Sunday, October 31, 2010

The Rally To Restore Sanity

This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times — not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.

But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke.

The country’s 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying up to our problems, bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen — or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic.

If we amplify everything we hear nothing.

-Jon Stewart

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Thomas Jefferson

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.
In short, Jefferson was assuring the members of the Danbury Baptist association that the government would not interfere in the religious beliefs of the people, only in the actions that people might take. As Jefferson says, religion is a matter between a person and God, and not the domain of government. And while the government has not always lived up to this, there is no mistaking the ideal conveyed here: Religion and Government should not mix. Period.