality differently. 

For our government to be neutral toward religion is to say that they are nothing more than people’s opinions, their personal preferences, like one’s taste in music or food.

If all religions are just people’s opinions, then our country was based on an opinion with no basis in reality.  God did not then in fact give people unalienable rights.  We don’t have unalienable rights.  Unalienable rights don’t exist.

But our Founders believed that what Christianity taught was indeed truth.  God giving unalienable rights to people was an event that actually happened in history.

We no longer teach this to our children, because it is considered to be religious.  And we certainly aren’t teaching it to the millions of people who are moving to our country, because we are supposed to be neutral or indifferent toward religion.  And when our children and these millions of people start voting, get elected to public office, and make laws for our country, they will do it without any knowledge about what exactly made the United States what it is, or at least used to be.  They will effectively change our country over the course of several generations into just another country like all the rest.

These unalienable rights include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

True liberty requires high personal moral standards.  You can’t focus on a nation’s freedom unless the people are already personally committed to a strong moral code; otherwise, you will need myriads of laws to regulate human behavior, and you will no longer have true liberty.  Laws have to apply to everybody, so to address the problems of a few, you have to make laws that will affect everybody.

For almost 200 years, the moral code of the Bible was the moral code of our country: the Ten Commandments, Love your neighbor as yourself, Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

This has essentially been replaced by political correctness, where tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity are the supreme moral values of the land.  And, frankly, they are not working.  The only duty put on individuals is tolerance, which can mean nothing more than to simply ignore your neighbor.  The other values rely on government to fulfill.  There is nothing that binds us together as a people. 

Since the courts have removed Christianity and God from our public schools and life, nobody talks or even knows about unalienable rights anymore.  And so, all rights are now seen as just government-given rights.  And hence subject to change.

We see it in free speech laws.  While the First Amendment prohibits the abridging of freedom of speech, we make laws limiting that freedom in order to protect people from being offended.  A person’s right not to be offended now supersedes a person’s right to speak.  The Founders would never have put a person’s right to free speech in the hands of someone else, so that they would determine what a person can say rather than the speaker himself.

But doesn’t the example of a person crying “Fire” in a crowded theatre prove that speech is not really free?  Actually, no.  Because if crying “Fire” in a crowded theater were to result in death or injury, then the person who said it can already be charged with crimes for causing those deaths and injuries. 

Another example is the matter of guns and security.  We used to have gun clubs in our public schools.  You could buy a gun at the local hardware store like you were buying a screwdriver.  And gun violence was not a problem. 

We lowered the voting age to eighteen 40 years ago, and now communities are raising the age at which people can buy guns to 21.  We consider people who are too immature and responsible enough to buy guns to be mature enough and responsible enough to vote.  I find that an obvious contradiction, but it shows some of the confusion that now surrounds this issue.

In the Federalist Papers (No. 46), our nation was described as an “armed” people, and that was considered a good thing, unlike all those countries in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings and dictators.  Guns in the hands of ordinary citizens was considered an essential check and counter to tyrannical governments. 

If guns are now a problem, then something changed.  Well, the people changed. 

As a secular nation, we are no longer teaching our children to love our neighbors as ourselves, or Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, or do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  These are considered to be religious values, and we can’t have that.  But secular values don’t give us any reason to value human life.  Humans are just talking animals anyway, and all life is just an accident of nature. 

An unalienable right to life would give a person an unalienable right to protect that life. 

That same First Amendment that protects freedom of speech also speaks of religion.  And the understanding of religion there has also morphed into something wholly different from what it meant when they wrote it.

Establishment of religion has to do with having a national church like they had and still have in Europe today.  The federal government was not allowed to favor one denomination over another.  Most of the original 13 colonies had a state church as part of their original state constitutions.  They soon came to see that they were just duplicating on a smaller level the same situation so many of them had fled from in Europe, so they gradually removed them from their constitutions.  But the fact that they had them in the first place shows that the First Amendment has nothing to do with a government having nothing to do with religion or forbidding even the mention of God in our public schools.  How can we teach our children about the founding of our country if we don’t tell them that God gave unalienable rights to people?

But the First Congress had Bibles printed to be used in all the public schools to teach morality to our children. It was wrong to say almost 200 years later that prayer and Bible reading in the public schools were unconstitutional.  The Founders knew what was meant by the First Amendment.  Read the original McGuffey Readers, which were the common reading books in public schools for over a hundred years. 

The First Amendment could not guarantee freedom of religious exercise unless religion was consistent with the highest values of the land.  Otherwise, there would be inevitable conflicts between religions values and those of our government.  And this is what is happening today. 

We call ourselves a secular country, thereby making secular values the highest values of the land.  These inevitably conflict with religious values, and they now take precedence.  So, freedom of religion doesn’t really exist anymore.  Some people try to get around this by calling it freedom of worship and hope that nobody notices.  This is proof that our country was founded and intended to be a religious nation.

It is also confirmation that our country was founded as a Christian nation.  Every religion has a unique moral code.  Islam believes in the subjugation or killing of those who are not Muslims.  We fought our first war against 5 Muslim nations in northern Africa.  They told our leaders that they were attacking our ships and enslaving our sailors, because that is what Muslims do, showing them that from the Koran.  Hindu nations at that time would burn widows alive on the pyre of their dead husbands.

So, while every person has an unalienable right to practice their religion according to their conscience, our Founders were not saying that all religions were equal and that the government should be neutral toward all.  They couldn’t, because they based our country on Christianity and the Bible.  And they relied on the moral code of the Bible to minimize the need for too much government involvement.

Obviously, I could go on and on, but everything stems from that one statement which our Founders called a fact and based our country on: we were endowed by our creator with unalienable rights.

Thank you.

I wish you well.

Where we get the First Amendment wrong

The Tribune ran a major article on a disputed tax break for pastors (Thursday, Nov. 1). 

It seems the whole issue stems from a common mistake that is prevalent today: “the First Amendment requirement of government neutrality on religious matters.”

If I had to summarize the basic, fundamental, founding principle of our nation it would be this paragraph from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Our Founders considered it self-evident that people were given unalienable rights by God.  The courts today would call that a religious statement.  The Founders called it a fact. 

Religious statements today are considered opinions or personal preferences, like your taste in movies or food.  The Founders based the existence of our country and the cause of our war with England on a statement they considered true and our courts today would call an opinion.

But then you have to ask: how did the Founders know that God gave people rights, and what God were they talking about?  It wasn’t Allah, or Krishna, or Buddha, or Moloch, Baal, or Thor.  It was the God of the Bible, and Christianity and the Bible were the vehicles of God revealing His will and purposes to humankind.

Our Founders also believed that liberty requires a strong moral code, because freedom comes with responsibility.  That is why the Ten Commandments, love your neighbor as yourself, and do unto others as you would have others do unto you were the moral code for our country for almost 200 years before the courts ruled that unconstitutional, and now we have secularism, which offers us tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity as the supreme moral code.

If you separate our country from Christianity, then you don’t have unalienable rights.  You have only those rights given to you by the government.  You also don’t have what made us unique among the nations.  All governments give some rights to their people. 

Our country is in the midst of shifting from unalienable rights to government-given rights, because the courts have ruled that talking about God in our schools and government is unconstitutional.   We have cut off the anchor that made us what we are, and the ship of state will be pushed by the waves to socialism, and maybe communism and totalitarianism.

It will take a few generations until the old people who still remember the truth die off, and the kids who were never taught the truth and the millions of people who have moved here who we certainly don’t teach them that either run the nation, and it’s good-bye America.