Catholics & Catholicism

Question:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – wrote in Irrespective, it would appear that Kerry DID go to Vietnam and fight the loosing war, while the coward Bush hid under daddy’s protection, too drunk and coked up to the eye-balls front up for work. ***You mean…oh no…like all those draft dodgers that went to Canada’s open and loving arms? I find it interesting that Clinton evaded the draft and was called a hero by the same Demoncats who now lie about George Bush.  How long did Kerry spend in Vietnam?  Four months?  How long was ‘W’ serving in the military?  Five years? Demoncats – their only stock in trade: Lies.

It is hysterical to see Democrats honouring the war service of Kerry after spending the last 30 years demonizing the war, everyone who fought in it, and its achievement of the destruction of global communism. — May God Bless You Michael GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY. GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL. We make a Living by what we get, We make a Life by what we give.

Response:

There is no statement of religion in the Constitution, and for good reason:  the Framers wanted to ensure that the Government stay out of religious affairs. Which may explain why state constitutions practically demanded an allegiance to Calvinism prior to taking political office.

I’m not sure how the snippets from the state constitutions impose a Calvinistic structure, especially when, at the time, the majority of Americans were Anglican (the CofE being imported with British rule), but certainly there was a demand for believers to be in government.  There is certainly nothing surprising about that, in an age where America had not yet undergone the secularization that it has today. North Carolina  Article XXXII. "No person, who shall deny the being of God, or the truth of the protestant religion, or the divine authority either of the Old or New Testaments, or who shall hold religious principles incompatible with the freedom and safety of the state, shall be capable of holding any office, or place of trust or profit in the civil department, within this state." [Did you catch the "truth of the protestant religion"?  Catholics and Anglicans need not apply in North Carolina.]

Last I checked, the Anglican Communion falls under "Protestant," not Roman Catholic or Orthodox. A "right" is something that is inherent to humanity, and does not depend on force of law or government to ensure. Ouch.  That sounds like a direct quote from the god hating libertine Neal Boortz.   I can find no reason, other than a desire to remove an absolute standard (God) from the definition of "right" to say "inherent to humanity".

Not at all — as God is the creator of humanity, and He imparts rights to His creation, we can clearly say that such rights are inherent to humanity. But this brings up a side issue:  are rights something that God gives *all* persons, or only the Elect?  Do the rights of speech, property, assembly, etc apply to those that God hates and intends to condemn for sin? If those rights do apply, does that mean there is some kind of "common grace" that is given to all in this mortal sphere?  Just a random thought. That may play well in the United Nations, a cabal of blaspheming reprobates, but the Declaration of Independance clearly defines that our rights are bestowed to us by the Creator – and because they come from God they are unalienable.   The best that government can do is make them untenable privleges.

A government of humans can only do one thing:  safeguard rights in the name of the people.  True government cannot grant rights, and to conceive of a right as an "untenable privlege" is to warp it from a right to a "gift of the government" to the people:  a gift that could be revoked. That’s why Hamilton, in FP #84, said that "Bills of Rights" are dangerous and should be avoided.  When the government is "granting rights," it also has the power to "revoke rights" at its leisure.  Even the atheistic Ayn Rand had it right: "The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group many initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man’s right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control."