Fidelity to God Is Commitment to Liberty and America

Every week I receive responses from my weekly commentaries by critics; comments such as:

Our public schools are places for teaching, not preaching. They have NO RIGHT to subject youngsters who[se] parents are not Christians to Christian indoctrination! Prayer has absolutely NO PLACE in public schools.

Evolution, communism, and sex-education are NOT a religion. Students in school are not taught that they must be atheists or communists. The notion that this is happening is just plain ludicrous.

To teach youngsters creationism is as insane as teaching them that the earth is flat and that Santa Claus and the tooth fairy actually exist!

Sorry, but “God” (whatever that is) has never said anything about abortion, and there is not a single reference to it in the Bible. Abortion IS legal, and the founders NEVER intended U.S. law to be based on the Bible.

Our rights come "from God?"   WHICH God?   Zeus?  Allah?  Brahma? Jehovah?  Odin? The Flying Spaghetti Monster? The Buddha? The Great Spirit of the American Indians? And where has the God of the Bible specified our rights? NOWHERE.  

Please don’t get me wrong; as a secular liberal I do not hate Christians; I am just appalled by the intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and self-righteousness of extremist ones.  
 

Alright. Let’s not be extreme. Why don’t we judge the Founders’ words?

Noah Webster, named the “Schoolmaster of America” who authored scores of school textbooks, including the famous dictionary that bears his name, asserted:

The Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things that children under a free government ought to be instructed.

Webster again declared:

The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws. All of the miseries and evils which men suffer from; vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from the despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.

Signer of the Declaration and President of Princeton University, John Witherspoon, declared:

Whosoever is an avowed enemy of God, I (hesitate not) to call him an enemy to his country.

The Father of America, George Washington, concluded his first presidential inauguration with the following exhortation:

It would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official Act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the Universe, who presides in the Councils of Nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that his benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the People of the United States… No People can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand, which conducts the Affairs of men more than the People of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency. 

In conclusion, I would like to exhort my detractors with one more statement by George Washington:

You do well to wish to learn our arts and our ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are.