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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (262370)	6/9/2002 8:21:15 PM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 769670

Charles, I understand what you're saying. Let me see if I can explain what I am trying to say a bit better. Do you believe that every person has a certain set of moral beliefs which have been instilled in them by society, by their parents, by their church, or by their historical experiences? If so, let's call these belief's "mental models". They form the cornerstone of assumptions around which we see the world. These mental models form the building block of our learning process. Up until the last 40 years or so, children who went to school had these mental models imbued with judeo-christian values. These values formed the cornerstone of thinking which went into our laws. The Ten Commandments is posted on the House of Representatives wall, our money is imprinted with the words "In God we Trust" and many of our oldest buildings contain judeo-christian symbols. We even take an oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth "so help me God" in court. Having said that, let me turn to our culture today... There is a constant struggle in any society to balance ideas. In America, freedom of speech has to be weighed against inciting violence or purveying pornography to children. So, nothing stands in a blank zone of perfect right and wrong. The gray areas of our culture have been in a constant state of change for years. The term "Seperation of church and state" has been recently used by secularist in this same vein. They've been pushing the phrase, perhaps with good intentions, to the point where it has now become sinister and crossed the line to becoming an anti-judeo-christian term. The phrase is now being used to prevent almost any religious expression in the public square. Especially, the expressions valued by christians. We have now reached the point where it is demanded that the concerns and sensitivities of every group in America must be taken into account, with the sole exception of the concerns of christians. Further, I've read the constitution and it does not contain the words "separation of church and state". Yet the phrase is constantly quoted as the sole overriding concept upon which America was founded on. Often, nightmarish scenarios are presented as the inevitable consequence of relaxing vigilance regarding "seperation of church and state", yet these things have never happened in America before when we prayed to God to start the class day, or when we had the Ten Commandments posted on the schoolhouse wall. Is this fear really founded on some sort of truth? So, why the change? Did the judeo-christian value system really cause problems in our education system? Or in our culture? Has the removal of God in our public schools been a positive boon to our society? Further, is the rise of anti-christian sentiments, driven by the NEA and other groups who have used the courts to press their agenda, helped our children learn to read, write, study, and persist when the going gets tough? These are the questions I've been asking myself, and my conclusion is that this move away from God has not been a positive one. With families fractured and far too many dads absent, we need our children's value system to be nurtured as often as possible. We need to arrest the environment in which teachers are afraid to say what is right or wrong, lest they be judged by the religionaphobics among us. The values which are now being shoved down our throats are coming from the secular left, not the christian right. And although your noble claim of neutral laws sounds reasonable, the fact is it is not happening. The left has introduced sex indoctrination and condom distribution to our children. The left has made tobacco the moral equivalent of child molestation. The left has been teaching an environmental awareness which borders on "earth worship". The left has been preaching in the classroom that guns should be removed from our society and anyone who owns one should examine their values. And lastly, the left strongly desires us to accept homosexual couples as the equivalent to married heterosexuality ones. So where is your evidence of neutral morals being taught?