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.
