I love this new book titled The Culture- Wise Family by Ted Baehr and Pat Boone. This is one of the books we are reading for our church’s forthcoming Family Retreat on July 6-8. With the current series of devotional materials`I am sharing, I thought that the portion Mr. Baehr and Mr. Boone has written has enriching insight for all of us . Read on…I love the Fourth of July! Eleven times a year, Americans are asked to remember to fly the flag on days such as Armed Forces Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. But i ask you: On which day do you feel more compelled to fly Old Glory than the Fourth of July / I daresay none.

But beware ; we should not take this freedom for granted. There are some people who want to prevent us from reciting our glorious Pledge of Allegiance as those beautiful colors lap against our houses and to remove the words “under God” from that pledge. Only a few years ago such a notion would have been unthinkable. Not today. Now it is the subject of serious and heated debate. How have we come to this misguided moment in our nation’s history?

Thankfully, not tool ong ago the U.S. Supreme Court overruled a liberal lower court’s decree that would have given one Michael Newdow, an atheist and noncustodial parent of a nine-year-old daughter, a legal right to stop her school (and all school kids everywhere) from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Mr. Newdow had claimed that citing ‘under God” in the Pledge violated the Constitution’s ban upon the establishment of a national religion.

Mind you, the girl’s mother- who does have a custodial rights and who regularly attends church- has no issues with her little girl reciting the Pledge,including “under God”. For that matter, nearly 90% of all Americans, according to an AP poll, want “under God” to remain just as it is in our Pledge. So it’s clear: With the vacuous compliance of the Ninth Circuit Court, one selfish atheist is offended by two words in our Pledge of Allegiance, so he wants the rest of America to shut up! This just isn’t the way democracy works.

Mr. Newdow (and some of the the Ninth Circuit Court) keeps quoting the First Amendment as it Congress had somehow mandated the saying of the pledge and thereby “established religion,” ignoring the fact that it is the school board and the kids themselves who voluntarily choose to say it the way Americans have said the Pledge since 1954. As Alan Keyes brilliantly points out, there is no law respecting the establishment of religion, because the First Amendment itself expressly forbids it! Congress can’t make any laws about religion.

Atheism itself is a religion, a faith system built on the premise that there is no Gos- and one that can’t be proven. Theism,of any description, is based on the premise that there is a creator God- and the evidence abounds everywhere. All our founding fathers,including Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Monroe and Lincoln, acknowledged this. And every single one of the 50 states in America acknowledges God within the framework of their own state constitutions. Here are few:

ALASKA (1956): ” We, the people of Alaska, grateful to God…”

IDAHO (1899): “We, the people of the State of Idaho, grateful to Almighty God…”

MASSACHUSETTS (1780) : “We…the people of Masschusetts,acknowledging…the goodness of the Great Legislator of the Universe…”

MISSOURI (1845): “We, the people of Missouri, with profound reverence for the Supreme Ruler of the Universe…”

SOUTH CAROLINA (1778): “We, the people of the State of South Carolina,grateful to God…”

Get the picture? Our founding fathers, the ones who wrote our Constitution and maintained our liberties, were never ashamed to acknowledge our dependance on God. In FACT THEY FOUGHT FOR THE RIGHT! So what are we doing? if embittered atheists like the late Madelyn Murray O’Hare and Michael Newdow have their way, we’ll not only lose “under God” in our Pledge of allegiance but school kids will also be forced to stop memorizing Lincoln’s Gettysberg Address, which ends with the famous “this nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth.” And that’s not all; we’ll have to remove “endowed by the creator” from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

Will we stand for this , fellow Americans? Or shall we just meekly lie down and let a few impose their will on us? Nobody makes Mr. Newdow,or even his nine year old daughter, say anything they don’t want to say. Shall we let him prohibit us?

Ref: The Culture- Wise family . pp63-65

        

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.