Monday, July 06, 2015

Neglecting To Tell God Whom To Bless






Uh, oh. President Obama has gone and done it again- or as Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft put it, "more and more of who the man is, and what he truly stands for, is beginning to seep out."   (This is supposed to be bad.)

President Obama's weekly, Saturday morning, radio address (video below) was coincidentally delivered on Independence Day and included only 18 sentences in eight paragraphs, two of which were

We remember as well that this is the day when, 239 years ago, our founding patriots declared our independence, proclaiming that all of us are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights including the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

A couple of centuries later, we have made ourselves into a big, bold, dynamic, and diverse country. We are of all races, we come from all places, we practice all faiths, and believe in all sorts of different ideas. But our allegiance to this declaration – this idea – is the creed that binds us together. It’s what, out of many, makes us one.

The address was released, Hoft noted, "with one key ingredient missing: God."   The Washington Examiner observed "Twitter users also criticized Obama for the omission. One person, for example, called the president a 'Godless little man' and wondered if anyone was truly surprised by the omission." In an apparent effort to be even-handed, The Blaze found the speech was

One that left God out.

Obama ended it like so: “Thanks, everybody. From my family to yours, have a safe and happy Fourth of July.”

In fact, Obama didn’t mention “God” once in his address — though some might give him points for “Creator.”

Thus implied is the similarity to the Declaration of Independence's ringing assertion "we find these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator...."

A funny thing, however: it appears those men created equal did not include men (or women) of the black variety, inasmuch as the best evidence has it that 41 of the 57, or 72%, of the signers of the Declaration owned slaves.

The Founding Fathers were not partial to a commingling of church and state.  Further, the evidence that the Founding Fathers were stout believers in the Divinity is mixed, although not so with one of the signers, for John Adams stated

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.

He didn't quite buy the Jesus story, the one detailed in the same book that argues for God. Adams claimed also

It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet the one is not three, and the three are not one: to divide mankind by a single letter into [“consubstantialists and like-substantialists”]. But this constitutes the craft, the power and the profit of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of factitious religion, and they would catch no more flies. We should all then, like the quakers, live without an order of priests, moralise for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe; for I suppose belief to be the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.

That was a little wordy, admittedly, and directed at the Son; but of the Father, Adams contended “God is an essence that we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there will never be any liberal science in the world.”

And that was Christianity in general. Of Roman Catholicism in particular, Adams was less charitable. Washington's emphasis was "liberty of conscience," tolerance and good citizenship. Madison's concern was a strict separation of church and state, as was that of Samuel Adams, who believed "persecution is not an original factor in any religon, but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law."    Thomas Jefferson chimed in with “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”   He was particularly contemptuous of the concept of the Trinity and proclaimed "Christianity neither is, nor was, a part of the common law."

President Obama referred to the "4th of July," the occasion for beer, baseball, and barbecues, rather than Independence Day, that which has been traditionally celebrated. Conservatives, however, didn't notice that. Barack Obama did not give God a directive, in that he failed to say "And God bless the United States of America." How un-American!












Share |

No comments:

Double Standard

Before NYU business professor Scott Galloway made his cogent points, Joe Scarborough himself spoke sense, remarking One of my pet peeves- o...