Not content with having “under God” stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance, Michael Newdow has filed a lawsuit (paid subscription may be required) to “remove all prayer and ‘Christian religious acts’ from the Jan. 20 inauguration.”
Perhaps Mr. Newdow, Judge Cooper in Atlanta, and all of the justices on the Supreme Court, need to read the First Amendment to the Constitution again. “Congress shall make no law…” [Emphasis added. And will continue to be added until it gets through the very thick skulls out there. —R]
Perhaps Mr. Newdow would like to file suit against the “Father of our Country,” the first President, George Washington. It was Washington who added the words “so help me God” to the end of the presidential oath. It was Washington who chose to open his inaugural address with a prayer to the Almighty.
Mr. Newdow claims “that an inauguration that includes prayers by religious ministers would turn nonbelievers ‘into second-class citizens and create division on the basis of religion.’” Perhaps Mr. Newdow should turn his looking glass inward, for it sounds as though Mr. Newdow has some unresolved conflict within that causes him to feel inferior when he compares himself to others.
I wonder if Mr. Newdow would be as strongly opposed to the prayers and invocations that will no doubt be offered if they were done in Arabic, and quoted from the Koran? Perhaps Mr. Newdow should travel to Saudi Arabia and complain about the domination of Islam in the every day lives of the citizens there. Then Mr. Newdow would learn what freedom of religion is all about.
I think this proves that like the Pledge case, Mr. Newdow isn’t concerned with his daughter (who personally was never opposed to saying the pledge, including “under God”) or anyone else being “forced” to tolerate a “religious” element in the public square. It has more to do with Mr. Newdow getting his name in the papers and his face on television.
It’s freedom of religion, Mr. Newdow, not freedom from. And let’s just say that the “religious” elements you are so opposed to are being paid for by the $40 million in private donations made for the inauguration. Will that satisfy you? No doubt it will not.
There used to be a time when most everyone knew the moral boundaries in our country. Back then, America was a community with distinct moral and ethical boundaries. Nowadays it’ tough to know where the boundaries are supposed to be. Stand nose to nose with those who say that there never were any boundaries, ‘cause those folks are dead wrong.
A federal judge in Atlanta has ruled that stickers placed on Cobb County textbooks regarding evolution are unconstitutional. The stickers read, in full: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”
Judge Clarence Cooper has a problem with the above benign statement regarding evolution:
His conclusion, he said, “is not that the school board should not have called evolution a theory or that the school board should have called evolution a fact.”
“Rather, the distinction of evolution as a theory rather than a fact is the distinction that religiously motivated individuals have specifically asked school boards to make in the most recent anti-evolution movement, and that was exactly what parents in Cobb County did in this case,” he wrote.
So if the Cobb County school board cannot call evolution a theory, and they cannot call it a fact, exactly what can they call it, Your Honor?
The fact is that evolution is not a fact; it is a theory, and one that has yet to be conclusively proven. This is all the “religiously motivated individuals” Judge Cooper scoffs at are trying to say. Christians simply want the government to acknowledge that evolution is not fact, has not been proven, and we do not wish to see our tax dollars used to indoctrinate our children in to believing it is such.
Perhaps Judge Cooper needs to read the Constitution yet again. There is no separation of church and state in the Constitution. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law…” Congress, Judge Cooper. Last time I checked, the Cobb County school board didn’t qualify as being the legislative body for the rest of the nation. Finally, Judge Cooper, the First Amendment says “freedom of religion”, not freedom from religion.
As a Christian, I cannot imagine any answer to the question of evil likely to satisfy an unbeliever; I can note, though, that—for all its urgency—Voltaire’s version of the question is not in any proper sense “theological.” The God of Voltaire’s poem is a particular kind of “deist” God, who has shaped and ordered the world just as it now is, in accord with his exact intentions, and who presides over all its eventualities austerely attentive to a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Not that reckless Christians have not occasionally spoken in such terms; but this is not the Christian God.
The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to “powers” and “principalities”—spiritual and terrestrial—alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him—“He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not”—and his appearance within “this cosmos” is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature.
“Lay Down My Pride” - Jeremy Camp
Every single word I say
You know it before I speak
You know every thought - the deepest part of me
You draw me closer than I see
Your Presence is every thing I need
To be the child that You’ve
Created me to be
I’m ready now to see it Your way
I lay down my pride
My desires my demise
I’m ready now to see it Your way
I’m done I’m thru ignoring You now it’s true
I’m kneeling at the cross of Your grace
Lay down my pride
I was faced with passing time
But I knew the choice was mine
To finally come to You
And give You all control
I’ve wandered miles to find my way
And then You revealed this simple faith
I know that You can see
The secrets of my soul
I lay down my pride
My desires my demise
I’m ready now to see it Your way
I’m done I’m thru ignoring You now it’s true
I’m kneeling at the cross of Your grace
Lay down my pride
The cross, the blood You shed for me
Your back was ripped and bruised
So I can know Your love
I kneel, I bow to You, my King
I lay down my pride
My desires my demise
I’m ready now to see it Your way
I’m done I’m thru ignoring You now it’s true
I’m kneeling at the cross of Your grace
Lay down my pride
— Camp, Lajoie © 2004 Thirsty Moon River Publishing (ASCAP) / Stolen Pride Music (ASCAP) / Spinning Audio Vortex (BMI) / LeToile Du Matin Music (BMI) / Admin by EMI CMP
