One Nation Under God

I don't think America will turn back to God like it used to be anyway. I think it will get worse and worse here till Jesus comes.

 

Heh! I remember back in the seventies when our pastor would stand in front of us preaching:

"Fathers on television are depicted as Dumbbells! Police officers are portrayed as bumbling idiots who never catch their men! They're showing two men and one woman rooming together...IN THE SAME APARTMENT! Teachers are teaching kids evolution! They're taking the job from the parents and teaching sex education! Women are wearing mini skirts! I can't go out without seeing someone in one today! What has this world come to? It can't get much worse than this!"

Yes it can, Pastor! Thirty years later:

Not only is evolution taught in school, but creationism is on its way out.

Not only are fathers on television portrayed as dumbells, but they've lost total control of their family...IF they accept their responsibility in the first place.

Not only are police depicted as bumbling idiots, but they're no longer respected by the general public, they're portrayed as the bad guy, the general public think the average police officer steals, accepts bribes, buys coke on the street, sleeps with every woman out there, and if he can't have her, he kills her.

I won't even go INTO the bedroom scenes on television! A series isn't over until every character has slept with every other character. Do the producers and writers REALLY think we're going to be shocked today? I'll be shocked if a character says, "I can't kiss you until we're married."

I WISH women were only wearing miniskirts today. They try to get away with wearing less and less at the beach, and when they model the same outfits on television, it's considered a family show because "they're not wearing any less than they would at the beach...and people take their kids to the beach".

One time...JUST ONE TIME...I'd like to go up to a half-naked lady in the market and yell at her, "Go home and get dressed, Lady! My husband's with me and I HAVE A HEADACHE!!!"

I can't go to the supermerket today without going ahead of my husband and turning around all the filthy magazines. The editors are catching on. Now when you turn it around, there's filth on the back cover, also. I try to stick it behind another magazine and THAT one is even WORSE!

Schools are arming themselves with security. It's controversial whether today's video games are disrupting the personalities of our children, but I am certain about one thing: Those kids who ARE susceptible to violence...kids who are brought up with out parents (they key their way into their home after school), who are teased at school and have nobody to talk to about it, who felt rejected because they've been placed in daycare the first week they were born, or generally have mental problems nobody noticed because nobody was there to notice...THESE kids who play these games over and over build up a tension inside them they just HAVE to let out somehow...somewhere. We ignore our kids and wonder why they're bringing guns to school.

But, Heaven forbid if they open a Bible during recess!

America has changed and we never will get back to where we were. I look around me and see the advances we've made in medicine (my mother is with us today because of it) and in technology (There's no excuse for not keeping in touch today). But with all we've managed to build around us comes the filth...pornography, wicked spam, commercials, and even tv shows we would think would be innocent enough for our family to watch until they show a bedroom scene. We're building an empire of unGodliness around us and we have no idea how deeply we've been sucked into the cult of wickedness in America.

Then I look back at my childhood and what seemed bad then now looks clean. Simple. Bearable. Innocent.

Where will we be thirty years from now? Will we yearn for the good ol' days of the early 2000s? where things were simple and bearable? It frightens me. It really does.

[ July 03, 2005, 05:57 AM: Message edited by: Victory in Jesus ]

 

Amen! And, with God's help, I believe that she one day will do so.

Great post, TexasSky!

 

TS,

Be careful of your sources. Many of these quotes are either false, or undocumented. They come from David Barton of Wallbuilders, who has even admitted some of them as questionable.

A critique by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty on Barton and some of these quotes is at http://www.bjcpa.org/resources/pubs/pub_walker_barton.htm

 

All nations are under God.

Romans 13v1 - "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers, For there is no power but of God, the powers that be are ordained of God."

 

Amen, Bro. C4K

 

TS, I still question the veracity of your sources, but not your research. Many of your quotes are listed on many sites as coming originally from Barton's flawed research, so I can only assume that those sources were parroting Barton.

Others, could very well be authentic.

In any case, while I believe God looks over all nations, we are still not a Christian nation, but a republic with people of many religions. I thank God for that freedom.

 

I don't know about his quotes, but many are the same ones I was taught back in the 40's, and 50's and then in college in the 50's and 60's. And there are many more. How do you think all the Bible quotes got put on all those goverment building in DC?
Yes I think history has been rewritten. Today many a college will tell you how great Thomas Paine was. He wasn't liked by many when he died.

 

The important question to ask is not whether America or any other nation is a "Christian Nation" but rather whether you. your family and your neighbors and friends are Christians. In thye end, nations are not Christian or anything else. INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE are Christian. Evangelism is primarily one on one.
**********************************************

George Washington
Much of the myth of Washington's alleged Christianity came from Mason Weems influential book, "Life of Washington." The story of the cherry tree comes from this book and it has no historical basis. Weems, a Christian minister portrayed Washington as a devout Christian, yet Washington's own diaries show that he rarely attended Church.

Washington revealed almost nothing to indicate his spiritual frame of mind, hardly a mark of a devout Christian. In his thousands of letters, the name of Jesus Christ never appears. He rarely spoke about his religion, but his Freemasonry experience points to a belief in deism. Washington's initiation occurred at the Fredericksburg Lodge on 4 November 1752, later becoming a Master mason in 1799, and remained a freemason until he died.
To the United Baptist Churches in Virginia in May, 1789, Washington said that every man "ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience."

After Washington's death, Dr. Abercrombie, a friend of his, replied to a Dr. Wilson, who had interrogated him about Washington's religion replied, "Sir, Washington was a Deist."

Thomas Jefferson
Even most Christians do not consider Jefferson a Christian. In many of his letters, he denounced the superstitions of Christianity. He did not believe in spiritual souls, angels or godly miracles. Although Jefferson did admire the morality of Jesus, Jefferson did not think him divine, nor did he believe in the Trinity or the miracles of Jesus. In a letter to Peter Carr, 10 August 1787, he wrote, "Question with boldness even the existence of a god."

Jefferson believed in materialism, reason, and science. He never admitted to any religion but his own. In a letter to Ezra Stiles Ely, 25 June 1819, he wrote, "You say you are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know."


John Adams
Adams, a Unitarian, flatly denied the doctrine of eternal damnation. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, he wrote:

"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved -- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"

In his letter to Samuel Miller, 8 July 1820, Adams admitted his unbelief of Protestant Calvinism: "I must acknowledge that I cannot class myself under that denomination."

JOHN ADAMS
In his, "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" [1787-1788], John Adams wrote:

"The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.

". . . Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind."


James Madison
Called the father of the Constitution, Madison had no conventional sense of Christianity. In 1785, Madison wrote in his Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments:

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."

"What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not."

Benjamin Franklin
Although Franklin received religious training, his nature forced him to rebel against the irrational tenets of his parents Christianity. His

Autobiography revels his skepticism, "My parents had given me betimes religions impressions, and I received from my infancy a pious education in the principles of Calvinism. But scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself.

". . . Some books against Deism fell into my hands. . . It happened that they wrought an effect on my quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a through Deist."

In an essay on "Toleration," Franklin wrote:
"If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practiced it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed persecution in the Romish church, but practiced it upon the Puritans. These found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here [England] and in New England."

Dr. Priestley, an intimate friend of Franklin, wrote of him:
"It is much to be lamented that a man of Franklin's general good character and great influence should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done as much as he did to make others unbelievers" (Priestley's Autobiography)

Thomas Paine
This freethinker and author of several books, influenced more early Americans than any other writer. Although he held Deist beliefs, he wrote in his famous The Age of Reason:

"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my church. "
"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.

 

Unfortunately, it is because of of these beliefs that we are truly losing our American Christian heritage. You have bought into the lie that this nation is just another of many nations upon the earth. The truth is that this nation was founded upon Christian principles and it is because of this that we have been extraordinary blessed by God Almighty.

 

Terry, God loves all people, not just Americans. I see nothing in scripture about the US being the chosen people.

 

Move to Iran then and talk openly about your Christianity.

 

What does that reply have to do with anything? Doesn't God love the Iranians?

 

This thread has nothing to do with who God loves. It has to do with the FACT that this country was established as a Christian nation. Although God does love the Iranians, Iran was not established on Godly principles.