I was born in 1934 and raised poor in our country where there was a measured degree of freedom. At the same time in the Ukraine people living under a secular regime were being starved to death while the fruits of their labor were being exported to the west. It was the beginning of genocide such as the world had never before seen. I still grieve today for those unfortunate people who died by the millions in the Communist and National Socialist regimes of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler. From 1932 until well after the end of World War II the murdering of men, women, and children in the Soviet Union, Germany, and conquered countries continued until the numbers exceeded thirty million dead. Much later I wondered, why me? Why was I not being starved to death or shot if I tried to eat some of the grain that I was raising in those years? What was different about our situation here in America?
In my generation an atheist was an oddity. It was just generally accepted that our founders were Christian and that it was the Christian influence that gave rise to our principles and institutions. In succeeding years the idea of a wall of separation between Church and State detailed in a letter by Jefferson morphed into a new interpretation of the first amendment to our Constitution so as to remove the Christian religion from all forms of public life.
Thanks to government schools and the teaching of the general theory of organic evolution there has been a rise of militant atheism. This new breed of atheist is not content to simply deny the existence of God, but he despises Christianity. In order to buttress his case he will argue that the founders were not Christian but deists. He is partially correct, but where is the Handbook of Deism that establishes the great moral and philosophical principles that are outlined in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution? It does not exist.
The atheist simply ignores the proposition set out in our Declaration of Independence that our rights come from our Creator. Instead he maintains that our rights come from our Constitution and overlooks the fact that the Constitution can be amended and those rights quickly removed by a secular government.
The dominate theology of the founders was Christianity and it was that theology that was the source of their inspiration drawn directly from the Bible. For proof of that assertion see http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/650 . Listen to the words of founder John Jay, President of the Continental Congress, and first Chief Justice of the United States in the Federalist Papers:
"With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence
has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united
people--a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same
language, professing the same religion, attached to the same
principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs,
and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side
by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established
general liberty and independence."
Today we are a much more diverse people, but the one religion to which the Chief Justice refers was indisputably the Christian religion. And Christianity changed the world for the better.
In Forbes Magazine August 20, 1990 before the Berlin Wall came down, Victor Aksyuchits who was head of the Socialist Democratic Party in the Soviet Union was asked during an interview what he thought about the wealth in the west. His reply,
"Social Democracy, when it looks to the West, only sees its material wealth. We, on the other hand, understand that the concept of Western Liberalism (in its traditional sense) could only arise as the heir to Christian civilization. Only the conviction that man is created in the image of God makes the individual inherently valuable. It is these religious roots to Western Liberalism and civilization which are very valuable to us."
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