Most of the time I just keep my mouth shut and my keyboard still about certain ideas that rattle around in my mind, but occasionally I decide to actually write them down. I usually only do so after prolonged periods of illness when my brain feels foggy--like right now--when my self-preservation shields are down.
Here goes.
The Founding Fathers of the United States decided that God gave us certain rights. The writers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights claimed that these rights were from the self-evident Natural Law given by God. (I have often wondered just where they got these ideas about a self-evident Natural Law-- the writers do not source scripture--evidently we are supposed to believe these rights are written in nature or philosophy or reason. The problem is that to make the claim they are from God--you better have some non-subjective source other than "what I personally think.")
So the Founding Fathers say these rights are self-evident and they are given by God himself.
Okay, (even if I am not convinced) let's go with that....
If the premise is that the government does NOT give us these rights, they are directly from God--they also claim the government cannot take these rights away.
Humph, okay again.
Now where this gets all sticky in my mind is that if your government is supposed to have a clear disconnect between church and state (as it has morphed into today) the church is free to have its rights and the government can't interfere and visa versa, why would the Founding Father's expect the government to protect rights they claim are from God?
If the rights originate from God, then shouldn't God protect these rights instead of expecting the state to do it? It would only make sense if the church and state worked together that Christians could expect the state to defend their God-given rights.
Maybe we are getting things a bit convoluted in America. Maybe America, from the very outset and birth, assumed a deep connection between the state and religion---perhaps even believing that the state was set in place by the authority of God himself and God requires the state to implement God's self-evident laws? That is the only possible explanation for the Founding Father to assume that the state cannot take away what they claimed to be God-given rights.....
