Democrat


​Christianity

God is love. God is good. We are sinners. The penalty for sin is death (Romans 6:23), namely the Second Death in the Lake of Fire (Revelation 21:8). But God so loved the world that he gave his one and only begotten son, Jesus Christ, so that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

The Constitution of the United States says nothing about God except at the very end of the document when it gives the year of its ratification:

“Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the twelfth....

The only other reference the Constitution makes about religion is the First Amendment which says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

This was a good idea back in the late 18th century. In those days, Christians were fighting and killing each other. One Christian thought the other Christian was a heretic and that he had the wrong Jesus. There were colonies in America who would go to war with each other over religion. To establish a religion or church meant 1) to levy taxes on everyone and give some or all of the tax money to that particular established church, and 2) that the laws and tenets of that one church were the laws and tenets of the entire colony. So that’s the beauty of the Constitution. No one is forced to contribute to someone else’s church, and no one is forced to obey laws or believe in something in the Bible that he doesn’t believe needs to be observed.

Though the Constitution only mentions religion and church in that there is not to be any establishment of a church, the Constitution is, in a way, a religious document. As Christians, our Founding Fathers realized that man is sinner and that any government under one man would be evil. They therefore instituted a government with a separation of branches or what we call checks and balances. The power of the federal government would be divided into three branches: the legislative branch in which Congress makes the laws, the executive branch in which the president would enforce the laws, and the judicial branch in which the Supreme Court decides if a law is Constitutional. They would be opposed to each other to make sure none of the branches becomes too powerful.

Another way the Constitution is a religious (or Christian) document is that it was meant for a religious people. It’s been said that Europeans came to Latin America looking for gold; while Europeans came to Anglo America looking for God. The Constitution is said to be the supreme law of the land; but it is God’s laws that we follow. The Constitution was made for, and only made for, a God-fearing people who didn’t need many laws for its citizens to obey. That’s what John Adams, our second president, said in October 11, 1798 when he wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

http://www.beliefnet.com/resourcelib/docs/115/Message_from_John_Adams_to_the_Officers_of_the_First_Brigade_1.html

John Adams gives the reason why we need to be a religious people in the sentence before this statement: “Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”

Let’s take a look at those four words. First is avarice. Avarice is greed and the desire to be rich; an inordinate desire to gain and hoard wealth. That sounds very much like our society. On our TV and radio sets, commercials flood the airwaves. We hear, see and crave all the goodies that are offered to us. Shows like The Price Is Right and Let’s Make A Deal have been on for ages since I can remember. When the ultimate prize is offered on these shows--A BRAND NEW CAR!!!--everybody goes hysterical. And which of us, including yours truly, wouldn’t want a lot of money. In fact, my math teacher at Erie Community College told us, “There is nothing more important than money.” Our children go to college to get a good education to get a good job, and to make a lot of money. We have become just like our Latin American brothers. We have become seekers of gold rather than seekers of God.

The second is ambition. Our dictionary.com defines ambition as an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment: This is about government, so we’re talking about power. It’s hard for a person who wants to be a congressman/woman or president not to be ambitious. In the old days, we had to drag George Washington out of his Mount Vernon home and almost force him to be our first president. They had to travel great distances by horseback to get to the capital. Nowadays, we travel those distances by jet plane. A congressman spends most of his time campaigning for reelection.

The third is revenge. The legal name for revenge is lawsuit. We have more lawyers per 1000 people than any country in the world. We sue for just about anything. We even sue our own doctors. Some people make a living suing any trivial reason they can find.

The last is gallantry. Looking this word up in the dictionary, we find that it means nobility, heroic, courageous, the courteous attention to a lady. That doesn’t seem bad. One or two unfavorable terms might be audacity and perhaps snobbery. Other than those two words, it’s hard to find fault with gallantry. The word isn’t even found in the Bible. Perhaps it is if it’s the same thing as pride, high mindedness, as well as egotistical and arrogant. Another possibility is that we are relying on persons of title who claim to be authorities particularly on the so-called science of evolution.

Though we have not always acted like a Christian nation, we still had Christian values. We may have had slavery in the past, but by our Christian values, we were able to abolished it. We are a generous people. We help others who are in need of help. When we vote for a president, we want him (or her) to be honest, and preferably a Christian.

The importance of being a Christian nation is stated in the Declaration of Independence. Our Creator gave us certain inalienable rights, which include life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. ( I was going to say that we owe our allegiance to God and no more to the King of England.) During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech known as the Gettysburg Address. He said we are one nation under God. We have acted as such from that time on. We used the Bible to swear upon when our officials take office. We swear on the Bible when we are in court. We have Thanksgiving Day to give thanks to God for all the blessings he has bestowed upon us. We have a federal holiday on December 25th that celebrates the birthday of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. We say the Pledge of Alliance to the Flag in which we recognize that we are one nation under God. We passed laws that freed the slaves, gave native American Indians citizenship, and gave women the right to vote. We are a generous and Christian nation. We give money to help the poor. We even help other nations with our foreign aid.

We are truly one nation. We have grown to 50 states including Alaska and Hawaii. We are the 3rd largest nation in the world in terms of population. We are tied together with highways, telephone lines, satellite dishes, and airports. That part of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is absolutely firm and sure. In fact, many of us around the country are dependent on the federal government for our social security benefits. We are one nation, just like Germany is one nation, just like Australia is one nation.

But we as one nation “under God” are becoming unglued. It seemed to have started after the Scopes Trial. The Bible was under attack. Evolution is fact. (It is NOT. I will show you later.) How can you argue about what’s under our feet--all the dinosaur bones that are millions of years old? How can you argue about star light from distant galaxies traveling million of light years to earth instead of six thousand years like it says in the Bible? Then the Supreme Court ruled that the Bible could not be taught in our public schools. At least it was not required to be taught in our public schools. And prayer was also banned from our public schools. The argument is that we all belong to different religions, therefore we should play it safe and not teach religion at all. Let the parents teach their children their religion. That is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind when public schools were first established. According to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, “Religion, morality and knowledge being essential to good government and the happiness of man kind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

Washington’s Farewell Address: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports

But instead of teaching the Bible and praying in school, educators are forbidden to do such things. One teacher at a public school who simply had a Bible on his desk which he would read in privacy of own time and place was severely reprimanded.

Another law which sneaked into our society and our American way of life is that which was introduced by then Senator Lynden Johnson to ban the endorsement of candidates by churches on the penalty of losing their tax-free status. As a result, churches cannot help their parishioners decide who the best candidate for office is. Is this what our Founding Fathers envisioned for us? A government that muzzles the church pastors so that that they cannot endorse a candidate?


We need to strengthen the Christian values and principles that made our nation great.


Jesus told a parable about a man that is compared to a house where a demon lived. The demon decided to leave and find a better place. But all it could find was desert places. He decided to go back to the house he came from. When he got there, he found it swept clean and put in order. So then he goes and invites seven other demons more evil than himself. Jesus said, “And the last state of that man is worse than the first.” In other words, nature hates a vacuum. You just can’t have “empty” high schools, colleges, and universities. A secular school where no Christianity is taught will soon be teaching humanism, evolution, communism, Islam and other doctrines of demons.


Another parable Jesus taught was in Matthew 7:24-27 where he said, “Therefore whosoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house upon a rock. And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house; and it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that hears these sayings of mine and does them not shall be likened to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. And the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it.”


That’s why it is important that we make Christianity the foundation of the Constitution of the United States.


This is what I believe we should incorporate into our Constitution, not as law, but something like The Preamble, as part of our national philosophy. It comes from the Lutheran Service Book and is as follows:

I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heave and earth
And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried.
He descended into hell.
On the third day He rose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven
and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
From thence He will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy Christian Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.


This is what we should make law: the reading of the Bible everyday in public school from kindergarten to the last day of college. It won’t be necessary to obey everything in it, but we should have frequent quizzes to determine the strength of our knowledge or at least how we compare to what is in the Bible. These test scores should be made available to the public, especially the ones who run for public office.