Separation Of Church And State

[Amillia]

1787 The Northwest Ordinance:

Article III.

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

this is an exerp out of our founding father's statements~ outlining carefully, their intent for religion to be a part of our governemtent and education ~

Judges, who are not even elected, and are sitting in these positions for life, are making up new laws, and new constitutional mandates which have nothing to do with the original constitution.

My questions: Do we really have a constitution, or a Judge ruling our governement and rights? Why are we allowing them to have this kind of power?

[Guest Taoist_Saint]

Deleted to Remove Anti-Mormon Lies

[Guest mckay]

What things would you like corrected, or rather what laws, to make the enviroment more in favor of religion? Prayer in school for one? My first thought on that one is to be fair, in some schools there would need to be a Catholic prayer, then a Protestant prayer, a Muslim prayer facing Mecca and where there is a significant number of LDS, a prayer for them.

Since schools are supposed to be secular, maybe leave out the praying and concentrate on secular learning. Those that feel a need to pray could pray to their hearts content anytime after school or before school.

Maybe the proud display of the Ten Commandments in all public buildings?

mckay

[pushka]

I was taught in a Catholic school until the age of 6, when I was transferred to a 'special school' for disabled children...We were taught there a basic knowledge of God and Jesus, without any particular emphasis on any one religious belief. I am sure that there were other pupils in the school, belonging to other Religious denominations, and that they received their 'main' religious education outside of school hours, as I did when I took my First Holy Communion Lessons...I don't see why this cannot be the situation in schools now...not teaching one particular religion, but teaching about others' beliefs in God and Jesus and just a general teaching of Christ's message to 'love thy neighbour as thyself' or words to that effect!

[Guest mckay]

OK, I see your point on Christ's teachings. Maybe the following ideas could be added also. Copied from "Freedom from Religion" web site. I personally like the beating of slaves and the burning of those who do not abide in Jesus. Those ideas would really be impressive to school age children.

=================================================

The burning of unbelievers during the Inquisition was based on the words of Jesus: "If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned." (John 15:6)

Jesus looked at his critics "with anger" (Mark 3:5), and attacked merchants with a whip (John 2:15). He showed his respect for life by drowning innocent animals (Matthew 8:32). He refused to heal a sick child until he was pressured by the mother (Matthew 15:22-28).

The most revealing aspect of his character was his promotion of eternal torment. "The Son of man [Jesus himself] shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth." (Matthew 13:41-42) "And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched." (Mark 9:43)

Is this nice? Is it exemplary to make your point with threats of violence? Is hell a kind, peaceful idea?

Did Jesus Promote "Family Values"?

"If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." (Luke 14:26)

"I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household." (Matthew 10:35-36)

When one of his disciples requested time off for his father's funeral, Jesus rebuked him: "Let the dead bury their dead." (Matthew 8:22)

Jesus never used the word "family." He never married or fathered children. To his own mother, he said, "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" (John 2:4)

[Amillia]

Originally posted by Taoist_Saint+Apr 22 2005, 04:27 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Taoist_Saint @ Apr 22 2005, 04:27 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin--Amillia@Apr 22 2005, 01:45 PM

1787 The Northwest Ordinance:

Article III.

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

this is an exerp out of our founding father's statements~ outlining carefully, their intent for religion to be a part of our governemtent and education ~

It isn't very clear what ROLE religion was intended to play...or HOW MUCH influence it would have.

Judges, who are not even elected, and are sitting in these positions for life, are making up new laws, and new constitutional mandates which have nothing to do with the original constitution.

My questions: Do we really have a constitution, or a Judge ruling our governement and rights? Why are we allowing them to have this kind of power?

That might be a valid question, but I don't see what it has to do with religion? In a Theocracy, we could also have appointed Judges, right?

The only difference would be that Christians would consider them appointed by the authority of God.

Abortion and prayer being taken out of the schools were both initiated by judges.

[pushka]

Eeek, McKay...you make some rather good points...though I'm sure there are some people here who will delight in re-interpreting those scriptures (not me, I don't read the Bible anymore).

[Guest Taoist_Saint]

Deleted to Remove Anti-Mormon Lies

[Amillia]

LOL ~ it would be kind of interesting to see all of those contradictory mandates lined up all in the same view space!

[Guest mckay]

Taoist Saint, you have the right idea. However maybe all the contradictions could be eleminated if we followed Deuteromony chapter 13. Under those rules, if anyone tries to get you to follow any other God then, verse 9 and 10 says, "But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, ......."

That should take care of all the opposition, just stone them to death.

mckay

[Amillia]

Originally posted by mckay@Apr 25 2005, 07:38 AM

Taoist Saint, you have the right idea.  However maybe all the contradictions could be eleminated if we followed Deuteromony chapter 13.  Under those rules, if anyone tries to get you to follow any other God then, verse 9 and 10 says, "But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.  And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, ......."

That should take care of all the opposition, just stone them to death.

mckay

Well that one doesn't always work! Look at Stephen in the NT.

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Tao,

When the Founders drafted the Constitution, they were convinced that it would be dangerous just to let democratic majorities enact whatever laws they wanted. Observing the democracies of ancient Greece, they saw how majorities often acted against their long-term interests, or failed to protect vital interests of minorities.

So they set up rules in the Constitution that would take precedence over ordinary laws. They recognized that those rules would have to be flexible enough to be updated with changing times, so they made provisions for the Constitution to be amended. However, it would of course have to be harder to amend the Constitution than to enact ordinary laws; otherwise, that would destroy the whole point of the Constitution as a restraint on out-of-control majorities.

One thing the Founders failed to consider, though, was the power the judiciary would arrogate to themselves almost two centuries later. For most of constitutional history, the federal judiciary considered itself bound by the Constitution's definition of their power: they were to decide cases arising under the Constitution, meaning that they would apply the actual language of the Constitution according to its original meaning. The thinking was that since the fundamental American political tradition is that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, the only authority the Constitution's provisions have is as expressions of the consent of the people who were represented by the Constitution's drafters. To ascribe a different meaning to those provisions than did the people who consented to be governed by them, cuts the connection of consent and removes the legitimacy from the provisions.

There were a couple of exceptions to this tradition -- the Dred Scott case, where Justice Roger Taney injected his own white-supremacist beliefs into the Constitution to come up with a result the Constitution's text did not actually mandate (and helped cause the Civil War), and the Lochner line of economic-rights cases, where the Supreme Court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to include guarantees of particular economic freedoms which aren't referenced in the text. (The problem with the Fourteenth Amendment is that its language is dangerously vague, which led to the abuses of the Lochner cases, which were eventually repudiated, and the Griswold-Roe-Casey-Romer-Lawrence line of "substantive due process" cases, which have been used to invent rights to abortion and gay sex that do not exist anywhere in the Constitution.)

Starting in the 1960s, judges started abandoning the tradition of being bound by the Constitution's actual text, defending their reading of their personal left-liberal politics into the Constitution as necessary to keep the Constitution a "living, breathing" document. The problem is that the Constitution was always "living and breathing," even as originally set up by the Founders; it could be amended at any time to update it to the times. (And in fact it was, to end slavery, recognize women's rights, allow an income tax, etc.) The problem with modern liberal judges' non-originalist theory of constitutional interpretation is that the Constitution is no longer harder to amend than it is to pass a law. It is now easier to change the meaning of the Constitution than it is to pass an ordinary law, which loses the Constitution its effectiveness as a backstop on society's adopting laws based on transitory whims. Instead of actually requiring both houses of Congress and the President to agree, a policy can be enacted based on the whim of an associate Supreme Court justice or five who happened to read the latest trend in European politics over lunch. (I'm not kidding; in a few recent high-profile constitutional cases, rulings on the American constitution have been based explicitly, in part, on foreign precedents. How this is appropriate to applying the American constitution is beyond me.)

This leads us to the fundamental misunderstanding afloat during the present conflict over the Democrats' unprecedented multiple filibusters of federal judicial nominees. It is not a case of "Christian judges" being appointed who will enact, by judicial fiat, laws against abortion and mandating school prayer. At the most, the originalist judges who are being filibustered would decline to read their own personal politics into the Constitution. It would be totally counter to the judicial philosophy of an Antonin Scalia, for example, to read into the Constitution a mandate against abortion. Such a mandate doesn't exist in the text, so it would be just as illegitimate to find it there, in the nonoriginalist view, as it was to find the right to abortion on demand. In fact, the main nonoriginalist judges on the Supreme Court, Scalia and Thomas, very often issue rulings that conflict with conservative political agendas, because they determine that the Constitution's plain language clearly prohibits those agendas. One of the advantages, on the other hand, of being a liberal justice is that you never have to issue a ruling you personally disagree with -- because in their minds, they ARE the Constitution.

If Roe v. Wade were ultimately overruled, as it should be, the result would not be that abortion would become illegal. States would only be able to regulate abortion as the have the power to regulate just about everything else. As a practical matter, abortion law would probably be tightened a bit in some states and not change at all in liberal states like California and the Northeast. (In fact, a couple of states have already passed legislation stating that in the event Roe v. Wade is ever overruled, those states will continue to allow abortion on demand.) Even in Utah, I expect that abortion would still be widely available, certainly for the most compelling reasons (rape, incest, life or physical health of mother, etc.).

America has possibly the least restrictive abortion laws in the world; we're one of very few countries that allow abortion essentially on demand for any reason. Virtually all European countries, including nations like Sweden that are considered far more "liberal" than the United States, have restrictions on when abortion may be performed, allowing later abortions only for well-documented, compelling reasons. (Here, you can, as a constitutional right, have an abortion literally up to the moment of birth if you can find a practitioner willing to state that the pregnancy is a threat to your health, including your "emotional" health. Since several hard-core abortion-activist doctors are on record as stating that they believe every pregnancy is a threat to woman's health, there is for practical purposes no limitation at all.)

One of the reasons the abortion debate in this country is so contentious is that abortion law is far out of step with actual public sentiment. This hurts the Democrats, because they feel themselves compelled to defend that absolutist position: no restrictions on abortion, period. Polls have shown that large majorities of people, including majorities of women, would prefer at least some restrictions. If the Supreme Court had allowed democracy to work, we would almost certainly have a system where early-term abortion would be widely available, and late term abortion would be available for genuine, important reasons. That is, we'd have Britain's or Sweden's laws -- and we'd have far less contention in our political process.

Actually, I think the absolutists on the Republican side of this issue would prefer Roe v. Wade i]not to be overturned -- because there's virtually no popular support for a total ban on abortion, along the lines of the Catholic Church's no-exceptions position. If Roe were gone, the burden of defending the "absolutist" position would shift, and Republicans would have to stop exploiting their opposition's being out of step with public sentiment, and either reject their own constituency's absolutist position, or be faced with the losing proposition of defending the absolutist position themselves.

Ultimately, I'm disgusted by the dishonesty congressional Democrats have brought to the judicial-filibuster debate, and especially by their express refusal to allow a vote on Judge William Pryor specifically because he's a devout Catholic. Pryor has never given any indication that he would allow his personal beliefs to interfere with his applying the law. (Democrats may have a hard time believing this, because their guys give precedence to their personal politics all the time, but the whole point of the originalist philosophy is that a judge has a higher loyalty to the actual law.) What part of the Constitution's ban on imposing "religious tests" on candidates for office don't those guys understand? You can't declare a man ineligible for office because he's Catholic.

[Jason]

Judges, who are not even elected, and are sitting in these positions for life, are making up new laws, and new constitutional mandates which have nothing to do with the original constitution.

Amillia,

Judges cannot make up laws. They interpret the meaning of the law, period.

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Originally posted by ExMormon-Jason@Apr 25 2005, 11:09 AM

Judges, who are not even elected, and are sitting in these positions for life, are making up new laws, and new constitutional mandates which have nothing to do with the original constitution.

Amillia,

Judges cannot make up laws. They interpret the meaning of the law, period.

Jason,

That's the idea. See the above post for why this is not the actual practice.

[Jason]

PD,

Good post. Wasn't aware that the Justices were using European precedents to make decisions. That's upsetting to say the least.

PS. How are the kids doing? Last I heard, you were running home to help clean up some projectile food particles? (Been down with a nasty virus myself this past week.)

[Guest jackvance88]

the Ist amendment was never intended to disestablish state churches. by its terms, it only applies to the federal government and was intended to prohibit the imposition of a tax funded national federal church.

subsequent liberal judicial interpretations applied it to the states. thus, there is no reason why the state of utah should not be able to establish the LDS church as the state's official established religion.

secular government, like communism and fascism, is of the devil.

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Originally posted by ExMormon-Jason@Apr 25 2005, 11:33 AM

PD,

Good post. Wasn't aware that the Justices were using European precedents to make decisions. That's upsetting to say the least.

PS. How are the kids doing? Last I heard, you were running home to help clean up some projectile food particles? (Been down with a nasty virus myself this past week.)

Thanks for asking. Last of the kid-barfing ended Saturday night, with Maren launching her second blaeurp of the day, down from 4 Friday and 4,673 on Thursday. Wife promptly came down with same thing Saturday and passed it on to me, fortunately in weakened form. Hope we both get well soon.

The two recent cases in which the Supreme Court cited foreign authority were the Lawrence v. Texas decision a year or so ago striking down a silly Texas law against sodomy (and also overruling a 1986 precedent) and the Simmons case from this year (can't remember the other party's name) declaring the death penalty unconstitutional for people who were under 18 when they committed murder.

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Originally posted by jackvance88@Apr 25 2005, 12:20 PM

the Ist amendment was never intended to disestablish state churches. by its terms, it only applies to the federal government and was intended to prohibit the imposition of a tax funded national federal church.

subsequent liberal judicial interpretations applied it to the states. thus, there is no reason why the state of utah should not be able to establish the LDS church as the state's official established religion.

secular government, like communism and fascism, is of the devil.

... nothing except the 14th Amendment, which applied the Bill of Rights to state governments.

Although you make a good point; as recently as 1826 -- forty years after the adoption of the anti-establishment clause -- Maryland still had a state-sponsored church.

secular government, like communism and fascism, is of the devil.

Gotta disagree with that one. The Bible expressly states that civil governments are sanctioned by God. It's when governments become oppressive -- that is, when they institutionalize human wickedness -- that they become evil.

[Guest Taoist_Saint]

Deleted to Remove Anti-Mormon Lies

[Guest Taoist_Saint]

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[Guest Taoist_Saint]

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[Guest Taoist_Saint]

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[pushka]

Here in the UK secular schools do allow pupils from differing religions to take time out for their prayers etc.

[Guest Taoist_Saint]

Deleted to Remove Anti-Mormon Lies

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Tao,

I was just saying that if Judges are enforcing liberal laws on us now, imagine what will happen if we lived in a Theocracy...which seems to be what Amillia wants. Then we would have Christian Judges enforcing Christian laws on the nation.

Pardon me while I retch (it doesn't take much this week, thanks to a nasty stomach flu) because of that 10,848th reference to an imminent American "theocracy."

Sorry for the unZen-like response, Tao -- I like you a lot, I really, really do (echoes of Sally field) but really: Even if the "religious right" got its way on every issue, America would not be a theocracy by any reasonable standard, not by a long shot. What we'd have -- maybe -- is a relationship between church and state similarly to that which we had during the Franklin Roosevelt administration. You don't hear People for the American Way damning FDR for a theocrat, do you?

If I read Amillia right, she is frustrated not so much because there are no Christian judges reading Christian principles into the law, but because secularist judges are reading secularist principles into the law beyond the extent which the Constitution's prohibition of establishment of religion requires.

I happen to agree, up to a point. It's not a "theocracy" when a high school choir puts on a Christmas concert, but there is a large and respected body of left-wing opinion (start with the ACLU) which would have you think it is.