Jefferson On Seperation Of Church And State

Thomas Jefferson in 1802 wrote a letter to the Banbury Baptist Association in response to their overture. They were concerned Congress might do as some states had already done and name a specific denomination as the official national denomination. The Baptists in Connecticut were chaffing over having to pay to support the Congregationalist church which was the official state church in their state.

Jefferson was a masterful politician. His opponents, the Federalists, accused him of being an atheist. He was at best a deist, perhaps an agnostic, and suspicioned of being an atheist. To counter the claims of him being an atheist he used pious tones assuring them of his prayers: “I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common Father and Creator of man, and tender you for yourselves and your religious association, assurances of my high respect and esteem.”

The Baptists were his supporters and primarily voted Democratic-Republican. He wrote to appease and console them. Some states had state supported church like Connecticut. Some wanted an official national denomination.

The issue really was not Christianity, it was denominationalism. Jefferson’s position did not entail hostility toward religion in government. He even invited people to join him in prayer at his second inauguration.

He negotiated a treaty with the Kaskaskia Indians designating federal money to build a church and provide ministers. Weigh that against today’s interpretation of the establishment clause.

Foreign to Jefferson’s concept today’s application of the principle of separation undercuts the idea of freedom of religion. If all freedoms noted in the First Amendment were interpreted to be restricted like the part related to religion, we would lose our freedom of speech, the press, the right of assembly and the right to petition Government for a redress of grievances. They are all grouped together in the First Amendment. Take for example the freedom of the press. Our free press is protected by the amendment from government interference. Banning the free press is a frightening thought. How would the public respond today if the right to petition the Government were prohibited?

Why Jefferson ever got involved in this debate is puzzling. He never used the phrase related to a wall of separation again. He was out of the country when the Constitution was adopted and the First Amendment debated. He never sat on the Supreme Court. Yet, one misunderstood statement in his letter to the Banbury Baptists is the dominant issue in the debate of separation of church and state. His metaphor, “a wall of separation” is the basis of today’s law on the subject.

Justice Hugo Black, a member of the Ku Klux Klan and arch anti-Christian issued the ruling in 1947 in the Everson v. Board of Education. In an amicus brief filed by Everson  he warned against turning the wall into an iron curtain.

It is worth hearing the great detective Sherlock Holmes again. He got it right when he said, “We are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of facts — of absolute fact — from the embellishment of theorists.”

God’s Judgement Of Nations

Not everybody has the same world view. That is, not everyone sees alike. Some have a secular world view with a spectrum ranging from a humanistic philosophy, to asceticism, to deism, and various points in between. Others hold a biblical world view. That is they tend to interpret life in light of the teachings of the Bible. This too is a broad field of belief.
Within this latter school of thought is the idea expressed by Benjamin Franklin at the time of the drafting of the Constitution: “…God governs in the affairs of nations….” That is, God is involved in the human arena. He is active in lives and events. He has been so excluded in the market place seldom do people try to understand things going on around them in light of this.
The biblical record reveals God judges nations in time. To say that is to call in a firestorm of criticism. Not to say it is to look the other way when confronted by reality.
He often judges in kind. Let me illustrate. As a child I disobeyed my mother and slipped to eat pickles she had forbidden me to eat. As always she caught me. I was delighted when she  invited me to eat another. Then yet another and another. Based on my experience I can confirm pickles taste a lot better going down than they do coming up. I had been judged in kind.
The Bible speaks of a time when the condition of a society is such God gives them up and to what He gives them up. It is so much of what they want they get sick of it.
Many believe God is judging America in kind. We evidenced greed was good and excess was acceptable. Individually millions of people and government entities exercised greed and our society including individuals and institutions are suffering the consequence.
Having thrown off normal moral restraints culturally we have said we want sexual freedom and an entertainment community that espoused promiscuity. If God is punishing us in kind the proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases, broken homes, undesired pregnancies, and emotional problems are the in kind discipline. He is giving us what we wanted and the unwanted consequences.
We have tried to blame everyone and everything for the senseless shooting in Arizona. Different political parties, social classes, gun advocates, our national mental health program, and likely even Amos and Andy have been blamed.
The Arizona case in point involved a person who appears to have mental and/or emotional problems. Blame that. Our national self-flagellation does little good. Aside from head cases few people are willing to say there is a heart problem in our nation. If however the travesty were to motivate us to see this as a time of moral reform then benefits can result.
The rash of evil being suffered by our nation has its origin in individual hearts. It is a moral problem. “Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, and blasphemies… (Matthew 15:19). Check the media, even our advertisements, and see if these things are glamorized and popularized. It is this root that must be addressed to avoid the fruit.
Benjamin Franklin also said, “…all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter.” Here? Is our nation suffering in kind here, that is, now?
To think of changing America one person at a time may be a great act of faith. To think of doing it any other way is an act of lunacy.
Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

The Young Earth: The Sun As Evidence

THE YOUNG EARTH: THE SUN AS EVIDENCE
You don’t know what you don’t know, you know.
I don’t know how evolution is possible. There are persons who don’t know how creation is possible. If both, I said both, adherents of both schools of thought were candid they would admit their belief is an act of faith.
I have difficulty in having faith in evolution because of facts. Consider one.
Dr. John Eddy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Aram Boomazian, a mathematician with S. Ross and Company, have found evidence that the sun contracts at about 0.1% per century. That is about five feet per hour. Don’t get alarmed the diameter of the sun is about one million miles. The rate of shrinkage is small but continual.
That means the sun was larger in the past than now by 0.1% per century. If that rate has remained constant 100 thousand years ago the sun would have been twice its present size then.
Evolutionary science says between 500 million and 2,000 million years would have been required for there to have been organic evolution. About 20 million years ago one major part of evolution is alleged to have taken place. That was the evolution of man from primates began.
Going back to the sun and setting its shrinkage in reverse gives an interesting time table. The radius changes about 2.5 feet per hour. The distance from the earth to the sun is approximately 93 million miles. There are 5,280 feet per mile. Running that model in reverse the sun would have been so large around 20 million B.C. its surface would have touched the surface of earth. Around 100 thousand B.C. the sun would have been twice its present size.
Since 500 million to 2,000 million years are required for evolution time runs out on the theory.
This is so damaging to the theory of evolution that its proponents, without proof, say the sun has undergone temporary shrinkages and expansions as small fluctuating oscillations in its over all regular evolutionary development. This is highly improbable in that the sun burns 4.2 tons of itself every second. There is no evidence this can be re-supplied.
It must be conceded, the concept of creation takes a lot of faith. A lot. However, it takes even more to have enough faith to believe evolution.
Evolution tenets exclude God not just from origins but all of life. If there is no God there is no good and/or evil. For there to be good and evil objective truth is required. That is, there is an object, in this instance God, who determines what is good and what is evil; right or wrong. If there is no objective truth there remains only subjective truth. We are each the subject determining what is good and what is evil. We become laws unto ourselves.
Thus, if subject “A” believes it is OK to lie and deceive and subject “B” believes only truth is right there is conflict. If “A” believes what is thine is mine and “B” believes in personal property rights there is conflict. That is how subject truth works.
If there is no divine Arbiter, that is God, there is no order to the universe or in the universe. Creation shouts there is a God. Reality reveals He loves us.
It is that love that is celebrated throughout the Christian community at Easter.

Awesome Alaska

What is our eastern most state?

What is our western most state?

The eastern most is Alaska. The western most is Alaska.

Alaska is so big it crosses the 180th parallel, the International Date Line, making it both our western and eastern most state.

Alaska is BIG. The distance from tiny Attu Island in the Aleutian Chain to the area down along the Southeast coast of Alaska, know as the Pan Handle, would span from San Diego to Tallahassee. It is larger than our twenty-one smallest states combined. It is bigger than Texas, California, Montana, combined with our three smallest states. It covers the same distance as four times zones in the lower 48 states. It is one-fifth the size of the lower 48 states combined.

Barrow is so far north they have 82 straight days the sun never sets.

Under the North Slope of Alaska there are 10 billion barrels of oil. The Trans-Alaskan Pipeline running from the North Slope to the Gulf of Alaska when full of oil contains over $300 million worth of oil. If the oil of Alaska were put in barrels and stacked one on top of the other the stack would reach to the moon —- eighteen times.

There are between 12 and 15 volcanos perking at all times. One-half of the glaciers in the world are in Alaska. There are 5,000 rivers of ice. The Malispina Glacier is larger than the country of Switzerland.

They have unimaginable mountains. Mt. Whitney in California is the tallest mountain in the Continental United States. Alaska has 14 peaks that are taller.

The tallest mountain in the world, Mt. Everest, sits on a plateau base of 14,000 feet before soaring up. If its base were at sea level as is Mt. Denali, then Mt. Everest would be only 15,000 feet. Measured the same way Denali, also known as Mt. McKinley, is 20,320 high.

We have just returned from fishing for Silver Salmon and men in Alaska. Three days were spent on a yacht in Resurrection Bay fishing for salmon. The weather one day caused me to wonder if we were type casting for “The Deadliest Catch.”

I visited at length with men bating their lines to go flounder fishing 14 hours out at sea. These men earn $130,000 a year to make six trips and they do earn it.

I fished for men at the Anchorage Baptist Temple the largest church in the state where the funeral of Senator Ted Stephens was held the same week.

The church has always been active in community life related to social, ethical, and moral issues. The secular press engaged in a prolonged campaign to discredit the pastor and church. For sometime it hurt the church badly. To counter this the church has bought five radio stations and one TV station that give a fair representation to Christianity, church, and pastor. They cover the vast territory just described and are changing lives.

Their harvest of souls is much greater than even my catch of Silver Salmon —- and I did well.

What Worry Does For You

Do you ever worry? Have you ever thought about what worry is? It is a thought, a negative thought, nothing more. To win over worry before leaving thinking about the troubling item, project a positive thought on the same subject.

Worry is simply pulling tomorrow’s clouds over today’s sunshine.

Change is a catalyst to worry and there is a lot of change going on. Out of the old west comes an illustration to the paralyzing influence of fear and its co-joined twin worry.

His name, “Black Bart”, struck terror in hearts. During his reign of terror which lasted from 1875 to 1883, he was credited with stealing the bags and breath from twenty-nine different stagecoach crews. He did it all without firing a shot. His weapon was his reputation. His ammunition was intimidation. A black hood hid his face. No victim ever saw him. No artist ever sketched his features. No sheriff could ever track his trail. He never fired a shot or took a hostage. He didn’t have to. His presence was enough to paralyze.

As it turned out, he wasn’t anything to be afraid of, either. When the hood came off, there was nothing to fear. When the authorities finally tracked down the thief, they didn’t find a blood thirsty bandit from Death Valley; they found a mild-mannered druggist from Decatur, Illinois. The man the papers pictured storming through mountains on horseback was, in reality, so afraid of horses he rode to and from robberies in a buggy. He was Charles E. Boles (AKA Bowles, Bolton) — the bandit who never fired a shot, because he never once loaded his gun.

If most of us would “unhood” those things causing most of the worry in our lives we would find them to be less formidable than we imagine them to be.

Worry is the only sin we brag about. “I worried so much I couldn’t sleep.” “You think that is bad. I worried so much I couldn’t eat.”

There are two things about which we should never worry.

Never worry about things you can change. If you can change them worrying about it will only delay the accomplishment and give stress.

Second, never worry about things you can’t change. Worrying about them won’t change them. If they are beyond your control worrying about them won’t change them.

There are two things about which never to worry: things you can change and things you can’t change. Eliminate those two and you will have no worries.

The expression “fear not” is found throughout the Bible. Most often the verb tense means “stop being afraid.” Like you, I face a lot of uncertainty and many perplexing challenges. I have found a formula for dealing with worry: “What time I am afraid I will trust in the Lord” (Psalm 56:3).

Thus alacrity replaces angst. The next time your counterpart to “Black Bart” shows up try it.