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Old 10-29-09, 06:48 PM   #6
CaptainHaplo
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Quote:
...no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions of belief...
You say this somehow states that a man cannot use, as a basis for his decisions as a governmet official, his own religious beliefs? In fact, it says exactly the opposite - that while government may not REQUIRE a man to support any worship, it also has no right to REQUIRE a man to NOT have his own opinions that may be based on his religious stance.

Quote:
no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States
NO religious test..... so if a man is religious, and would use his moral or ethical compass, which is often based on faith, your saying that this is a violation of the "church and state clause", when in reality your applying a "religious test" to the person simply because of his faith - which violates the clause you claim supports your position.

Quote:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
Again - you cannot prohibit a government official from the "free exercise" of their beliefs - but the claim that there is a "wall" between church and state that is somehow sacrosanct directly contradicts the free exercise.

The only way you could have total seperation of church and state is if government was restricted to those who identify themselves as athiests, and even then, some could argue that athiesm is nothing but the religion of "no god".

There is a huge difference between the ESTABLISHMENT of a state religion and having people of faiths involved in government.

You can try and twist it however you want, but NO religious test means exactly that.

It should also be noted, since you bring up the Treaty of Tripoli, that Article 11 of said treaty in reality does not exist as claimed.

"As even a casual examination of the annotated translation of 1930 shows, the Barlow translation is at best a poor attempt at a paraphrase or summary of the sense of the Arabic; and even as such its defects throughout are obvious and glaring. Most extraordinary (and wholly unexplained) is the fact that Article 11 of the Barlow translation, with its famous phrase, "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion," does not exist at all. There is no Article 11. The Arabic text which is between Articles 10 and 12 is in form a letter, crude and flamboyant and withal quite unimportant, from the Dey of Algiers to the Pasha of Tripoli. How that script came to be written and to be regarded, as in the Barlow translation, as Article 11 of the treaty as there written, is a mystery and seemingly must remain so. Nothing in the diplomatic correspondence of the time throws any light whatever on the point."

This is a quote directly from the notes of one Hunter Miller, who was commissioned by the US Government to analyze the treaty in 1931.

You may find the information here:

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1796n.asp

I totally concur that the US is not a "christian" nation as many claim, the majority of the founding fathers were deists, yet there is no denying the fact that deists and christians share both a very similiar moral and ethical code that stems from common roots.
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