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April 8, 2024 Editor, The News-Gazette: America’s promise, stated in the Declaration of Independence, is to provide every citizen the opportunity to achieve a fulfilling life. Our democracy is a spiritual inheritance, freedoms we are to pass on to generations that follow, government establishment of religion forbidden by the Constitution.
The Founders were Deists, believing Jesus was a mere man and would have been astounded by the notion of a personal savior. Claiming American was Christian in the modern sense is ignorance or today’s common willful misrepresentation.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has no trouble lying, insisting the plain English of “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” is not about separation of church and state.
Johnson is one of the selfanointed holy few who want a new America. By Christian, he means dinosaurs, extinct 65 million years ago, were on the Ark, in a world created 6,000 years ago. There is evidence of humans 300,000 years ago.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, divorced and reportedly an adulteress, feeling morally superior, wants a “Christian government,” but “liked” an internet post favoring the murder of Nancy Pelosi. When she is Popesse of American religion, who else will she “like” being murdered?
Christians can’t agree on what Christian means —whether ministers should be educated or are even needed, whether women can be ministers, whether Catholics are Christians, the nature of Jesus and his relation to God, how one is “saved,” the Eucharist, limbo, purgatory, the sacraments, the Sabbath, whether only 144,000 go to heaven, if the Book of Mormon is scripture.
Half of “Christians” have divorced, violating their founder’s prohibition.
Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor threatened the returned Jesus, warning him not to mess with the religious establishment’s power. See the murderous autocratic distortion of religion in Afghanistan and Iran.
European Christians honored “love thy neighbor” by killing millions and millions of other Christians in innumerable religious wars. The Founders, knowing Christians wouldn’t hesitate to murder over doctrinal differences, feared religious egotism would destroy the secular democracy they created.
Would Jesus even recognize today’s “Christian” America? JOE PETITE Rockbridge County
