"Understanding Today's America"

On May 15, 2001, CBS News Anchor Dan Rather appeared on a show called The O'Reilly Factor.  In an explanation that he gave as to why he thought Bill Clinton to be an upright man Rather said, "I think you can be an honest man and lie about any number of things."

 

Those who are deceived 
don't know they are deceived because they are deceived.

 

In order to truly understand today's America, we must first become students of our history.  Only then can we see how far we have "drifted."  In 1778 the 4th president of the United States, James Madison said,

 

We have staked the whole future 
of American civilization...
upon the capacity of each and all

of us to govern ourselves according 
to the Ten Commandments of God.*

 

102 years later "sin" had taken away our understanding.  In 1980, the "delusion of sin" was in full effect at the highest level of our legislative branch of government, the United States Supreme Court.  Literally ignoring 150 YEARS! of precedents, the Supreme Court ruled in a Kentucky case, Stone v. Graham, that the Ten Commandments could not be posted in schools:

 

"If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments

are to have any effects at all, it will be to induce

the school children to read, meditate upon, and

         perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments...

This is not...a permissible...objective."

 

Tragically, we have forsaken the warnings of our forefathers:

 

"Let the children...be carefully instructed in the principles and obligations of the Christian religion.  This is the most essential part of education.  
The great enemy of the salvation of men...
never invented a more effectual means 
of extirpation (removing) Christianity 
from the world than by persuading mankind 
that it was improper to read the Bible at schools."**

-Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence

 

 

*James Madison.  1778.  Beliles and McDowell, Providential History, p.221.

**Benjamin Rush.  Letters of Benjamin Rush, Princeton, New Jersey:  American Philosophical Society, 1951.