Three Secular Reasons Why
By Bill Federer
Do you like having rights the
government cannot take away? Do you like being equal? Do you like a country
with few laws, where with every law, whether just or unjust, there is some
restriction or loss of individual liberty? These ideas have origins.
Rights
To have individual rights the
government cannot take away, rights must come from a power higher than government. The Declaration
of Independence states "all Men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...That to secure these
Rights, Governments are instituted among Men" In other words, rights come from God and
government's job is to protect your rights.
In his 1961 Inaugural Address,
President John F. Kennedy put it this way: "The rights of man come not
from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God."
But if there is no God, where can
the rights come from except from the "generosity of the State." The State, then, becomes the new god. And
what the State giveth, the State can taketh awayeth.
This was espoused by German
philosopher Hegel, who influenced Marx and Hitler. Hegel did not believe in the
existence of God and thought the closest anyone could come to attaining eternal life was to create a government
that would exist after their death. Thus Communism teaches that citizens exist
for the State's benefit.
Without God, government transitions
from being our servant to our master. In
1950, President Harry Truman addressed the Attorney General's Conference,
stating: "The fundamental basis of this nation's laws was given to Moses
on the Mount...If we don't have a proper fundamental moral background, we will
finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights
for anybody except the State!"
Equality
In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge
stated: "It seems... perfectly plain that...the right to equality...has
for its foundation reverence for God. If we could imagine that swept away...our
American government could not long survive."
The concept of all citizens being
equal before the law, having an equal vote in elections, is based on equality
before a Supreme Being, a concept originally derived by our Founding Fathers
and the Framers of the Constitution
from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Harry Truman stated in his 1949
Inaugural Address: "We believe that all men are created equal, because
they are created in the image of God."
But if there is no God - then men
are not only not "created," they are not "equal". If, as
This concept influenced the 1856
Dred Scott Case, which stated slaves "had for more than a century before
been regarded as beings of an inferior order...so far inferior, that they had
no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might
justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."
This influenced Margaret Sanger,
who, prior to World War II, founded Planned Parenthood and hired Nazi Party
member Ernst Rudin as her advisor. In her book Pivot of Civilization (1922), she called for "The elimination
of 'human weeds'...overrunning the human garden;...for the cessation of
'charity' because it prolonged the lives of the unfit; for the segregation of
'morons, misfits, and the maladjusted'; and for the sterilization of
genetically inferior races." The liberals in politics have descended from
this discrimination, yet command some loyalty from the very ones they would
eliminate. All the while, the party of
Sanger influenced Hitler to consider
the German, or Aryan, race as "ubermensch," supermen, being more advanced in the supposed progress of human
evolution. This resulted in their perverted effort to rid the "human gene
pool" of "untermensch" - races considered less evolved - through the gas chambers. Stalin followed
this example, exterminating 25 million "inferior" Ukrainians.
The potential consequences are
frightful if we chose to depart from President Truman's belief, "that all
men are created equal because we are created in the image of God."
Few Laws
President John Adams stated in a
letter to the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts,
In other words, our government was
designed to govern people who could govern themselves. We could get by with few
laws if people had an internal law.
British Statesman Edmund Burke
stated in 1791 in A Letter to a Member of
the National Assembly: "What is liberty without virtue? It is the
greatest of all possible evils...it is madness without restraint. Men are
qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put
moral chains upon their own appetites...Society cannot exist, unless a
controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of
it there is within, the more there must be without."
Robert Winthrop, U.S. Speaker of the
House in 1849, stated: "All societies of men must be governed in some way
or other. The less they have of stringent State Government, the more they must
have of individual self-government. The less they rely on public law or
physical force, the more they must rely on private moral restraint. Men, in a
word, must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them, or a power
without them; either by the word of God, or by the strong arm of man."
To be a country with "few
laws," citizens must have internal laws for there to be order, but
internal laws are powerless without a consequence, such as being held
accountable to a Supreme Being in some future state.
Benjamin Franklin wrote to Yale
President Ezra Stiles,
Daniel Webster, Secretary of State
for three
The idea of an oath was to call a
higher power to hold you accountable to perform what you said you would. This accountability is expressed in all three
branches of government: President's oath of office: "So Help Me God";
Congressmen and Senators' oath: "So Help Me God," and witnesses' oath
in court to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth -
"So Help Me God."
It was known that witnesses or
politicians would have opportunities to twist the truth or do dirty, backroom
deals for their own benefit and never get caught. It was reasoned, though, that
if a witness or politician believed God existed and was watching, that person
would hesitate when presented with the temptation. They would have a
conscience. They would think "even if I get away with this unscrupulous
action in this life, I will still be accountable to God in the next."
But if that person did not believe
in God and in a future state of rewards and punishments, when presented with
the same temptation to do wrong and not get caught, they would give in. In
fact, if there is no God and this life is all there is, they would be a fool
not to.
This is what
President Reagan referred to in 1984: "Without God there is no virtue
because there is no prompting of the conscience."
William Linn, elected unanimously as
the first Chaplain of the U.S. House,
Linn's observation was demonstrated
when, after 80 years of atheism, the countries of the former
From Bill Clinton to Enron, we see
where absence of an internal law will take our country - crimes are only wrong
if one gets caught. Unfortunately, the less internal moral code we have as a
nation, the more external legal codes the government must pass to keep order -
and each new law takes away another little piece of our freedom.
Importance
to American Government
President Calvin Coolidge, unveiling
to the Equestrian Statue of Bishop Francis Asbury,
Clarence E. Manion, Professor
of Constitutional Law and dean of the Notre Dame College of Law, was quoted in
Verne Paul Kaub's 1946 book, "Collectivism Challenges
Christianity," "Look closely at these self-evident truths, these
imperishable articles of American Faith upon which all our government is firmly
based. First and foremost is the existence of God. Next comes the truth that
all men are equal in the sight of God. Third is the fact of God's great gift of
unalienable rights to every person on earth. Then follows the true and single
purpose of all American Government, namely, to preserve and protect these
God-made rights of God-made man."
President Ronald Reagan summed it
up,
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Bill Federer is a nationally known speaker and best-selling author on