Separation of church and state is somewhat like separating the mind from the brain. The mind might very well be the inspired corner of the brain, giving it fresh insight into normal observations managing the mundane, or even leading to an entirely new concept and direction. Some would be tempted to call this inspiration the spiritual quality of thought and thus attribute this to divinity or a single God. However, they would be wrong; for it would debase divinity as just another element of the space-time continuum of which God cannot be. Temporal spirituality grows out of the rarefied, and often delusional imagination of the mind, from which many religions are derived without help from God, who, to have any true existence, must be divorced from the mundane affairs of the world. Those who attribute religious doctrine to God is on shaky ground as no self-respecting god would indulge in the muddled affairs of humanity.
Albeit in the main Christian, the founding fathers dismissed religion as a force in the shaping of a nation’s principles for good reason. They were all too aware that religion, not unlike the Puritans, took pride in the officious meddling of behaviors requiring injunctive morality , which subsequently would unravel the sustained quest for a united front in the foundation of a nation espousing individual freedoms under material law. The founding fathers, given the freedom to grow under friendly law, envisioned the individual within the framework of a dispassionate community, capable of an enlightened pursuit of life. They were willing to risk the shiftless rogues that would probably never change.
Still, the founding fathers did not rule out the freedom of worship, preferably private, as they, being religious to a degree themselves, recognized the individual was affected by tradition and conscience, and could not entirely block out the inspirational precepts of one’s beliefs, provided this disposition did not interfere with the maxims of the state, which admittedly was partially founded on the generic inspirations implanted by the tradition of the Christian faith that capsulated free will within the general welfare.
Today, however, with organizational religion returning to the fray and impudently hijacking a disinterested God as now frowning on the “sinners” of the United States, secular justice is in jeopardy. These self-styled prophets are denigrating the supra-high mindedness of a Deity by bringing Him down to their temporal level to serve as a divine lawyer in defense of subversive trends toward theocracy.
Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: November 1, 2004.
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