PART IV
:|From: ambro8se searle ( )
:|Subject: Re: Government churches should be constitutionally rabid
:|Newsgroups: misc.education.home-school.christian, alt.politics.libertarian, >:|alt.politics.usa.constitution, alt.politics, alt.education, misc.education, alt.atheism
:|Date: 2003-11-17 20:19:28 PST
buckeye-ELO@nospam.net wrote in message
news:<rsjhrv8v1a4t65sfruk3napobjlumnl1i1@4ax.com>...
:|> (ambrose searle aka richard gardiner) wrote:
:|>
:|> The impartial reader will carefully consider what Ambrose Searle AKA
:|> Richard Gardiner has posted. In fact, I strongly recommend that. I
:|> recommend they carefully examine any cites that Searle/Gardiner has
:|> provided.
:|>
:|> That same impartial reader will then carefully examine all the information
:|> found at he following site:
:|>
:|> Christian Orthodoxy And The Founders
:|> http://members.tripod.com/~candst/orthodox.htm
:|Let's examine that "impartial" site again, shall we?
OK.
:|Allison then cites Barry Schwartz, a social psychologist, NOT A
:|HISTORIAN, much less a religious historian, as proof that George
:|Washington was not a Christian. Whose next? Is Allison going to invoke
:|Dr. Phil or maybe Oprah to settle for us the question of whether John
:|Adams was just kidding when he said that the revolution was achieved
:|on the principles of Christianity?
LOL, the old M.O. at work.
Smoke screens consisting of sarcasms, ridicule, etc. However, noting of
substance to be a rebuttal of that which was presented. I actually
presented hundreds of cites and respected (not by you of course, because
they don't say what you are trying to sell in these groups, BUT GUESS
WHAT, YOUR NOT A HISTORIAN EITHER. You are someone that has spent a decent
percentage of your life going to school. You studied to be a minister and
sort of been a minister in the past as well as a elementary history
teacher. Whoooopppeeeeeee do, LOL . You co-authored with a man who has
serious ties with the religious right that can be documented,. a book for
use as a history text book in religious schools of the k-12 level, though I
think k-8 is a bit of a stretch,, and for those, particularly those of a
Protestant Christian leaning who home school) scholars and authors.
Now:
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"As President, Washington regularly attended Christian services, and
he was friendly in his attitude toward Christian values. However, he
repeatedly declined the church's sacraments. Never did he take communion,
and when his wife, Martha, did, he waited for her outside the sanctuary....
Even on his deathbed, Washington asked for no ritual, uttered no prayer to
Christ, and expressed no wish to be attended by His representative. George
Washington's practice of Christianity was limited and superficial because
he was not himself a Christian. In the enlightened tradition of his day, he
was a devout Deist--just as many of the clergymen who knew him suspected".
Source of Information: Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an
American Symbol, New York: The Free Press, 1987, pp. 174-175.)
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(1) Have you read the book, or are you just attacking it because it is
there because you have to attack it because it is threatening to your
position?
(2) Do you have any evidence to offer to show what is quoted above is
false?
(3) Schwartz is not the only person to have said the above, several other
scholars said the same. Thus you are going to have to try and poison
everyone against them as well.
Honors & Awards: Meigs Awards
Honors & Awards: Russsell Teaching Awards
William A. Owens Creative Research Award
Barry Schwartz Professor of Sociology
Barry Schwartz has received the William A. Owens Award for this
year. The Owens Award recognizes an outstanding body of scholarly or
creative activities in the social and behavioral sciences that has already
gained national and international recognition. Schwartz is America's
leading sociologist on history and collective memory. He is author of five
books, including the highly esteemed George Washington: The Making of an
American Symbol. Since 1982, . . .
http://www.uga.edu/columns/000424/research1.html
In addition one can learn more about him at the following
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=barry+schwartz%3B+george+washington&spell=1
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:|Allison also cites Garry Wills, who has some solid historical
:|credentials, but Allison seems to not realize that much of what Wills
:|says is what Allison has been working all his life to refute. To wit,
:|"America was, sociologically, a 'Christian (Protestant) nation' by
:|virtue of its dominant cultural values" (Wills)
Do you have a complete cite for the above. Nothing personal, but you have
exhibited over and over again a habit of misquoting and doctoring quotes.
Did Garry Wills say the following?
FROM: Christian Orthodoxy And The Founders
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/orthodox.htm
(1) By contrast, historian Garry Wills sees no mistake. "The framers of the
Constitution," he concludes, stitched together ideas from "constitutional
monarchies, ancient republics, and modern leagues... but we (the U.S.)
invented nothing, except disestablishment... No other government in the
history of the world had launched itself without the help of officially
recognized gods and their state connected ministers."29. . . [p. 84]
29. Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics, Simon and
Schuster, 1990. p. 383.
(2) Conclusion
Since this book is about religion in American politics, it has dealt
primarily with Protestant, and especially evangelical, Christianity. The
influence of that form of religion has been so preponderant that only
recently has the notion of America as "a Christian nation" become rightly
suspect. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor caused a flurry of criticism when she
endorsed that notion in 1989.1 Yet the Supreme Court referred to "this
Christian nation" in nineteenth-century cases.2 Abraham Lincoln regularly
used the term.3
To understand why the term is now offensive we must recognize exactly
what it meant through most of our history. It did not mean that
"JudeoChristian heritage" people invoke when they want to defend civil
religion of Tocqueville's sort or try to shoehorn prayer back into the
schools. The dominant Christianity of America tolerated when it did not
encourage anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. The "Judeo" part of the
mythical Judeo-Christian heritage was a Protestant reading of its "Old
Testament" as if that were the Jewish Scripture. There is more genuine
religious vision, much of it derived from the Jewish tradition, in recent
criticism of religious symbols than in condescending praise of the Jews as
preparers of the Christian testament. The ancient prohibition on idolatry
is a healthy warning against letting "civil religion" appropriate the
attributes of God. In most of our wars, as in dubious other matters like
slavery, we have indeed "taken God's name in vain."
America was, sociologically, a "Christian (Protestant) nation" by
virtue of its dominant cultural values, so long as those values were not
effectively challenged by others. Catholics withdrew from the national
school system to escape Protestantism, not secularism. Prayers were still
said, the Bible still read, in schools that the Catholic hierarchy objected
to-only it was the Protestant translation of the Bible that was used, and
the Protestant version of the Lord's Prayer. Nineteenth-century
Protestantism was not ecumenical. Those harking back to the "good old days"
of religion in public life forget just how exclusive that religion was.
America's culture was infused with Protestantism in the same way that,
according to Cardinal Newman, British literature was culturally Protestant.
As a Catholic, of course, he did not consider this historical fact
prescriptive, the expression of what should have been or had to be or must
forever be; but he told his fellows to face it as a historical fact: "We
cannot write a new Milton or a new Gibbon.."4 There are some givens of a
historical situation-and he was speaking de facto, not de lure. Catholics
should not deny the facts, he argued. They should face the obvious: "We
cannot destroy or reverse it the Protestant character of classical English
literature; we may confront and encounter it, but we cannot make it over
again."5
In the same way, there is no denying the Protestant consensus with
which this nation began-the anti-Catholicism expressed even in the
Declaration of Independence, the long exclusion of Jews from "Christian
organizations," the nativist resistance to other cultures. A Protestant God
led armies into war against the devil-worshiping Native Americans. African
gods could not be worshiped on America's soil when slaves were brought
here. Yet the first insights into the need to separate church and state
also came from Protestants-from people like John Endecott, Roger Williams,
and the Baptists. There were Protestant critics of slavery as well as
defenders-Anthony Benezet, for instance, in colonial and revolutionary
Philadelphia, breaking the law to teach slaves how to read. We have a
double heritage, even from the Protestant background that dominated our
culture for so long.
But few, even Protestants, want that exclusive aspect of our culture to
be maintained. That is why our history has been selectively rewritten,
foisting on us a premature ecumenism and mythical amity of
"judeo-Christian" elements. But it is our task, in a society of
increasingly complex articulation, to complete the effort of Madison in
removing religion from state ceremony and proclamations. We appreciate
better than Lincoln's contemporaries did his use of religious language to
question the complacent view that God is in agreement with armies that
invoke him. We value more those who follow conscience to deny that a
once-Christian culture must have a Christian state. A modern prophet like
Dr. King makes us understand the witness of those who found the "Christian
state" ungodly in its blessing of things like slavery.
Despite the Protestant presuppositions of our culture (many of them
unspoken), we have had a professed ideal of constitutional separation. That
gave to religion an initial, if minimal, freedom from crippling forms of
cooperation with the state. That, more than anything else, made the United
States a new thing on the earth, setting new tasks for religion, offering
it new opportunities. Everything else in our Constitution-separation of
powers, balanced government, bicameralism, federalism-had been anticipated
both in theory and practice. The framers aptly defended their handiwork
with citations from Polybius and Montesquieu and Hume, and with references
to the history of constitutional monarchies, ancient republics, and modern
leagues. We combined a number of these features in a way that was suitable
to our genius, as the drafters put itto what Montesquieu called the
national esprit. But we invented nothing, except disestablishment.
No other government in history had launched itself without the help of
officially recognized gods and their state-connected ministers. It is no
wonder that, in so novel an undertaking, it should have taken a while to
sift the dangers and the blessings of the new arrangement, to learn how
best to live with it, to complete the logic of its workings. We are still
grappling with its meaning for us. But, at the least, its meaning has been
one of freedom-the free exercise of the churches, free not only from
official obstruction but from compromising favors. A burden was lifted from
religion when it ceased to depend on the breath of princes, when it had
nothing by way of political office with which to lure or tempt people into
the fold or into the ministry. Thrown back on themselves, the churches were
encouraged to search for their own essence, make their moral case on truly
religious grounds, reward people in the proper spiritual currency. The
contradictory goals of political advancement and religious vocation were
not an omnipresent problem.
Corruption of church and state i
a mutual infection, whether mild or
extreme. Even in mild form, it leads to the quiet agony of Trollope's
Warden (Septimus Harding), baffled by pygmy clergy seeking preferment.At
its worst it leads to the horror of the medieval papacy Lord Acton's own
example of "absolute power [that] corrupts absolutely. "6
Our American churches have escaped the worst element of that
partnership-the effort to maintain theological consistency through changes
of political regimes; the cleansing of mud from ecclesiastical skirts after
official scandal; the labor to maintain spiritual strength in captivity,
like Samson stirring in his chains; the spectacle of disappointed clerics
who dwindle into bitter courtiers. Purity of teaching and practice is
easier to demand, and not always impossible of achievement. Mercenary
desires, though they can creep in on ministers from all other sides, are at
least not obtruded by the state. We stumble on no remnants of cuius regio
eius religio (each region its own religion), as even Queen Elizabeth II
does, obliged to change identities in moving from one realm to another:
Head of the English church south of the Scottish border, she becomes head
of the Presbyterian kirk north of it.
The fear, of course, was that a church freed of official power would be
neutered. But no careful look at our history can support such fear.
Religion has, admittedly, been a powerful force for social stability,
supporting indirectly the regime that offers free exercise to all beliefs;
but it has also been a prophetic voice of resistance to power when that is
unchecked by moral insight. The cleric in jail is an American tradition,
the conscientious objector, the practitioner of civil disobedience. The
Quaker Anthony Benezet denounced slavery to Patrick Henry, war to General
Howe, and the treatment of Arcadians to his local Philadelphia rulers.
Carrie Nation, like Ronald Reagan a Disciple of Christ, made fervent
war on saloons. The Underground Railway was run by holy criminals.
Religious radicals have extraordinary staying power-like Dorothy Day, who
went to jail for women's rights with Alice Paul in the 1920s, and with
Ammon Hennacy to protest nuclear war in the 1950s, feeding the poor and
defying the powerful, decade in and decade out. Of all the communes formed
in the wake of the 1960s, only religious ones seem to have survived into
the 1990s-Jonah House, Sojourners, the Committee for Creative Non-Violence.
The sanctuary movement offered a new underground railway for those fleeing
oppression in El Salvador and Guatemala.
The sanctuary movement of the 1980s renewed a religious drama played
out, over and over, in our supposedly secular world-the nocturnal gathering
for prayer, then the flight from police. The FBI sent bugged informers into
sanctuary churches. It paid spies like Jesus Cruz to smuggle refugees
alongide the movement's organizers, then to testify against them in the
Phoenix trial of 1985-86. 7
Jesus Cruz was an interesting name in this context, both the first and
the last name (cruz means "cross"-Jesus Cruz always wore one around his
neck). I think of him at Mass with the refugees, repeating that Last Supper
at which Jesus said the one who dipped a hand in the bowl with him would
betray him. In Cruz's case, the price was not thirty pieces of silver but
eighteen thousand dollars of tax-collected money. Here, as so often, the
church was not only separate from the state, but opposed to the state,
castigating it, breaking its laws, as Dr. King did, and Dorothy Day, and
Anthony Benezet. It is a part of our history we can be proud of, though our
elected representatives play the villains in the story. Roger Williams knew
that true religion must always be, in some measure, an underground affair.
1. Alan M. Dershowitz, "Justice O'Connor's Second Indiscretion," New
York Times, April 2, 1989.
2. People v. Ruggles (1811): "We Are a Christian people." Justice
Brewer in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States (1892): "This is a
Christian nation." Cf. Mark DeWolfe Howe, The Garden and the Wilderness:
Religion and Government in American Constitutional History (University of
Chicago, 1965), pp. 14, 29.
3. See Lincoln's order for Sabbath observance by the military, out of
"deference to the best sentiment of a Christian people," in Abraham
Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 18591865, edited by Don F. Fehrenbacher
(Library of America, 1989), p. 382. Also the resolution of slavery, as
disqualifying the South from entry "into the family of christian and
civilized nations" (ibid., p. 445-and cf. pp. 223, 433, 597, 627).
4. John Henry Newman, "English Catholic Literature," in The Idea of a
University (Oxford, 1976), p. 255.
5. Ibid., p. 259.
6. Acton's famous axiom was formulated in a letter of 1887 to Mandell
Creighton, a historian of the papacy. See Selected Writings of Lord Acton,
edited by J. Rufus Fears (Liberty Classics, 1985), vol. 2, p. 383.
7. 'Cf. Miriam Davidson, Convictions of the Heart: Jim Corbett and the
Sanctuary Movement (University of Arizona, 1988), pp. 115-17; Robert
Tomsho, The American Sanctuary Movement (Texas Monthly Press, 1987), pp.
159-67, 204-5.
Source of Information: Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American
Politics, Simon and Schuster, 1990. pp. 381-385. 383
(3) Despite the Protestant presuppositions of our culture (many of them
unspoken), we have had a professed ideal of constitutional separation. That
gave to religion an initial, if minimal, freedom from crippling forms of
cooperation with the state. That, more than anything else, made the United
States a new thing on the earth, setting new tasks for religion, offering
it new opportunities. Everything else in our Constitution-separation of
powers, balanced government, bicameralism, federalism-had been anticipated
both in theory and practice. The framers aptly defended their handiwork
with citations from Polybius and Montesquieu and Hume, and with references
to the history of constitutional monarchies, ancient republics, and modern
leagues. We combined a number of these features in a way that was suitable
to our genius, as the drafters put itto what Montesquieu called the
national esprit. But we invented nothing, except disestablishment.
No other government in history had launched itself without the help of
officially recognized gods and their state-connected ministers. It is no
wonder that, in so novel an undertaking, it should have taken a while to
sift the dangers and the blessings of the new arrangement, to learn how
best to live with it, to complete the logic of its workings. We are still
grappling with its meaning for us. But, at the least, its meaning has been
one of freedom-the free exercise of the churches, free not only from
official obstruction but from compromising favors. A burden was lifted from
religion when it ceased to depend on the breath of princes, when it had
nothing by way of political office with which to lure or tempt people into
the fold or into the ministry. Thrown back on themselves, the churches were
encouraged to search for their own essence, make their moral case on truly
religious grounds, reward people in the proper spiritual currency. The
contradictory goals of political advancement and religious vocation were
not an omnipresent problem.
Source of Information: Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American
Politics, Simon and Schuster, 1990. p. 383
--------------------------------------------------------------------
OH NO!!!!!!!!!!
Garry Wills who you sort of put a seal of approval on, sort of, cites
1. Alan M. Dershowitz, "Justice O'Connor's Second Indiscretion," New
York Times, April 2, 1989. The same Alan M. Dershowitz you said this
about:
[Gardiner AKA Searle said]
:|Allison cites good ole Alan Dershowitz. The great and mighty defender
:|of O.J. Simpson (I'm sure Allison thinks that the founders would have
:|all agreed that O.J. was innocent the same way they all agreed about
:|separating church and state).
LOL Major ***** up on your part. LOL
I wonder why you didn't mention any of these folks or sources who are also
quoted in that same section of the Orthodoxy article
A Documentary History of Religion in America to the Civil War, Ed,
by Edwin S. Gaustad, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (1982) pp. 226-27.
The American Heritage, History of Making the Nation 1783-1860,
American Heritage/Bonanza Books N.Y. (1987) pp 77-78
The Papers of James Madison, Volume 8, March 10, 1784- March 28,
1786. Edited by Robert A. Rutland, William M.E. Rachal. The University of
Chicago Press, (1973) pp 295-298.
Encyclopaedia Britannica s.v. "Religious and Spiritual Belief,
Systems of," (London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.), (1997, 26:569).
From a review of Allen Jayne's Jefferson's Declaration of
Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology. (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky. 1998. Pp. XIII, 245. The American Historical Review Vol.
104 # 3 June 1999. On line at
www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/104.3/br_36.html
The Rise of American Civilization, by Charles A. and Mary R. Beard.
(Vol. I., p. 449.)
Faith of Our Fathers, Religion and the New Nation. Edwin S.
Gaustad, Harper & Row, (1987) pp 77
Adrienne Koch and William Peden, eds., The Selected Writings of
John and John Quincy Adams (New York, 1946), 291-92
Harold O. J. Brown, God and Politics, Four Views on the Reformation
of Civil Government, Gary Scott Smith, ed. Presbyterian and Reformed
Publishing, 1989. p. 132.
Entry by Thomas Jefferson in his Anas. February 1, 1800, The
Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Selected and Edited by Saul K. Padover , The
Easton press. (1967) pp 217-218)
William Meade, Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia, 2
vols.; Philadelphia, 1857, I, 191). (Paul F. Boller, George Washington &
Religion, Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963, p. 26.)
William Lee Miller, "The Ghost of Freedoms Past," in The Washington
Post National Weekly Edition (13 October 1886), p. 23. ]
Frederick Clarkson, Eternal Hostility, The Struggle Between
Theoracy and Democracy. Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine (1997) 83-86
Robert Rutland, "The Courage to Doubt in a Secular Republic," in
James Madison on Religious Liberty, Prometheus Books, 1985. p. 208 [209].
As quoted by Leo Pfeffer, "The Establishment Clause: The
Never-Ending Conflict," in Ronald C. White and Albright G. Zimmerman, An
Unsettled Arena: Religion and the Bill of Rights, Grand Rapids, Michigan:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990, p. 72.)
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POOR FORM ON YOUR PART.
Dishonest and unethical perhaps, other things you display frequently.
:|This is what Brewer said in the Holy Trinity decision!
What Brewer said was dicta, and painted one sided, thus inaccurate
picture.
SEE:
Church of the Holy Trinity v U.S
1892 U.S. Church of the Holy Trinity v U.S., 143 U.S. 266
Legal research, analysis and writing by Susan Batte, Esq.
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/case17.htm
The "Christian Nation" Decision and Rebuttal.
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/holytrin.htm
The Supreme Court has Declared that the United States is a Christian
Nation. Research and writing by Susan Batte
http://candst.tripod.com/tnppage/arg7.htm
Holy Trinity and the Christian Nation Dicta. Research and writing by Susan
Batte
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/trinity.htm
Getting to Know Supreme Court Justice David J. Brewer. Researched by Susan
Batte and James Allison. Written by James Allison
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/brewer.htm
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:|This is what Amos and Gardiner say in Never Before in History.
LOL, cute,, You mean Gary Amos the Pat Robertson and Rushdoony fella and
Richard Gardiner AKA Ambrose Searle? (Grin)
What Gardiner as himself and Gardiner as Searle has had to say can be found
in the following
************************
Gardiner AKA Searle's church state posting history covering 3-99 to 902,
5/02 - 7/02 and this current year
http://makeashorterlink.com/?N16F22596
http://snurl.com/2ws8
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q54F21596 (up to date as of 11/18/03)
*************************
http://makeashorterlink.com/?I2AF32596
http://snurl.com/2wsb
*************************
TO BE CONTINUED WITH PART V SHORTLY
.
|
