I am over it. I am fed up with these whiny crybaby atheists who for some bizarre reason have decided that God and Christianity are “offensive.” I also think the agencies, administrators, and judges who uphold their ridiculous argument that even so much as mentioning the name of God violates our Constitution are also pathetic. Those folks are using their positions of responsibility to undermine the very foundation that this great nation was built upon. That bedrock, like it or not, is known as the Judeo-Christian principle. Anything else promoted as the bedrock is an impostor and is simply secular hogwash. Here is a quote from our second president, John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Imagine President Adams saying that today. Imagine any president or politician saying that.
The Pilgrims and Puritans and Quakers and Catholics and Mennonites and so many others came here for religious freedom. The existence of God was never in question. His existence was an absolute. The question was, how do we acquire the freedom to worship God in our own way? It took the colonialists about 180 years, from the forming of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia in 1607 until, as newborn Americans, they ratified the Constitution on September 17, 1787. It was not until 1791 that the first ten amendments to the Constitution were ratified. They became known as the Bill of Rights, and the very first one states that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Easter season is once again upon us. It is the Christian celebration of new life and redemption. Yet there are so many in positions of authority that step on the Constitution, trying to obliterate the words in it. We Christians believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. We believe that “Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.” Isn’t that our right as Americans? Jesus seems to be hated by many, including the vitriolic atheists who want His very existence “stricken from the record” by trying to claim it is illegal. Yes siree, I, for one, am over it and tired of it. Jesus Christ preached love and kindness and forgiveness. Is that a problem? Why would that “offend” anyone? Plus, He was beaten, tortured, and killed because He promoted those virtues. Does that make any sense? Yes it does, because, as history has proven over and over, oftentimes pride and greed and ego squash love and kindness and forgiveness into smithereens. It is very sad that so many people can be filled with so much hate — so much so that they willingly kill and destroy and do everything they can to eradicate all that is good. And they do it claiming it is virtuous. What a joke. How “FAR” you have NOT come.
If you do not want to believe in God, I do not care. Knock yourself out. Sit under a tree and feed a squirrel. That is the beauty of America. It is okay to do that. But this business about mocking Christianity and trying to have it taken from the public square is utter nonsense. More than anything else, though, it is spitting into the faces of all those two billion plus people around the world who follow Christ and His teachings. It is mocking the millions of Jewish people exterminated in the Holocaust. It demonizes a 75-year-old priest, Father Frans van der Lugt, who was beaten and murdered in Syria on April 7 for being kind and loving to the poor and needy for more than fifty years. It defiles the memory of the eighty Christians who were executed in North Korea last November because they each owned a Bible.
You people who want God out of the American equation are fools. The reason you have this right to complain is that our country is built on the Judeo-Christian principle. If you lived in North Korea or Iran, or China or Afghanistan, or Pakistan or Somalia, and tried this, you would be tortured and killed and never heard from again. But you live in the United States of America, that allows you to spit into the faces of so many without retribution. You are blessed more than you can know.
To all you God-haters and deniers, I am tired of your rants. You know, back in 1938, Kate Smith introduced the Irving Berlin song “God Bless America.” I would venture to say that almost every American, young and old alike, knows this song. Every time we sing it, no matter what the venue, we, as Americans, are asking God to bless us. It is our national prayer as Americans. It is a beautiful thing. If you choose to be “offended” by that simple prayer because it uses the name of God, can’t you just keep it to yourself and keep your mouth shut? You are the ones being offensive. How “FAR” you have NOT come.
Larry Peterson began doing freelance newspaper commentary after graduating from Tampa College in 1984. His first children’s picture book, “Slippery Willie’s Stupid, Ugly Shoes,” was published in 2011. In 2012, his full-length novel, “The Priest and the Peaches,” was released, and he is presently working on the sequel. He also has a blog, “It Makes Sense to Me,” where he posts weekly commentary. He and his family live in Pinellas Park, Florida.
Stephen Weisenbach
Stephen Weisenbach is a freelance copy editor and proofreader, and guest-posts editor for the Catholic Writers Guild blog. He has worked with a number of Catholic media organizations, including Scepter Publishers, Circle Media, Catholic News Agency, Tiber River, and FultonSheen.com, as well as ad agencies serving national accounts. You can reach Steve at sweisenbach @ ymail.com.
Yes, it is tiring, and your comments are right on target. Nonetheless it seems that this new persecution of Christianity is here to stay, and it will make us all choose sides. As Robert George said at the national Catholic Prayer Breakfast on May 13, the days of comfortable Catholicism are over – we are no longer acceptable in society, and there is now a price to be paid for our faith – for some, it will be a very high price.
Thanks Lea—your lines, “comfortable Catholicism” and “we are no longer acceptable in society” has jump-started me and I intend to write exactly about those sentiments this week. We have been in a nice, little, Catholic comfort zone over the past decades, haven’t we?
Janet–I think the Constitution was giving us ALL religious freedom. It was not written as a religious document. So, to me, as far as dealing with atheists and agnostics etc. we probably need to discuss the truth and common sense concerning the existence of our God before we can even considering going any further. Thanks for your insightful comments.
Larry P
“You people who want God out of the American equation are fools.”
Dear heart, forgive me for saying that they are no more foolish than those who believe that an alliance made up of various religions, believing in an entity called ‘god’ but empty of content, could ever have lasted. Such an alliance –as Belloc said, among so many Catholic others–can only roll downhill to practical atheism in the state. There is room only for one God, the true God, in any state. Or any mind or heart. (That makes us gag, those of us who were raised on the poison of ‘religious freedom.’)
Our constitution was and is an insult to God. Oh, it is ‘natural’ enough, it flowed very naturallyt from its parent, the first insult in the protestant rebellion, Henry VIII’s clumsy death blow, and after that all the sects this post mentions flowed very reasonably as well. Our constitution honored only one common belief that also flowed from the protestant rebellion and was the game’s organizing principle, that money rules. Money is the single unifying element: the right to make it any way you can, damn the other fellow, competition is sacred. That also is protestantism, and our beloved constitution formalized its supremacy. All the rest is, as they say, history.
Here’s the way out (other than announcing that you are ‘over’ atheism): forget our constitution and its enshrinement of religious freedom. Ally temporarily with evangelicals and go for a religious state. Make the Catholic state (WITH COOPERATIVE CATHOLIC ECONOMICS) our ultimate goal driving our day to day platforms. If muslims can do that, and the MB does it fairly well, so can we. Find out what that economic polity is (you could start with Belloc’s wonderful The Servile State) and enunciate it to the American public. We actually have an economic alternative, what protestantism overthrew, the entire structure of widely distributed land ownership and guilds and regulation of profits and wages for the good of all–but mums the word on that, business as usual, right? Well. End the silence. At the very least, please let us stop calling for religious freedom, because we’re choking on it. (This is one of the three issues SSPX discussed without success–and doubtless will discuss again–with the Vatican, one of the traditional teachings denied by the Council.)
And we’d better do it soon because they’re coming for us, there’s really no compromise, ‘you will apostatize or you will die’ is just over the horizon. Most of us will apostatize, still kissing that constitution. We will celebrate gay marriages at the point of a bayonet, and pray that private conscience is enlightened when abortion is an option, etc. etc. etc. We will continue to allow the banks to predate savagely. Everyone will lose their houses and have their hand out to the government, who will tell us how to think and what to eat and who to love in exchange. But I think it needs said, I wish I had a more gentle voice in saying it: those who deny the social kingship of Christ the King and renounce a real Restoration risk hell for it. The American constitution is heresy, as it stands. It denies Christ, and just as Peter learned as he warmed his sinful backside at the fire, that we cannot do.
Little note: I did not enable the comment notification box, because I just don’t have time to engage in the kind of spirited debate this comment might provoke. I’m working on the last chapters of a novel and racing a heart condition. I hope you’ll forgive me for commenting and running. If you disagree very much, pray for my enlightenment.
Well said Larry! Sounds like someone put one two many straws pieces on your back. But you are absolutely correct, there is an organized attempt to eliminate the rights of those who believe in God because of hypersensitive whiners.
Let them whine. I will not give up my rights to my Religion or my Speech. There is no such Right as a Right to NOT be offended.
These people need to grow the heck up!