Wisdom Sells

It's Friday, and I know I should be allowing you to rest your minds and drift into your weekend activities.  It is a day to post pictures of the sky and invite all your friends to look at your little portion.  I grow weary at the thought of such shallow pursuits.  I know many of you watch the current fare of abysmal television programming and allow your minds to be salved in its nothingness.  I have done the same.  We are an "in the moment" society.  Problems must be solved in days and wars must be won in months or the American public loses interest and starts to grumble.  When the issues get hard and the answers are not immediately forthcoming, we want to give up and go somewhere else.  I can't let it rest.  I have told myself over and over to stop writing about the things that require serious reading and analysis, but then I come across a piece like this and I can't help but share it.  I hope you absorb what is said here.  It pays to know where your form of government came from and what the founders intended.

Religion and Politics Don't Mix?

"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." --Thomas Jefferson

For all of our nation's history, there have been tactical battles between opposing political ideologies -- liberals (leftists) who want to liberate us from constitutional rule of law, and conservatives who strive to conserve rule of law. Great political capital has been, and continues to be, expended by the Left in order to offend our Constitution, and by the Right in order to defend it.

Amid the din and rhetoric of the current lineup of tactical contests, I ask that you venture up to the strategic level and consider a primal issue that transcends all the political noise.

How many times have you heard the rejoinder, "Religion and politics don't mix"?

Most Americans have, for generations now, been inculcated (read: "dumbed down") by the spurious "wall of separation" metaphor and believe that it is a legitimate barrier between government and religion. So effective has been this false indoctrination that even some otherwise erudite conservatives fail to recall that religion and politics not only mix, but are inseparable.

Recall that our Founders affirmed in the Declaration of Independence "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."

In other words, our Creator bestowed the rights enumerated in our Declaration and, by extension, as codified in its subordinate guidance, our Constitution. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are natural rights; they are not gifts from government.

To that end, Alexander Hamilton wrote, "The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."

But the Left has, for many decades, made its primary objective the eradication of God from every public quarter, and routinely relied on judicial activism to undermine constitutional rule of law and, thus, the natural rights of man.

The intended consequence of this artificial barrier between church and state is to remove knowledge of our Creator from all public forums and, thus, over time, to disabuse belief in a sovereign God and the natural rights He has endowed.

This erosion of knowledge about the origin of our rights has dire implications for the future of liberty.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever."

As the author of our Declaration of Independence makes clear, we should all tremble that man has adulterated the gifts of God.

Ironically, it was Jefferson who penned the words "wall of separation between church and state" in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association.

Jefferson was responding to a letter the Association wrote to him objecting to Connecticut's establishment of Congregationalism as its state church. Jefferson responded that the First Amendment prohibited the national (federal) government from establishing a "national church."

After all, the controlling language (Amendment I) reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Jefferson concluded rightly that the Constitution's 10th Amendment federalism provision prohibited the national government from interfering with matters of state governments -- a "wall of separation," if you will, between the federal government and state governments.

Among all our Founders, Jefferson was most adamant in his objection to the construct of the Judicial Branch of government in the proposed Constitution, writing, "The Constitution [would become] a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please."

Jefferson warned: "The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch. ... It has long been my opinion ... that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped."

Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 81, "[T]here is not a syllable in the [Constitution] which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution."

But Jefferson was correct in his apprehension about our Constitution being treated as "a mere thing of wax" by what he called the "despotic branch," who would do the bidding of their special-interest constituencies rather than interpret the plain language of the Constitution.

In 1947, Justice Hugo Black perverted Jefferson's words when Black speciously opined in the majority opinion of Everson v. Board of Education that the First Amendment created a "wall of separation" between religion and government, thus opening the floodgates for subsequent opinions abolishing religious education and expression in all public forums.

John Adams wrote, "If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave."

It may not be in the power of man to alienate the gift of liberty, but it will certainly take the power of men, guided by our Creator, to defend it. To that end, religion and politics are inseparable.

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!

Mark Alexander
Publisher, PatriotPost.US

Quote of the Week

"Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged. When our Founding Fathers passed the First Amendment, they sought to protect churches from government interference. They never intended to construct a wall of hostility between government and the concept of religious belief itself. ... To those who cite the First Amendment as reason for excluding God from more and more of our institutions every day, I say: The First Amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people of this country from religious values; it was written to protect religious values from government tyranny." --Ronald Reagan

America at the Mall

I wrote a poem several years ago to express my feelings toward America. To be more specific, the United States of America. I read this morning about the effect our financial situation is having on World Markets, and I am reminded of the influence we have on other countries. They may not like us, but they sure don't want us to fail financially. Some are even offering help. Try and remember who we were when we started, and then think about who we are now. I am posting my poem along with a piece from an annonymous author.


AMERICA

Out of revolution,
the grip of monarch’s rule.
Driven by freedom.
Necessity.
Founded on values
from God’s holy book,
the glue that binds,
in trust,
its varied masses.

America

Through fire of war,
without,
within,
was forged in strength
a strong republic.

America

And though the vision dims
in her prosperity,
she rises to the challenge
when tyrants seek
to quell her voice.

America

Blessed by God,
we must hold those
values close
that bound
our loose knit colonies
in their infancy.

America

Now consider the course that some in our country would have us follow.

'You ain't gonna like losing.'

President Bush did make a bad mistake in the war on terrorism. But the mistake was not his decision to go to war in Iraq. Bush's mistake came in his belief that this country is the same one his father fought for in WWII. It is not. Back then, we had just come out of a vicious depression. The country was steeled by the hardship of that depression, but they still believed fervently in this country. They knew that the people had elected their leaders, so it was the people's duty to back those leaders. Therefore, when the war broke out the people came together, rallied behind, and stuck with their leaders, whether they had voted for them or not or whether the war was going badly or not. And war was just as distasteful and the anguish just as great then as it is today. Often there were more casualties in one day in WWII than we have had in the entire Iraq war. But that did not matter. The people stuck with the President because it was their patriotic duty as Americans to put aside their differences in WWII and work together to win that war.Everyone from every strata of society, from young to old pitched in. Small children pulled little wagons around to gather scrap metal for the war effort. Grade school students saved their pennies to buy stamps for war bonds to help the effort. Men who were too old or medically 4F lied about their age or condition, trying their best to join the military. Women doubled their work to keep things going at home. Harsh rationing of everything from gasoline to soap and butter was imposed, yet there was very little complaining.You never heard prominent people on the radio belittling the President. Interestingly enough in those days there were no fat cat actors and entertainers who ran off to visit and fawn over dictators of hostile countries and complain to them about our President. Instead, they made upbeat films and entertained our troops to help the troops' morale. And a bunch even enlisted.And imagine this: Teachers in schools actually started the day off with the Pledge of Allegiance, and with prayers for our country and our troops. Back then, no newspaper would have dared point out certain weak spots in our cities where bombs could be set off to cause the maximum damage. No newspaper would have dared complain about what we were doing to catch spies.A newspaper would have been laughed out of existence if it had complained that German or Japanese soldiers were being 'tortured' by being forced to wear women's underwear, being subjected to interrogation by a woman, being scared by a dog or that they did not have air conditioning.There were a lot of things different back then. We were not subjected to a constant bombardment of pornography, perversion and promiscuity in movies or on radio. We did not have legions of crack heads, dope pushers and armed gangs roaming our streets. No, President Bush did not make a mistake in his handling of terrorism. He made the mistake of believing that we still had the courage and fortitude of our fathers. He believed that this was still the country that our fathers fought so dearly to preserve. It is not the same country. It is now a cross between Sodom, Gomorra and the Land of Oz. We did unite for a short while after 9/11, but our attitude changed when we found out that defending our country would require some sacrifices.We are in great danger. The terrorists are fanatic Muslims. They believe that it is okay, even their duty, to kill anyone who will not convert to Islam. It has been estimated that about one third or over three hundred million Muslims are sympathetic to the terrorists cause...Hitler and Tojo combined did not have nearly that many potential recruits. So...we either win it - or lose it - and you ain't gonna like losing. Hopefully, your children can adjust to becoming Muslim, if we lose.America is not at war. The military is at war. America is at the mall. Annonymous

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane. - Philip K. Dick