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Tag Archives: First Amendment

What’s the Beef?

The lie cannot defeat the truth; evil cannot overcome good; and dark cannot cover light. Since the tower of Babel, Satan has attempted to use man to reach God. But he will never succeed, because God has built into every one of us. And so it is now. Our country was God’s idea, not man’s, and He has woven liberty into the fiber of our being. Evil may attempt to enslave us, but as Churchill said, “Americans will always do the right thing…after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.”

Good is waking up in our land and evil is being exposed for what it is. The most recent evidence is the Chick-fil-A episode. Dan Cathey, owner of the restaurant chain, voiced his opinion that marriage is between one man and one woman. Oh, horrors! What he said has been a tenet of our American society and the foundation of our culture since the beginning. Note that he did not attack individual homosexuals or their rights under the law. The fact is heterosexuals are not legally allowed to marry someone of the same sex either. Cathey merely stated his belief in the traditional definition of marriage.

The homosexual crowd immediately planned to protest the chain nationwide, while mayors threatened to ban the establishment from their cities. Chicago’s Rahm Emmanuel said that Chick-fil-A did not stand for the values of his city. That may be true. We all know that Chicago is the nation’s bastion of honesty in government. I’m sure he’s never heard of the Constitutional right of free speech, much less the first amendment’s guarantee to free exercise of religion.

Chick-fil-A is a class act. They have close on Sundays out of respect for the Sabbath, willing to sacrifice profits for their beliefs. Shouldn’t that the anti-business crowd happy? In support of the chain, Mike Huckabee suggested a Chick-fil-A Appreciation day for those who were like-minded. The response was enormous as crowds lined up and waited patiently for service all over the nation. I experienced first-hand the American spirit that inhabited the Americans in those lines. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell and others in my city suggested that their customers eat at Chick-fil-A that day. Not only did Chick-fil-A set company records, but we saw that good is alive in our nation.

Americans who believe in freedom and in America’s core values far outnumber those who do not. Christians, especially, have been branded as racist, homophobic, hate-filled war-mongers. They are not. Realizing the absurdity of the lies, they have gone their merry ways, working, raising children, paying taxes and living life. But when a lie is told long enough, people begin to believe it. When someone stands as Dan Cathey, the true hate-mongers can’t wait to attack, and those with traditional beliefs have stood down, not wanting to be labeled in negative ways..

Americans are waking up now, rising in love, not in hate. We will never be able to argue with evil, but we can defeat evil with love, lies with the truth, and darkness with the light. We may disagree in our individual beliefs. Free individuals do. But remember our motto, y pluribus unum, “out of many, one.” God is arising in America once again.

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Have We Been Deluded?

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I’m going to quit talking about this soon (maybe!), but I recently heard a news personality say the first amendment was “freedom from religion.” See what I mean from my last post? We must get back to what the founders meant, not what the court’s have changed the Constitution to mean. One more time, the First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law establishing a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This is not freedom from religion, but freedom from Congress’s establishing a religion or interfering with individual religious exercises. How much clearer can this be? How do we expect justices to correctly interpret a 2000 page bill if they can’t get this one right?

The Bible says Satan “deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.” [2 Thess 2:9-12]

Have we been deluded? Consider the following:
  • The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock with little more than their Geneva Bibles and their Calvinistic teachings that church and civil government should be separate and that man can serve God in any area of life. They knew first-hand the tyrrany and persecution of a state run religion, and they realized the importance of education in achieving their goal. Toward that end, they passed the Old Deluder Act in 1647, recognizing “the chief project of that old deluder, Satan” was to keep people from learning the true meaning of the original Scriptures.
  • The New England Primer, published by Benjamin Harris in 1690, was used by students into the 19th century. The Primer used the Bible to teach reading. Note the content of the 1877 edition, especially the questions at the end.
  • Upon completion of the Constitution, the Second Continental Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance off 1787 to determine how new states should be added to the union. One of the its stated purposes was to “extend the principles of civil and religious liberty.” [Section 13]. “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” [Section 14, Article 3]. The Congress saw the need for schools to teach children religion, morality and knowledge, in that order. They knew that citizens educated in Biblical principles were necessary for good government. “When the godly are in authority, the people rejoice, but when the wicked are in power, they groan.” [Prov 29:2]

Benjamin Franklin wrote, “History will also afford frequent opportunities of showing the necessity of a public religion…and the excellency of the Christian religion above all others, ancient or modern.”

Have we been deluded? Have we listened to the lie long enough to believe it? What do you think?