http://www.thebulletin.us/site/news.cfm?newsid=19124234&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=618959&rfi=6
Lillback, Kennedy Townsend Debate Church-State Issues
By: Bradley Vasoli, The Bulletin
12/18/2007
Philadelphia - Rev. Peter Lillback, president of the Providence Forum, and
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a Democrat former lieutenant governor of
Maryland, discussed religion in public life at the National Constitution
Center yesterday.
Respectively a Presbyterian minister and a daughter of the late Catholic
Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and niece of President John F. Kennedy, the two
offered vastly different approaches to religion in the public square,
though they both said they see a place for it. Both have written recent
books about the subject, Mrs. Townsend's entitled Failing America's
Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God with Politics and Losing
Their Way and Mr. Lillback's entitled Wall of Misconception: Does the
Separation of Church and State Mean the Separation of God and Government?
John DiIulio, a former head of President Bush's Office of Faith-Based and
Community Initiatives and a professor of political science at the
University of Pennsylvania moderated the discussion.
Mr. Lillback averred that public officials inevitably make at least
occasional mention of their faith because it is so interwoven into the
tapestries of their worldviews.
"Your faith does influence you," he said. "It comes from your conscience. I
believe faith is so dynamic, when you pretend it isn't you become more and
more a hypocrite all the time."
Mrs. Townsend never spoke against public expressions of faith, but
emphasized she believed religion is suited to more than merely addressing
issues of embryonic stem-cell research, abortion and same-sex marriage
which in her view have dominated the religious discourse of the American
center-right.
Most of her comments on spirituality bespoke an unsubtle leftist
collectivism. "Religion can open us up to the 'other'," she averred. "I
think we're saved together, in a community," she said a bit later. "That's
the kind of faith that I think we need in our country."
Attempting to explain her view that Democrat politicians have given more
appropriate rhetorical treatment to religion than Republicans, she said
that it matters not merely "what you do" but "who you are". She asserted,
based on account of the leftist evangelical minister Jim Wallis, that Bush
has admitted to never having spent any spare time helping the poor and
questioned whether he had a Christian's commitment to aiding the
downtrodden.
"You kind of figure he doesn't really mean it," she said.
The former lieutenant governor, a practicing Catholic, declined to express
the same distaste for the atheistic left she did for the theistic right.
"I'm not worried about people who say they don't believe," she said.
Mr. Lillback, however, did not find so benign the burgeoning popularity of
atheistic public intellectuals like evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins
and Daniel C. Dennett.
"I think it is important that we are not over-optimistic about atheists,"
he said. "Atheists are very important people." He noted that the spread of
rigidly secular Marxism had ended the lives of about 70 million during the
twentieth century.
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You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Historical Reality SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
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.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
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USAF LT. COL (Ret) Buffman (Glen P. Goffin) wrote
"You pilot always into an unknown future;
facts are your only clue. Get the facts!"
That philosophy 'snipit' helped to get me, and my crew, through a good
many combat missions and far too many scary, inflight, emergencies.
It has also played a significant role in helping me to expose the
plethora of radical Christian propaganda and lies that we find at
almost every media turn.
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THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
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