The Big Lie

A letter to the editor found at WorldNetDaily:

[Joseph Farah:] I read with interest your article about the nontheist congressman from California.

Where did you learn your history? The United States was the shining example of a secular constitution and government. Can you show me where God is mentioned in the Constitution? And you may take any angle you like, but most of our Founding Fathers were borderline theists at best. Fact, documented. The Taliban was able to build a theocracy of violent zealots by miseducation and misrepresentation of the origin of Islam. You seem to be taking the same tack yourself.

Would you like to live in a country of zealots out to kill every non-Christian? That certainly is the way it looks from here. Get your god out of Washington; he was never invited!

SL


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I've noticed that the more ignorant or dishonest a person is, the more willing he becomes to proclaim his ignorance or dishonesty from the highest rooftop. Let's see what we've got: the U.S. government was intended as a secular institution; our Founders were barely theists; Islam is distorted by Al-Killya and Taliban types; and Christianity is an "Amen" away from producing self-detonating Jihadis for Jesus. Before I continue, I'd like to commend the author for being wrong so many times in such a short letter; that requires skill in the art of cluelessness.

The United States government was never intended as a godless body. Our Constitution reveals a thoroughly Christian worldview, and the Declaration of Independence--which the writer ignores as irrelevant to his false argument--does mention God. There's nothing secular about our founding documents, nor our government in its conception. That these documents and institutions may be twisted into secular variants or obtusely misinterpreted says nothing about the original intentions of the people who conceived and/or penned them.

Regarding religious affiliations, the majority of the Founders were Christians, not "borderline theists." We had an atheist or two, and some Unitarian deists and what are known as theistic rationalists, but these latter two groups are a far cry from secularists. Understand, too, that the non-Christian theists of that day were believers in Jesus' moral authority, and in the basic worth of Christian principles. They rejected the specific claims of revelation, such as Christ's godhood; sad as this is, it does not a secular humanist make.

As for Talibanites and Muslim terrorist groups perverting true Islam, I'll just say that history, the Koran, and the Hadith (teachings & sayings of Muhammed) do not bear out this falacious assertion. Further, since Christianity has neither the same roots, nor similar priorities, nor even the same god or basic teachings as Islam, the contention that Christians--fundamentalist, or otherwise--pose a terror threat to the world is ludicrous and, again, not borne out by observable reality. Of course, that doesn't impede the Goebbelsian Big Lie policy on the part of those who have a vested interest in seeing Christianity's influence on this country eroded.

The bottom line is that the notion of Church and State separation as contemporarily understood emanates from a deliberate warping of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, not from the desires of those who founded this once-great nation.