Editor,
The Commercial-News
Danville, IL 61832-0787
Editor:
Posting the Ten Commandments in government buildings clearly violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution did not appear magically, but were the products of broader historical events. The founding fathers intended to re-establish self-government of, by and for the people in a world darkened for centuries by priests and kings claiming to rule by divine right.
They were well aware that the continent from which they intended to separate had been held back and devastated by centuries of religious warfare. They wanted no part of religious wars and sought to devise a means by which the adherents of the various denominations, sects, and cults in America could co-exist without putting each other to the sword.
The only solution was for civil government to remain absolutely neutral in religious affairs. The right of the people to worship freely was recognized, but in order to achieve any degree of religious liberty, in order to achieve any semblance of freedom of worship, church and politics had to be separated and prevented from exercising a mutually corrosive and corrupting influence upon each other.
The first step in securing religious freedom for all was to recognize a freedom from government established and imposed religion. The Bill of Rights begins by ensuring freedom from having someone else’s religion forced upon any of us: “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion…”
Like so many of the freedoms we take for granted today, freedom from established religion arose from colonial oppression, paying taxes to support churches and clergy whose theologies many found repugnant. The Founders were products of the Age of Reason, which was a rational reaction to the witch-hunts and other theologian-inspired barbarity of recent memory.
Virginians such as Jefferson and Madison pioneered separating church and state. Under British rule, the only church recognized- and subsidized- by the crown had been the Church of England. Understandably many of its clergy were reluctant to jeopardize their standing and income by supporting independence.
Churches not approved by the crown were subject to taxation, government monitoring, disbanding, seizure of church grounds and property, and jailing of clergy if loyalty to the King was not their first commandment.
Following independence, some clergy sought to secure their power by reviving a state religion. Thomas Jefferson persuaded the state legislature that freedom from state sanctioned and mandated religion was the only way to secure any individual’s freedom of conscience. He regarded Virginia’s freedom of religion statute as one of his greatest accomplishments; the text is engraved on his monument in Washington and the story related in his Notes on the State of Virginia.
The notion that the founding fathers were fundamentalist crusaders who sought to form a Righteous Christian Republic is an obvious fabrication. References in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to “Nature’s God” and “Providence” were not and are not the language of the Ayatollahs Robertson and Falwell, but of the prevailing Deist philosophy of the times.
The key figures in framing the Constitution were predominately Freemasons who accepted a universal brotherhood of self-governing mankind, rather than dividing humankind between the Saved and hell-bound infidels.
They recognized that no religion had a monopoly on the truth and specifically excluded in the Constitution any religious test for holding public office. Mention in the Constitution of a messiah or saviour is conspicuous only in its absence. The genius of the Founders, and of their framework for a Republic based on law rather than decree by king or mullah, becomes apparent in the Constitution’s durability and adaptability. Their finest work was never intended to exclude citizens, to place them outside the protection of the law, but to allow that framework to grow with the nation.
We are now a nation which includes people whose faiths the Founders had never observed, or even heard of. But certainly they would have understood the desire of those of the Bahai faith to escape persecution and live freely here.
Most of the Ten Commandments are universal and the basis of any civilized society. A society which condones theft and murder, which promotes coveting that which belongs to others, is plainly unjust and truly a rogue nation. However, even a cursory reading of the 20th Chapter of Exodus reveals that the first four of the Ten Commandments apply to one specific religion, to the exclusion of all others.
It is the first four commandments, not the injunctions against murder, theft and adultery, which render displaying the Decalogue in government buildings an unacceptable government promotion of one religion over another. The legal question was not whether a wall between church and state has been breached, but whether government’s strict neutrality in church affairs has been violated.
The most conservative Supreme Court in generations has ruled decisively and unquestionably that posting the Ten Commandments in government facilities is a flagrant misuse of taxpayer money to promote one religion over all others.
The drive to impose Exodus 20 on public buildings is led by the self-appointed Righteous whose agenda is to impose a Christian Taliban on the rest of us. Those who are sincere in promoting positive moral and spiritual values have a perfectly legal alternative to imposing the Shariah of the Saved on a diverse and secular state.
It is a cardinal principle of the world’s many faiths and appears almost universally in the world’s sacred writings and scriptures, and in the creed of secular humanism.
It first appears in the Judeo-Christian Bible in Leviticus and has been translated as “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” It reappears in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but the principle is a tenet of faiths that have preceded and followed Judaism and Christianity.
What we know as The Golden Rule is held sacred across the globe, across time and by faiths from tribal Animists to Zoroastrians. Practicing the Golden Rule, not imposing the laws of one faith upon others, is the true basis of civilization.
Sincerely,
Scott Kair