Separation of Church and State 1
Feb 10th, 2008 Posted in Constitution, Faith, Liberty | no comment »
For the period of history before our nation came into being, people believed that rights and freedom came from God, but that they then flowed to a king, and that the king gave these rights to the people as he saw fit. Our Founding Fathers turned this system on his head when they proposed to start a government that recognized that freedom and rights were given by God to everyone, and that people then apportioned these rights back to the government as they saw fit.
In this nation today, we hear a great deal about a “separation of church and state”. When I ask people where that appears in our founding documents, most people hem and haw and the bolder ones cite “the 1st Amendment”. But neither the word “state” nor the word “separation” are in that Amendment. When I give this reasoning, the answer I get is, “But that’s what they meant“. Isn’t it? How do we know that?
The question – though some still have it – is not whether or not the Founding Fathers were predominantly Christian in their outlook (they were), the question is, “What did they intend when penning the Constitution?” Read the rest of this entry »
