patrick.net

Kevin, I'm not surprised you haven't gotten any responses so far. First of all, this article is intelligently written and uses real historical facts to prove that our Constitution is vehemently secular. Second the article not just requires reading and comprehension, but it isn't a 5 second emotional sound bite that most here seem to require to grab their fleeting attention.

I wish that today's Americans were more willing to take on intellectual pursuits and would value the process of education. Instead today's Americans are conditioned to distrust anything even hinting of intelligence and to strive for willful ignorance so that they can be easily manipulated by the aristocracy of our country through the emotional sound bite.

It's too bad that the reading of our Constitution will fall on the deaf ears of not just Americans who have grown much less interested in understanding the document but the very politicians who will be reading it out loud won't listen to a word of it. Instead, they've decided what it means so that their "understanding" fits their own agenda. This is a stunt to pull the wool over the eyes of their followers who also blindly believe whatever their politicians say about the Constitution. This is how most of their followers develop their understanding of what is in their Bibles, actually. Most of these people can't be bothered to study either document with open eyes or open minds.

Let's hope that the majority of Americans learn to become critical thinkers who actually hold their politicians accountable for improving the USA instead of continuing to tear it down.

I'm not holding my breath. The barbarians aren't simply pounding on the gate, they run things now.

Interesting, I remember the author from when he had a column in Prism, the magazine of Evangelicals for Social Action. Nice to see the shout out to Roger Williams (I mentioned him in a post a couple of months ago). Freedom of conscience in regards to religious choice; hard to understand how radical it was for the times. The Economist had an interesting article recently. It noted that weekly attendance at houses of worship in the US is higher than in Iran; state established religion doesn't fare so well (see Europe as well).