If God’s truths aren’t in government, does that mean the Devil’s lies will be? It’s a question some may ask given the longstanding attempt to purge faith from public life, an effort epitomized by a Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) ad run during the last Democrat debate.
Capturing the top spot on Google post-debate, the commercial features a 2014 video of presidential son Ron Reagan proclaiming his lifelong atheism and saying he isn’t afraid of burning in Hell. But whatever his immortal soul’s destination, he should ponder whether his beliefs could create Hell on Earth.
“Hi, I’m Ron Reagan, an unabashed atheist,” he opens saying, “and I’m alarmed by the intrusions of religion into our secular government” (video below).
Reagan is “saying he objects to the over 84% of Americans who are religious injecting their beliefs into government policies,” writes American Thinker’s Tom Trinko. “Essentially, he’s calling for the institution of his faith-based belief system, atheism, as a national religion in direct contradiction to the First Amendment.”
“The FFRF works hard to impose its faith-based beliefs on America by using dishonest judges to exclude people of faith from the public square,” Trinko continues, explaining his position. “They’re constantly suing to end voluntary prayer in public settings. They apparently believe that the 3% of Americans who are atheist have the right to never hear anything religious, and the 84-plus percent of Americans who are religious have to shut up and sit down as a result.”
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But “demanding that people who believe in God be denied input into how they’re governed is effectively creating an atheist faith-based Church of America and declaring that only members of that atheist church are allowed input into how our country is run,” Trinko sums up.
Yet contrary to Reagan’s simplistic ad claim, irreligious government is “not what the Framers intended,” Trinko further points out. “Thomas Jefferson, who coined the now infamous ‘wall of separation between church and state,’ gladly used government money to fund a Catholic priest to minister to American Indians.”
Explanation? Contrary to myth, Jefferson’s wall (leftists do like some walls, apparently) — mentioned in an 1802 letter — is merely a fed/state barrier preventing the central government from imposing religion on the states. It has nothing whatsoever to do with keeping religion out of government. Proof?
Aside from Jefferson’s funding of the priest, Congress has been opening with prayers (exclusively Christian for ages and still mostly so) ever since its 1789 birth. Thus, anyone asserting such expression is unconstitutional is making a startling claim:
The men who composed the First Amendment had no idea what they meant when they wrote it!
But judges a century-plus removed from our founding?
They do!
Speaking of which, no mention of any “wall” is even in the First Amendment; notions to the contrary are the invention of those usurpative judges.
Moreover, Trinko correctly notes that the “First Amendment enjoins only the federal, not state, government from establishing a religion.” For sure, in order to allow the official state churches that existed at our nation’s founding, the Establishment Clause specifically constrains only “Congress” — period.
Trinko also makes a great point, asking rhetorically, “Can you imagine the outcry if a Christian group called the ‘Freedom from Atheism Foundation’ demanded that atheism be thrown out of the public square?” In reality, the “separation of church and state” obsession is based on an unexamined bias, one exposed as fallacious with a simple argument:
If the “religious” ideas in question really have been handed down by God, Creator of the Universe and Inerrant Author of All, don’t we actually have a duty to infuse our public sphere with them? Is it not then an imperative that we immerse schoolchildren in this divine light? Of course, an atheist will respond, “Not everyone worships sky fairies! These are just man-made beliefs.”
Yet if so, why, atheist friends, do you say the man-made beliefs we happen to call “secular” may be in the public square, but the man-made beliefs we happen to call “religious” may not be? If they’re all man-made, wherein lies the difference?
Conclusion: Either these beliefs are man-made, in which case they can share the table with other man-made ideas and may be in the public square.
Or they’re from God and must be there.
And what are the consequences when they’re not? George Washington warned of a major one in his 1796 farewell address, saying, “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” But did this just reflect a bias of the time — or the brilliance of the timeless?
I examined how belief in God or lack thereof influences conception of right and wrong in my 2013 essay “The Acceptance Con“ in the following segment, which I urge you to consider carefully:
If God exists and has a will — what is often called His “law” or Truth — then we can say that morality is something real, existing apart from and being above man. Yet if God doesn’t exist and man is, as Protagoras said, “the measure of all things,” then humans are the source of what we only may call morality. And the operative word is “call” because we are then confronted with a striking proposition: Morality doesn’t really exist. After all, imagine we learned that 90 percent of the world loved vanilla but hated chocolate. Would this make chocolate “bad” or “wrong”? It would just be a matter of whatever flavor works for you. But then how does it make any more sense to say that murder is “bad” or “wrong” if the only reason we do so is that the vast majority of the world prefers that we not kill other humans in a manner the vast majority considers “unjust”? If consensus preference is all it is, it then falls into the same category as flavors: taste. This explains why it’s no surprise that “whatever works for you” is now often applied to behavior as well.
To analogize the matter, it’s as with the fact that the zebra exists and thus is a Physical Truth while a unicorn is a function of imagination. No amount of believing in unicorns will make them real nor will even the most ardent denial of zebras’ reality make them imaginary; moreover, adults generally don’t deny that zebras exist nor insist that unicorns do — such is the power of recognized reality. Likewise, when people believe in God and His will — that Moral Truth exists — they tend to take morality seriously. And when they believe it’s just a “social construct”? They’re then more likely to see it as occupying the realm of unicorns.
And if they think the matter through more thoroughly, they may say, to quote a man I once knew, “Murder isn’t wrong; it’s just that society says it is.”
So what is the source of that characteristic mistake of moderns, moral relativism, with its familiar refrains “That’s your truth; someone else’s may be different” and “Everything is a matter of perspective”? It’s clear it is atheism, which absolutely has the corollary that there is no morality. (Note: This isn’t to say, as atheists usually assume, that only the faithful can be moral; the godless cannot. The point is that if divine will isn’t real, no one can be “moral” because you cannot conform to a non-existent standard. “Moral” is as incomprehensible a term in a universe without Truth as “physical” is in one without matter.) And this is why George Washington was right. Just as people wouldn’t abide by the “laws” of physics if they didn’t believe they existed (the idea jumping off a building and flying sounds like fun) and there weren’t obvious and immediate consequences for their violation (splat!), they won’t be likely to abide by morality if they believe its laws don’t exist; this is especially true since the personal consequences — the spiritual and emotional harm you may suffer — aren’t as obvious.
Neither are the symptoms of pancreatic cancer, by the way, until it’s terminal.
Atheists (and I used to be an agnostic) who’d dispute this should consider that fellow atheist, the aforementioned man who stated that only “society says” murder is wrong. How would you respond to him? For according to your beliefs, atheist friends, society is all there is to say anything.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
