It never ceases to amaze me how, in the name of God, so many of these people find attacking gays on an assortment of issues (like being in the military when so many other countries — including the UK — openly allow them) is more important than violence, starvation, priests having sex with children and so on. I guess I’m just naive.
An Evangelical’s Concession on Gays
The old and often bitter debate over what causes homosexuality took an unexpected turn this week in the wake of comments by a leading conservative Christian theologian, who says fellow evangelicals should accept that science may one day prove homosexuals are born gay. “We sin against homosexuals by insisting that sexual temptation and attraction are predominately chosen,” wrote the Rev. Albert Mohler, the influential president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Mohler’s position is a startling departure from years of insistence among fundamentalists that gay rights advocates are wrong when they say homosexuality is not something they choose.
Even more surprising, perhaps, is the implication of Mohler’s statement that science can help inform Christians’ response to moral questions — a rare admission among evangelicals. “The Al Mohler example is certainly a departure,” said President Richard J. Mouw of nondenominational Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, the largest evangelical seminary in North America. “Evangelicals, and I am one, haven’t always exhibited very clear thinking about science and spirituality.”
On the other hand:
That’s what has angered gay rights advocates, and overshadowed Mohler’s concession that homosexuals may be born that way. “What is wrong with Mohler’s argument is that it implies that there is something wrong with being gay,” said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign. “I would welcome the fact that they are beginning to concede that homosexuality is not a chosen lifestyle. But it is hard for me to believe that anyone that would then conclude that our next step ought to be to get about the business of changing everybody is really offering any sort of enlightened view.”
“Regarding Leviticus, enjoy your eternity.
Thank you BSA, I’m enjoying my eternity right now. I figure I have 35-40 years of it left before revert naturally to my basic elements, carbon and a few other trace elements, and give life elements to some other plant or animal.
I’m an Evangelical Christian, myself, and I’m “pro gay.” We aren’t all gay bashers.
It isn’t Evangelical doctrine — specifically — it is conservatism that leads to gay-bashing. The reason evangelicals tend to gay bash is because they tend to be conservative. We liberal evangelicals don’t gay bash.
I’m not alone among evangelicals, for sure, but I can’t say what percentage we are. Since I’m “pro gay,” people tend to out themselves to me and I can say that there are more than a few gay Evangelicals.
PS: I put quote marks around “pro gay” because I’m not exactly pro gay. (Not any more than I’m “pro black,” “pro Muslim” or “pro Lithuanian.” )
All these groups are Americans. So, they should have the same rights and responsibilities as any other Americans.
It’s really that simple.
PS2: I seriously doubt they’ll find a gay gene. Decoding the genome is revealing that genes rarely work like that.
I, personally, believe that sexual preference will be shown to be as complex as any other human preference — meaning that it will be a combination of genetic pre-disposition altered by experiences — (especially experiences during our sexual development phase).
I know it’s not PC to believe this but it just makes 100% sense to me and it was a good lesbian friend who first clued-me in on it.
1981 – Ground Zero in the US, the first cases of HIV was originally concentrated in several metropolitan areas on the coasts: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and in the East Coast Metropolises from Baltimore through Washington DC, New Jersey, New York City to Boston.
The epidemiology of AIDS was found to be the same epidemiology as the hepatitis B in the bathhouses in the 1970s Exactly the same people, gays, behaving as diseased rodents.
Here are some of the dubious benefit have gays brought to society
AIDS activists and civil libertarians lobbied state legislatures to weaken other public health laws to limit the state’s ability to use traditional public health measures in all areas.
Quarantine and isolation laws were the main target, but other disease control laws also suffered.
Thanks to their effort, the public is going to be helpless when Bird Flu hits.
Because gays will frequently not tell their partners of their diseases, because their urge for sex is strong, many prominent doctors now recommend infected people should have their left butt tattooed with the word “AIDS”. I agree.
Let the real heat begin, bring it on.
BgScryAnml, have you ever read “Peter Pan”. I highly recommend it; way better than the Bible. Never Never Land is Heaven, and little boys never grow up. Captain Hook is the Devil, and Peter Pan is God. The lost boys are his disciples. Very similar to the Bible, but Peter isn’t a dictator hypocrite and you can see him, you get to fly if you truly believe and you don’t have to die to get there. Good story. The Bible sucks by comparison.
Noname, while you’re at it tattoo the left butt cheek with influenza, the left thigh with Epstein-Barr Virus (causes cancer) and the right thigh with pneumonia. Then when you kiss that person you’ll die because people wear clothes dummy.
Wow, it looks as if the diggnuts AND the morality bigots are on the warpath with this one. Reminds me of a guy, Fred Phelps I think, @ God Hates Fags Dot Com. I’m not going to google it, verify yourself. I thought it mildly funny yet a waste of time to protest at funerals where openly gay ppl died as a result of AIDS or other std (sexually transmitted diseases for the RepCons and LibDem readers out there). But was outraged when Phelps group started harassing at funeral for soldiers who were killed as a result of the Iraq or Afghan wars. How disgusting can you get. But then a few gold star parents get a little media attention for their complaints about the bush(Cheney, the boss) war and the boot lickers come out in a fury denouncing the treason of a parent who may protest a war policy that cost his/her child their life, simply for asking what the hell for? ??!!
I hope this christian preacher will find it in himself to understand the genetic impulses within my own imperfect soul, and pray for me everytime I have the luck, er depraved temptation of the pleasure of company with a female half my age. I AM over 38, so that’s a 19 year old for the RepCons and the LibDems who still believe creationism and evolution are irreconcilable opposites. I Only lust after LEGAL women! I hope the good preacher will explain to his flock that the gods are the creator {or God is the only creator if your a monotheist} and wants all of us to evolve, just like the woman in this story.
http://tinyurl.com/dwv9e
[editor: please use tinyurl.com for long urls]
Who in their right mind could believe a godless evolution or a creator with no real expectations for his/her creation could ever claim that opposing love is better for the species. tho I believe the dolphin could do better than this British tart.
Steves
Atheists are the most progressive people on earth. They understand that all people are not created physically and mentally equal, that no person is perfect. The reproductive process is imperfect. Atheists accept people for who they are and what they were given at birth. Atheists afford respect based on merit rather than the contradictory ramblings of a storybook. Atheists help the needy without an expectation of repayment. They don’t want your soul in return. Atheists don’t want to put fear or any kind in you, unless you first hurt others in society. The laws of society were developed and in place long before Jesus claimed them as his own. Atheists believe that you are free, your body is yours alone and that it isn’t healthy to have imaginary friends when real people are around you. Atheists aren’t afraid to return to the earth forever, to be redistributed into the system of life and death. Atheists accept death as a fact of life. There is no need for a atheist to cower in fear, to pretend that you don’t really die because you go to another place and live forever. There is no need for an atheist to lie to our children about an afterlife. We teach them what we see is true and they accept it with dignity.
#33
> Regarding Leviticus, we are living under the New Testament not the Old.
Ooooh. So much for “One cannot pick and choose which laws to obey and which to disregard.”
Matthew 15:4: “For God commanded, saying, Honour thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death.”
Mark 7:10: “For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death: ”
That sounds like a rousing endorsement of Leviticus. So, I take it that you endorse execution for cursing at mom or dad?
Btw, when you last saw a smoking hot woman, did you pluck out your eye (Matthew 5:29)?
#33
> If you doubt the Bible is The Authority and
> the foundation of this country, please reference
> a non bias history book.
You mean like Age of Reason by Thomas Paine?
#40 Atheists are the most progressive people on earth.
You atheists did a real progressive drive with collectivization! Good job on that one! Tens of millions dead and the economy sucked worse than before!
My own religious group were slaughtered by the thousands and starved by the tens of thousands by who you call “the most progressive people on earth”.
So excuse me if I don’t immediately jump on your dreamy bandwagon.
Atheism wasn’t incidental to communism and its horrors — it was the philosophical bedrock of the new social order.
Atheists don’t want to put fear or any kind in you, unless you first hurt others in society.
It was this very rationale that sent our church leaders to slave, starve and die in the gulags because they were “hurting society” with their teaching about God. And, believe me, that put the fear of atheists in us all!
#21 BgScryAnml The costs of homosexuality
Costs? That statistics show that being gay PAYS!
Average household income: $76,460 for same-sex couples who live with nobody else.
Average household income for total adult population: $41,994
http://tinyurl.com/249ww9
On average gays are 4 times as likely to have college or university degrees, earn approx 3 times the average of a heterosexual and have 6 times the disposable income.
http://tinyurl.com/2rbfyx
But your statistics and my statistics don’t matter at all.
What you or your religion believe about homosexuality is totally irrelevant. Nor does it matter if you hate them.
Homosexuals are Americans.
As Americans they have the same rights as you do.
It’s that simple.
Apparently you can only stop a gay baby from crying by sticking a pacifier up his ass.
#45 – Greg Allen,
Excellent points. Here’s one you missed about the costs of homosexuality. This cost is, of course, the cost of NOT allowing gay marriage.
http://tinyurl.com/2ls8bz
Has BSA ever commented here before (Or Noname)? Or is he just one of those types that obsessively seeks threads discussing gay sex?
Countries where homosexual is considered a mental disorder: All middle eastern countries, China, Russia, Cuba, India, Poland, Brazil, Belarus to name a few.
So you think we should emulate the Communist and Islamist countries, BigScaredAnimal? Also, I’m highly skeptical of your inclusion of Brazil on that list – apparently you’ve never been to Rio?
#43
Atheism is not an economic system. Mao-Tse and Stalin were both communists that happen to be atheists. They wanted to try to reverse the millennia of damage caused by religion. IMO, their common thread is communism and absolute power rather than their lack of religious belief. Their solution was as horrific as that of Hitler who was Christian. All that proves is that evil people come in all forms of belief systems including a lack thereof. Communism can exist without atheism just as it can under Christianity.
> My own religious group were slaughtered by the thousands
> and starved by the tens of thousands by who you call “the
> most progressive people on earth”.
Your numbers were far worse under religious leaders such as the Romans. Further, let’s not forget that the Jews haven’t exactly fared well under religious leadership.
Frankly, I find the word “progressive” to be vague and inappropriate. IMO, it is more accurate to say that atheists are the only group not guided by superstition. Sometimes superstition can be innocuous, such as believing the number 13 to be an unlucky number. However, inherently it means that a person can be made to believe anything and that is the true danger.
> It was this very rationale that sent our church leaders to
> slave, starve and die in the gulags because they were
> “hurting society” with their teaching about God. And,
> believe me, that put the fear of atheists in us all!
During the Inquisition, which predates any rule by an atheist by at least 700 years, atheists were feared and burned with reckless abandon. It is atheists that have traditionally feared the religious as history has established that they can be made fanatical and homicidal.
About the so-called science that is supposed to ’cause’ Evangelicals to stop hating gays, what science are you talking about? To the best of my knowledge, the only science that can CAUSE someone to change their belief system, opinion, or worldview is the science-fiction of cerebral reprogramming. I do hope that’s not what’s being intimated here.
Ironically, the science of anthropology gives ample reason to continue to treat homosexuality with indifference, if not enmity. The only thing that a homosexual relationship intrinsically contributes to society AS A RULE is population control. Anthropologically speaking, this puts homosexuality in the same category as famine, disease, war, and natural disasters. From a Natural Selection viewpoint, if science conclusively proves that people are ‘born gay’, it will also prove that, according to the law of the jungle, they are also born losers, that they are born with a genetic trait that inherently blocks their ability to pass on their genes to the next generation. According to Darwin, this makes them unworthy specimens in the evolutionary process. So far, it looks like science is even harsher on homosexuals than Evangelical Christians, or even Muslims.
Christianity, on the other hand, offers the hope that one CAN not only overcome one’s nature, but personally enlist God in the effort to do so. This is the difference, the crucial difference, between Christianity and the other religions of the world, as well as the misconceptions many hold about Christians. True adherence to the teachings of Jesus doesn’t mean that Christians bring condemnation to others regarding THEIR sin; that would be usurping the role of the worshiped deity. Instead, Christians are instructed to love others, without condition, so that through them those who live in sin might see the freedom and joy that comes through a life of following the Christ. This also means that when Christians see someone engaging in something that is known, through the Christian credo, to be wrong, one does not passively accept it, but tries to lovingly correct the offender. Why? Because the Christian code of ethics says so. When, according to the story, Jesus encountered a Samaritan woman at the well, he did not say anything to the effect of, “Well, as long as you’re not breaking up anybody’s home or hurting anyone, your sleeping around is ok.” No, instead, Jesus told her to “Go and sin NO MORE.” (emphasis mine) And before I hear yet another tired and irrelevant non-sequitur about how if this part of the Old testament is followed, then it must be all right to engage in polygamy, necessary to perform animal sacrifices and get circumcised, et cetera, let me point out that Jesus himself was, according to Christians, the perfect self-sacrifice to end the need for all other sacrifices, Jesus himself commanded men to be content with one wife(interesting, he didn’t say life partner), and Paul settled the whole circumcision issue by saying that it’s more important to trim one’s will than one’s willy. Let me also point out that in Old Testament law, which is constructed very similarly to modern-day legal codes, that homosexuality is found in the same death-penalty group as all other sexual sins; adultery, incest, bestiality, and sodomy. There is no mistaking, according to people who take the Bible at its word, how serious God is about what sort of sexual conduct is not kosher.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I am a Christian, and a member of one of the Evangelical sects. I personally believe that if homosexuality is hard-wired into anyone’s genotype, then the same God who demands purity, or at least an honest cooperative effort towards it, will also heal that person of that genetic ordering, if the person wants it. I am also a psychology major, which brings me to a very important point–every study on twins and behavior show that the breakdown of influences on behavior lend around 60% to genetics (significant, but not absolute) and a corresponding approximation of 40% to environment. It is not homosexuals that I hate, so much as the atmosphere of permissiveness. God, in my belief system, does not differentiate between homosexuality, murder, lying, stealing, envy, lust, adultery, child molestation, rape, or tax evasion. To Him, it’s all dirt, and all unacceptable. The degrees by which we classify sin’s acceptability are purely human invention, based on how negatively or personally the act will impact someone else. To God, all sin is an affront, a second-guessing of His wisdom and love.
I do hope I’ve given you all something to think about.
#25
It’s quite simple, you just leave circumcision only for REAL health reasons (phimosis, etc.) ’cause no man will let a knife cut his penis, unless he’s stupid enough to do it for a chick.
#50
“It is not homosexuals that I hate, so much as the atmosphere of permissiveness.”
Why gay men f*ck like bunnies in Spring?
BECAUSE GAY MEN DON’T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THAT BS COURTING THAT STRAIGHT MEN HAVE TO GO THROUGH TO GET SOME ASS.
#50
Ironically, the science of anthropology gives ample reason to continue to treat homosexuality with indifference, if not enmity. The only thing that a homosexual relationship intrinsically contributes to society AS A RULE is population control. Anthropologically speaking, this puts homosexuality in the same category as famine, disease, war, and natural disasters.
I don’t know what kind of anthropology you are talking about, but it isn’t anything like the anthropology that I’ve read about, taken classes on, and taught. Anthropology is just the minor in my phd, so maybe there are some classes that people who are actual phds in Anthro take that I haven’t seen.
Linguistic Anthro wouldn’t have much to say about homosexuality. Legal Anthro would be interested in the legal systems (be they formal or customary laws) regulating sex and relationships across cultures. Cultural Anthro would be interested in homosexuality as a culture. Paleo Anthro would be looking at homosexuality as evidenced in the historical records. Anthropology looks at a lot of things that aren’t seen as “productive” from cock fighting to riding the bus. I don’t know why they would look at sexuality in such a different way.
#33 – BigScaredAnimal – If you doubt the Bible is The Authority and the foundation of this country, please reference a non bias history book. One that isn’t written by a liberal history professor with an agenda and a theory.
Okay. Non-biased sources. How about George Washington? He was there at the time:
“The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” – George Washington, Treaty of Tripoli, 1796
Or how about Thomas Jefferson? I mean, he was another guy who was actually there:
“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”
– Thomas Jefferson, February 10, 1814
Go back to stoning your daughters (another Leviticus pearl, I think). Leave rational people alone.
#53
I’m speaking of emerging field of biological anthropology, which looks at the phenomenon of sexual attraction and reproduction from an anthropological / evolutionary point of view. Homosexual couples, by the nature of their relationships, cannot produce a child from their union. Moreover, there is far less inclination among homosexual men to invest in children in any way – advertisers have had this figured out for years, and structure their campaigns accordingly, targeting gay men for the purchase of higher-end items, knowing that without kids in the mix, a gay household will have more disposable income to spend. The thing is, without children, without healthy offspring, any society will die out. Since on a subconscious level, homosexuals represent that death, you will find very few people willing to actively defend homosexuality for its virtues – assuming there are any. Heterosexuality will always be held as inherently superior by any portion of society that values not only that society’s core culture, but also the children to whom that culture is to be transmitted. Likewise, heterosexual marriage will always be held by that same segment as the best environment for children to be raised in–their have been too many studies lending evidence to this statement for it to be easily.
Ok, switching gears now. On the science front, from a biochemical point of view, heterosexual relations have also been proven superior for reinforcing emotional bonds between sexual partners. Studies have shown that male and female bodies release some 40 times more of the hormones responsible for forming and strengthening those bonds than either homosexual relations or self-pleasure. This means that in a healthy traditional marriage, with regular sex, the emotional attachment between the husband and wife is quantifiably deeper and more solid than in a homosexual relationship, medically speaking.
I guess you can’t be troubled to provide a bibliograpy?
#54
Why would the homosexual orientation of an unborn baby need to be medically treated any more than if, say, it were discovered the baby was left-handed or red-haired? These are all natural and innocuous traits.
56.
It looks like there are some people in the anthro department here at IU that do bioanthro. I guess I just haven’t ran into them.
I’ve also ran across some things in Discover magazine or somewhere else that ask if there is a purpose for homosexulaity. One of the suggestions is that it is a response to overpopulation or other issues. I would still think that looking only at how useful for reproduction something is seems to be missing the point. After all, there’s a whole lot of porn with men having anal sex with women, so there must be some interest in it for straight men as well.
As far as the parenting thing, most of the gay men and women I’ve been friends with have said that they wanted to adopt, but as a straight man, I never want kids. So anecdotally I’ve not seen anything all that different between gay people and straight people.
#60
The relatively small minority of gay people is not preventing heterosexuals in the West from also reproducing like bunnies. Sending Dr. Mengele to medically alter gay babies would hardly make a dent towards increasing Western population. (The more immediate need vis-a-vis the 3rd World is strict border/immigration control, but that’s for another time).
I remember reading an article years ago about a village in post-WWII Italy that was left in ruins. Their ability to grow the grains to make the dietary staples of pasta and breads was severely impeded for a handful of years. The children conceived and growing up during these years had an inordinately high rate of homosexuality, something like 30% – 40%. After life normalized after the war the homosexuality rate greatly declined. This suggested that diet ( specific nutrients found in their favored grains, and I wish I could remember what they were, though I want to say B’s and proteins) might play a part in how the brain develops sexual orientation.
#62
Yes: Dr. Mengele = bad; Dr. Salk = good.
Since March 19, 2003:
U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq: over 3,000
U.S. babies killed by abortion: over 5,000,000
#30 BgScryAnml “I made no judgment, God is quite clear.”
I am always appalled by people who presume to tell me what God thinks or says. This is usually based on the fallacy that the Bible is the authoritative word of God. The Bible is not the word of God, it is the word of man. What I mean by this, and this is indisputable, is that every single word of the Bible (and for that matter the Koran) was, at some point, written down by man. Man is a fallible animal with his own opinions and prejudices and his writings are inevitably filtered through the mores of the age in which he is writing – mores which later shift as a function of time.
The standard rebuttal to this is that the Bible was written under the inspiration of conversations with God. Since God has no known phone, email or other contact address, this statement reduces to “what goes on in the head of the writer”.
Putting this into a modern context, imagine that the collective conversations with God of Pat Robertson and George W. (“God told me to invade Iraq”) Bush were to be recorded for posterity and then quoted back by the faithful in a couple of thousand years as representing the words and opinions of God, with no supporting evidence of why this should be so. That, in a nutshell, is the problem.
Back to the main topic of the post, my only comment is “homosexuality is a phallusy” 🙂
#55 TJGeezer
Perhaps we should look at a non bias text. The quotes you reference are from one of the offending text due to the lack of due diligence. Please consider the following which were excluded.
The following quotes are from George Washington
“It would be impossible to govern rightly without God and the Bible”
The following quotes are from John Adams
“Suppose a nation in some distant region, should take the Bible for their only law book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited.. What a Utopia, What a Paradox would this region be! ”
“Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”
“It would be impossible to govern without God and the Ten Commandments”
The following quote is from Thomas Jefferson
“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only h h s , a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?”
The following quotes are from John Quincy Adams
“No book in the world deserves to be so unceasingly studied, and so profoundly meditated upon as the Bible. ”
“Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the Foundation of the Redeemer’s mission upon earth? That it laid the cornerstone of human government upon the first precepts of Christianity?”
“The highest glory of the Revolution was that it united in one indissoluble bond the principles of Christianity and the principles of civil government”
The following quote is from James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution”
“We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God”
The following quote is from Andrew Jackson
“Sir, I am in the hands of a merciful God I have full confidence in his goodness and mercy … The Bible is true…I have tried to conform to its spirit as near as possible. Upon that sacred volume I rest my hope for eternal salvation, through the merits and blood of our blessed Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ”
The following quotes are from Honorable John Jay (first Chef Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court)
“Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty… of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers”
The following quotes are from Abraham Lincoln
“Unless the great God who assisted [President Washington], shall be with me and aid me, I must fail. But if the same omniscient mind, and Almighty arm, that directed and protected him, shall guide and support me, I shall not fail … Let us pray that the God of our fathers may not forsake us now”
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity, we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. but we have forgotten God We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness”
The following quote is from Theodore Roosevelt
“In this actual world, a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoffed at, or ignored their religious needs, is a community on the rapid down-grade”
The following quotes are from Woodrow Wilson
“America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of the Holy Scripture”
“A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is t&y, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about … The Bible. ..is the one supreme source of revelation of the meaning of life, the nature of God and … nature and needs of men. It is the only guide of life which really leads the spirit in the
way of peace and salvation”
The following quotes are from Calvin Coolidge
“They were intent upon establishing a Christian commonwealth in accordance with the principle of self-government. They were an inspired body of men. It has been said that God sifted the nations that He might send choice grain into the wilderness … Who can fail to see it in the hand of Destiny? Who can doubt that it has been guided by a Divine providence?”
“The foundations of our society and our government rest so much on the teachings of the Bible that it would be difficult to support them if faith in these teachings would cease to be practically universal in our country”
The following quotes are from Harry Truman
“In men and nations would but live by the precepts of the ancient prophets and the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, problems which now seem so difficult would soon disappear… That is a supreme opportunity for the church to continue to fulfill its mission on earth. The Protestant church, the Catholic Church, and the Jewish synagogue – bound together in the American unity of brotherhood – must provide the shock forces to accomplish this moral and spiritual awakening. No other agency can do it. Unless it is done, we are headed for the disaster we would deserve. Oh, for an Isaiah or a St. Paul to reawaken a sick world to its moral responsibilities”
“The basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don’t think we emphasize that enough these days. If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a…government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State!”
Examples of Biblical principles in the the founding documents of the United States.
Belief in a Creator; “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” Declaration of Independence
Belief in God being the Lawgiver, ‘!..to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Name’s God entitle them.. ” Declaration of Independence
Belief that God is the Judge; “We … appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world .. Declaration of Independence
Belief that God is the Provider, “And for the support of this Declaration, with afirm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor ” Declaration of Independence
Eighth and Tenth Commandment: “You shall not steal”; “You shall not covet”
Amendment 5: “nor shall any person be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation
Amendment 14; Section 1: “…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”
Article I, Section 10, Paragraph (1) forbids the states from enacting any “Law impairing the obligation of contracts”; relates to properly rights (psalm 15: 1,4; Eccl. 5:4)
Fourth Commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”
Article I, Section 7, Paragraph (2): “If any bill shall not be returned by the President within ten days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it…”
George Washington’s first act of taking office choose to do so before God by placing his hand on the Bible. After taking the oath of office, he bent down and kissed a page of the Bible. He then lead the entire Senate and House of Representatives to an Episcopal Church for a two-hour worship service.
Regarding reliable text, (presumably college)
Reliable authors: Belloc, Carroll, DiLorenzo, Epstein, Howe, Raico, Strauss, Walsh or Clyde Wilson
“The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals, and 362 to heterosexuals. This doesn’t mean God doesn’t love heterosexuals, it’s just that they need more supervision.”
~ Lynn Lavner, a lesbian comic