"We have this day restored the Sovereign (God) to whom all men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven, and from the rising to the setting sun, may His kingdom come."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7Y1ougODMo link to clip for viewing - please copy and paste and watch...
Homework for WEEK 2 (Week 1 HW is still posted if needed)
1. Read Chapter 2 of "A Christian Manifesto" and write a brief summary of the main points - highlight and take note as as you read and be ready for discussion in class. This is very important as well for quizzes upcoming
2. Read the 3 articles below and write a brief summary of facts and your opinion regarding the articles
(all summaries should be well thought out and cover at least 1/2 a page)
Article 1 Officials cleared in prayer injunction case (Washington Times)
Two rural northern Florida school officials were found not guilty of violating an injunction against praying in school, a Florida judge ruled late Thursday in a contentious school prayer case that spurred a reaction from Congress earlier this week.
Hundreds of people waiting in the rain outside of a federal courthouse in Pensacola cheered just after 7:30 p.m. when U.S. District Judge Margaret C. "Casey" Rodgers ruled that Frank Lay, principal of Pace High School in Santa Rosa County, and his athletic director, Robert Freeman, didn't intentionally violate her order to not offer prayers at school-sponsored gatherings.
"We're very pleased," said Mathew Staver, spokesman for the Liberty Counsel, the Orlando-based legal group that represented the two men. "We'll now focus on getting the underlying order set aside or overturned by a higher court."
Glenn Katon, director of the Florida American Civil Liberty Union's religious freedom project, said the judge "made an honest evaluation of the facts and applied the law."
"I respect her ruling just as I hope school officials will respect her order prohibiting them from promoting their personal religious beliefs in the classroom and at school events," he added.
More than 60 members of Congress signed a letter Monday in support of the two school officials. Reps. Jeff Miller of Florida and J. Randy Forbes of Virginia, both Republicans, gave speeches Tuesday night on the floor of the House castigating the reasons for the case. Mr. Forbes said it had "the potential for the criminalization of prayer in the United States of America."
The ACLU sued the Santa Rosa County School District a year ago on behalf of two students who said some teachers and administrators were allowing prayers at school events, orchestrating separate religiously themed graduation services and proselytizing students during class and after school.
In January, the school district settled out of court with the ACLU, agreeing to several conditions, including the barring of all school employees from promoting or sponsoring prayers during school-sponsored events.
The ACLU complained to Judge Rodgers after Mr. Lay asked Mr. Freeman to offer mealtime prayers at a Jan. 28 lunch for school employees and booster club members who had helped with a school field house project. The judge then issued a contempt order for the two men.
When asked Thursday why he agreed to give the prayer, "It was just out of reflex," Mr. Freeman told the judge, according to the Pensacola News-Journal. His testimony was part of a 10-hour hearing involving several witnesses.
An estimated 1,000 demonstrators apparently including numerous Pace High School students and teachers were in the streets of downtown Pensacola throughout the day in support of the two men. Crowds began gathering at the federal courthouse at dawn. Some sang hymns such as "Amazing Grace;" others held signs criticizing the ACLU.
Had the men been found guilty, they faced up to six months in jail, a possible loss of their retirement benefits and $5,000 each in fines.
Article 2 - God, History, and the War of Ideas (Petermarshallministries.com)
Someone famously said "history is just one thing after another!" No, not from a Biblical point of view, it isn't. History is not just a list of what happened, when and where. History is a window through which we can see God's hand in human affairs. The German monk that started the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, said that history is "a demonstration, recollection, and sign of divine action and judgment, how God upholds, rules, obstructs, rewards, punishes, and honors the world, especially the human world." All of history is being managed by God. He sits outside of time and space, but He presides over the history of this inhabited planet, and is moving it along toward the time when it will be swallowed up in the final coming of the Kingdom of God. "All events," said the great reformer John Calvin, "are governed by God's secret plan." Were it not for history we would not even know God, for His revelation of Himself and His plan to redeem sinful and fallen human beings has been revealed to us in the historical record of the Bible. History, then, is a source of revelation and truth - about God, about ourselves, and about life. As we move deeper into the 21st Century we Americans find ourselves in a war with Islamofacist terrorists, or jihadis, who have hijacked Islam for the purposes of establishing their Islamic dictatorship - first in all Islamic nations and ultimately throughout the world. On the surface, this struggle with Islamic extremists seems to be a military and political one, but there is a deeper, spiritual issue. At the core, it is a battle for the souls of men between the satanically-inspired religion of Islam and God's plan of salvation through Jesus Christ. This battle is primarily a battle of ideas, as is always the case in the great struggles of human history. What should be of great concern to all who love our nation is whether modern Americans know our own history, and especially whether we know anything about the hand of God in it. How can we understand the American experiment; how can we understand who we are and what we are about if we do not know the truths of our history? And if we do not understand the original God-inspired vision and the Biblically-based ideas on which we were founded, then the American experiment in self-government is at risk of failing. It can fail, you know. The Founding Fathers were well aware that it could fail. As I have previously related in these commentaries, when Ben Franklin came out of the recently concluded Constitutional Convention proceedings in Philadelphia in 1787 one of the leading ladies of the city accosted him on the street: "Dr. Franklin, what manner of government have you given us," she queried. "A republic, Madam," replied Franklin, "if you can keep it." Exactly. But, the "keeping" of it is not an easy thing. If we should fail at the American experiment, how then can we hope to win the war for the souls of men against radical Islam, or any of the other spiritual struggles we will face in the course of this century? Keeping our republic, and succeeding in developing the vision God gave our forefathers requires that we educate our youth about American history in general, and God's hand in it in particular. In this regard, the latest surveys about our young people's knowledge of American history are downright frightening! The Intercollegiate Studies Institute of Wilmington, Delaware issued a report in September 2007 entitled Failing Our Students, Failing America. The report details the findings from a 60-question, multiple-choice test on American history, government, international relations, and market economy given to thousands of college freshmen and seniors at 50 different institutions. The average score for all the students was 52.9 percent. That's an "F"! Even for Harvard seniors, who were the highest scoring group, the average was only 69.6. That's a "D+." And what's even worse, the knowledge of civics was lower for college seniors than for freshmen. We are actually "dumbing down" our college students! A recent study done by the National Endowment for the Humanities discovered that over half of our high school seniors did not know which nations fought against America during World War II. Eighteen percent of them even thought that Germany was on our side! Good grief!! Of course, at the heart of education is reading ability. Those who don't read well, or who don't bother to read, aren't going to learn much. In the years since The Light and the Glory was published in 1977 I have discovered that the reading level of Americans has dropped precipitously. Never, in the first ten years after its publication, did anyone ever tell me that they found the book hard to read. But, in the last 20 years a number of people let slip to me that they found it to be a bit taxing. If you haven't read the book yet, don't let that scare you! It really isn't hard to read at all, but what it shows is how drastically our reading levels have slid in the last 30 years. And sure enough, the same National Endowment for the Humanities study reported that only 31 percent of adults have a rating of "proficient" in reading. Sadly, the study also tells us that only 52 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds read a book voluntarily, without it being assigned to them. A century ago we had the highest literacy rate in the world. No more. What are those Bible-based ideas on which the American experiment was founded? What are some the truths of our history which Americans must know in order to be good citizens in our society? Our moral leadership in the family of nations was announced by the Founding Fathers in 1776 with the creation of the Declaration of Independence. That document establishes our moral legitimacy. In the Declaration we made clear to the world that we were basing our undertakings on certain universal truths - they were true for all people of all times. These universal truth claims stand in stark contrast to today's post-modernist view that truth is relative - what's true for you may not be true for me, and vice-versa. In other words, says today's relativist, there's no such thing as truths that are true for everyone, so we really shouldn't even use the word truth any more. We should talk about "preferences" instead. In the Declaration the Founding Fathers stated that the self-evident and universal truths that are always true for everyone consist in certain God-given inalienable rights. These rights belong to every human being from the moment of conception, are bestowed by God on the individual by virtue of his or her creation, and cannot be lawfully taken away by any person or government. Indeed, government exists for the purpose of protecting and defending human beings in the exercise of those God-given rights, and derives its only just powers from those very rights. For example, government is legitimate only when it is based on the consent of the people. If it governs without this it infringes on the people's God-given right to liberty. Everything that the United States does, either in international relations or on the domestic front, ought to be a reflection of the Declaration of Independence and its principles. This document is our national creed; our national confession of faith; the primary statement of our national morality. Today's relativistic thinking, however, is seriously damaging our foreign policy, and could end up crippling us in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. Some of the American advertising that was done on international radio and television seems to give the impression that Muslims are happy here because we have a diverse society of "shared values." This message of toleration and diversity is very much the wrong signal to send to Muslims, who believe that Islam is absolutely true. In fact, it is much more likely to earn their contempt, because to Muslim "true believers" tolerance is a sign of moral weakness, not virtue. In their view, if you don't have any strong beliefs, such that you don't take a strong stand for the rightness and truthfulness of anything, then you are worthy of contempt. By the way, as a committed Christian, I would tend to agree with that viewpoint. I do not want to be guilty of an attitude of "contempt" for people that don't have any moral values, but they certainly cannot earn my respect. The message that we need to be sending to Muslim people around the world is that Muslims are perfectly free in America - not because of some rainbow policy of diversity - but because the United States views Muslims as human beings with the same God-given inalienable rights as the rest of us. The reason why this is such a powerful and important message to send to Muslims around the world is that many of them live under governments that deny the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to their own citizens. Muslims (and everyone else, for that matter) need to hear that this is who we are, and this is what we are about. Woe unto us if we try to use tolerance, relativism's child, in the midst of a war over truth. This is a struggle of one claim of truth over against another, and if we try to fight with tolerance as a weapon, we will find it to be a broken lance indeed. We dare not seem to be indifferent to truth in a conflict with a people that are satanically deceived into believing that they have absolute truth on their side. The freedom that we enjoy in our society appears to serve no purpose other than our personal pleasures, yet we are engaged in a war with a people who believe that everything in their lives should serve the purpose of submission to Allah. Only when Americans begin to recover the Biblical roots of our understanding of freedom are we going to develop the kind of moral courage the Founding Fathers displayed in the struggle to win our independence from Great Britain. They understood the connection between God and human freedom stated in such scriptures as 2 Corinthians 3:17: "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." Perhaps we're not going to win this century's wars until we have a nation-wide revival of true Christianity in America, and recover our moral backbone.
Article 3 - The Declaration of Independence: A History (Charter of Freedom National Archives)
Nations come into being in many ways. Military rebellion, civil strife, acts of heroism, acts of treachery, a thousand greater and lesser clashes between defenders of the old order and supporters of the new--all these occurrences and more have marked the emergences of new nations, large and small. The birth of our own nation included them all. That birth was unique, not only in the immensity of its later impact on the course of world history and the growth of democracy, but also because so many of the threads in our national history run back through time to come together in one place, in one time, and in one document: the Declaration of Independence.
Moving Toward Independence
The clearest call for independence up to the summer of 1776 came in Philadelphia on June 7. On that date in session in the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall), the Continental Congress heard Richard Henry Lee of Virginia read his resolution beginning: "Resolved: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved."
The Lee Resolution was an expression of what was already beginning to happen throughout the colonies. When the Second Continental Congress, which was essentially the government of the United States from 1775 to 1788, first met in May 1775, King George III had not replied to the petition for redress of grievances that he had been sent by the First Continental Congress. The Congress gradually took on the responsibilities of a national government. In June 1775 the Congress established the Continental Army as well as a continental currency. By the end of July of that year, it created a post office for the "United Colonies."
In August 1775 a royal proclamation declared that the King's American subjects were "engaged in open and avowed rebellion." Later that year, Parliament passed the American Prohibitory Act, which made all American vessels and cargoes forfeit to the Crown. And in May 1776 the Congress learned that the King had negotiated treaties with German states to hire mercenaries to fight in America. The weight of these actions combined to convince many Americans that the mother country was treating the colonies as a foreign entity.
One by one, the Continental Congress continued to cut the colonies' ties to Britain. The Privateering Resolution, passed in March 1776, allowed the colonists "to fit out armed vessels to cruize [sic] on the enemies of these United Colonies." On April 6, 1776, American ports were opened to commerce with other nations, an action that severed the economic ties fostered by the Navigation Acts. A "Resolution for the Formation of Local Governments" was passed on May 10, 1776.
At the same time, more of the colonists themselves were becoming convinced of the inevitability of independence. Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published in January 1776, was sold by the thousands. By the middle of May 1776, eight colonies had decided that they would support independence. On May 15, 1776, the Virginia Convention passed a resolution that "the delegates appointed to represent this colony in General Congress be instructed to propose to that respectable body to declare the United Colonies free and independent states."
It was in keeping with these instructions that Richard Henry Lee, on June 7, 1776, presented his resolution. There were still some delegates, however, including those bound by earlier instructions, who wished to pursue the path of reconciliation with Britain. On June 11 consideration of the Lee Resolution was postponed by a vote of seven colonies to five, with New York abstaining. Congress then recessed for 3 weeks. The tone of the debate indicated that at the end of that time the Lee Resolution would be adopted. Before Congress recessed, therefore, a Committee of Five was appointed to draft a statement presenting to the world the colonies' case for independence.
The Committee of Five
The committee consisted of two New England men, John Adams of Massachusetts and Roger Sherman of Connecticut; two men from the Middle Colonies, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania and Robert R. Livingston of New York; and one southerner, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. In 1823 Jefferson wrote that the other members of the committee "unanimously pressed on myself alone to undertake the draught [sic]. I consented; I drew it; but before I reported it to the committee I communicated it separately to Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams requesting their corrections. . . I then wrote a fair copy, reported it to the committee, and from them, unaltered to the Congress." (If Jefferson did make a "fair copy," incorporating the changes made by Franklin and Adams, it has not been preserved. It may have been the copy that was amended by the Congress and used for printing, but in any case, it has not survived. Jefferson's rough draft, however, with changes made by Franklin and Adams, as well as Jefferson's own notes of changes by the Congress, is housed at the Library of Congress.)
Jefferson's account reflects three stages in the life of the Declaration: the document originally written by Jefferson; the changes to that document made by Franklin and Adams, resulting in the version that was submitted by the Committee of Five to the Congress; and the version that was eventually adopted.
On July 1, 1776, Congress reconvened. The following day, the Lee Resolution for independence was adopted by 12 of the 13 colonies, New York not voting. Immediately afterward, the Congress began to consider the Declaration. Adams and Franklin had made only a few changes before the committee submitted the document. The discussion in Congress resulted in some alterations and deletions, but the basic document remained Jefferson's. The process of revision continued through all of July 3 and into the late morning of July 4. Then, at last, church bells rang out over Philadelphia; the Declaration had been officially adopted.
The Declaration of Independence is made up of five distinct parts: the introduction; the preamble; the body, which can be divided into two sections; and a conclusion. The introduction states that this document will "declare" the "causes" that have made it necessary for the American colonies to leave the British Empire. Having stated in the introduction that independence is unavoidable, even necessary, the preamble sets out principles that were already recognized to be "self-evident" by most 18th- century Englishmen, closing with the statement that "a long train of abuses and usurpations . . . evinces a design to reduce [a people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." The first section of the body of the Declaration gives evidence of the "long train of abuses and usurpations" heaped upon the colonists by King George III. The second section of the body states that the colonists had appealed in vain to their "British brethren" for a redress of their grievances. Having stated the conditions that made independence necessary and having shown that those conditions existed in British North America, the Declaration concludes that "these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved."
Although Congress had adopted the Declaration submitted by the Committee of Five, the committee's task was not yet completed. Congress had also directed that the committee supervise the printing of the adopted document. The first printed copies of the Declaration of Independence were turned out from the shop of John Dunlap, official printer to the Congress. After the Declaration had been adopted, the committee took to Dunlap the manuscript document, possibly Jefferson's "fair copy" of his rough draft. On the morning of July 5, copies were dispatched by members of Congress to various assemblies, conventions, and committees of safety as well as to the commanders of Continental troops. Also on July 5, a copy of the printed version of the approved Declaration was inserted into the "rough journal" of the Continental Congress for July 4. The text was followed by the words "Signed by Order and in Behalf of the Congress, John Hancock, President. Attest. Charles Thomson, Secretary." It is not known how many copies John Dunlap printed on his busy night of July 4. There are 24 copies known to exist of what is commonly referred to as "the Dunlap broadside," 17 owned by American institutions, 2 by British institutions, and 5 by private owners.
EXTRA CREDIT ARTICLE - instructions for this article same as above
Hijacking the Declaration
by Gary DeMar, Apr 28, 2008
It’s been said that you can tell a book by its cover. You can also tell a book by those who endorse it. Consider Alan Dershowitz’s Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking our Declaration of Independence.[1] The book is endorsed by at least two high-profile published atheists (Steven Pinker and Sam Harris), the president of the ACLU (Nadine Strossen, who speaks to atheist groups and may be an atheist herself), an anti-Christian and self-avowed atheistic Congressman (Pete Stark, D-CA), and the Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (Barry W. Lynn) who rarely has anything good to say about religion and the public square and whose organization takes the atheist position in court battles.
Their endorsement of Blasphemy and its defense of the Declaration of Independence over against its Christian interpreters made me laugh out loud. How can any of these critics denounce the “Christian Right” and its use of the Declaration when the Declaration asserts that our “inalienable rights” are an endowment from the Creator?
“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.”
Dershowitz and his atheistic supporters are hypocrites. Their attack should be on the Declaration itself since it not only grounds our nation’s most fundamental rights in a Creator, but it also acknowledges that this Creator is “the Supreme Judge of the world.”
In his chapter titled “The Christian Right’s Strategy,” Dershowitz attacks “serious scholars” who argue that the Declaration includes Christian elements.
Anson Phelps Stoke [sic], author of a three-volume study of church and state in America, published in 1950, argues that Christian values “permeate” the Declaration of Independence. “The ideal of the Declaration is of course a definitely Christian one,” especially when “considered along with the references to the Deity.” He believes the Declaration is based on “fundamental Christian teachings,” including “our duties toward God.”[2]
Stokes was not a part of the Christian Right since it didn’t exist in 1950. So it seems that Dershowitz’s Christian conspiracy theory is just like so many other conspiracy theories—contrived to obscure the truth. If a non-Christian like Stokes believed the “Declaration may be accepted as evidence that the founders of the country . . . were sympathetic with the fundamental theistic belief and with the moral and social teachings of the Gospels,”[3] then it seems that Christian Right defenders of the Declaration can’t be too far off the mark if they believe something similar.
Dershowitz admits that “it would be wrong to conclude that the Declaration of Independence supports the entire agenda of those who would remove all references to God from public pronouncements. Although that would be my strong personal preference, I cannot find support for it in the history or text of the Declaration.”[4] So what would be Dershowitz’s substitute for the God-language of the Declaration and countless other official government documents that mention God and Jesus Christ? For Dershowitz, Nature is our god. “Ultimately all scientific, empirical, or logical arguments for God’s existence must fail under the accepted rules of science, empiricism, and logic. The only plausible argument for God is an unscientific, antiempirical, and illogical reliance on blind (deaf and dumb) faith—precisely the sort of faith Jefferson rejected.”[5]
Dershowitz’s dilemma is that he has no way to account for science, logic, and morality given his materialistic assumptions. At least Jefferson had enough sense to recognize he needed a god, even if it was a god of his own invention, to make his worldview work. Dershowitz, writing in his book Shouting Fire, admits that “the diverse components of nature” cannot “be translated into morality, legality, or rights.”[6] Without God as the grantor of rights, as the Declaration declares, Mr. Dershowitz has no way to account for rights and certainly no way to legitimately secure them.
1 comment:
www.sangambayard-c-m.com
Post a Comment