"If My People, who are called by My name, shall humble themselves, pray, seek, crave, and require of necessity My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land." (2 Chronicles 7:14)
Introduction: The Core Principles for America's Founding According to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams
When we think of the principles upon which our nation was founded, we think of such phrases as Thomas Jefferson's from his authoring of the Declaration of Independence beginning on June 11, 1776 that are found within the Preamble (Courtesy of The Charters of Freedom: The U.S. National Archives):
In Congress, July 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. — The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free system of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislature, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in attention to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
So, too, are these of yet another Founding Father, John Adams, who in a letter to Jefferson describes the three sources of the nation's founding (Courtesy of Conservatively-Speaking: A Conservative-Political Blog on Today's Issues):
Both men are correct because they were among the chief architects behind the characteristics upon which America was founded. But as I posited in another article on May 9, Americans seem to be more inclined to identify with the founding principles of the French Revolution rather than those of our own War of Independence. In another letter written to Jefferson by Adams, dated March 2, 1816, he discusses this very phenomena (Courtesy of The Online Library of Liberty):
Quincy, 2 March, 1816.
I cannot be serious! I am about to write you the most frivolous letter you ever read. Would you go back to your cradle, and live over again your seventy years? I believe you would return me a New England answer, by asking me another question, “Would you live your eighty years over again?” If I am prepared to give you an explicit answer, the question involves so many considerations of metaphysics and physics, of theology and ethics, of philosophy and history, of experience and romance, of tragedy, comedy, and farce, that I would not give my opinion without writing a volume to justify it. I have lately lived over again in part, from 1753, when I was junior sophister at college, till 1769, when I was digging in the mines as a barrister at law for silver and gold in the town of Boston, and got as much of the shining dross for my labor, as my utmost avarice at that time craved. At the hazard of the little vision that is left me, I have read the history of that period of sixteen years, in the six first volumes of the Baron de Grimm. In a late letter to you, I expressed a wish to see a history of quarrels, and calamities of authors in France, like that of D’Israeli in England; I did not expect it so soon, but now I have it in a manner more masterly than I ever hoped to see it. It is not only a narrative of the incessant great wars between the ecclesiastics and the philosophers, but of the little skirmishes and squabbles of poets, musicians, sculptors, painters, architects, tragedians, comedians, opera singers, and dancers, chansons, vaudevilles, epigrams, madrigals, epitaphs, sonnets, &c.
No man is more sensible than I am of the service to science and letters, humanity, fraternity, and liberty, that would have been rendered by the encyclopedists and economists, by Voltaire, D’Alembert, Buffon, Diderot, Rousseau, La Lande, Frederic and Catherine, if they had possessed common sense. But they were all totally destitute of it. They seemed to think that all Christendom was convinced, as they were, that all religion was “visions judaiques,” and that their effulgent lights had illuminated all the world; they seemed to believe that whole nations and continents had been changed in their principles, opinions, habits, and feelings, by the sovereign grace of their almighty philosophy, almost as suddenly as Catholics and Calvinists believe in instantaneous conversion. They had not considered the force of early education on the minds of millions, who had never heard of their philosophy.
And what was their philosophy? Atheism,—pure, unadulterated atheism. Diderot, D’Alembert, Frederic, De La Lande, and Grimm, were indubitable atheists. The universe was master only, and eternal. Spirit was a word without a meaning. Liberty was a word without a meaning. There was no liberty in the universe; liberty was a word void of sense. Every thought, word, passion, sentiment, feeling, all motion and action was necessary. All beings and attributes were of eternal necessity; conscience, morality, were all nothing but fate. This was their creed, and this was to perfect human nature, and convert the earth into a paradise of pleasure.
Who and what is this fate? He must be a sensible fellow. He must be a master of science; he must be a master of spherical trigonometry, and great circle sailing; he must calculate eclipses in his head by intuition; he must be master of the science of infinitesimals, “la science des infiniment petits.” He must involve and extract all the roots by intuition, and be familiar with all possible or imaginable sections of the cone. He must be a master of the arts, mechanical and imitative; he must have more eloquence than Demosthenes, more wit than Swift or Voltaire, more humor than Butler or Trumbull; and what is more comfortable than all the rest, he must be good-natured; for this is upon the whole a good world. There is ten times as much pleasure as pain in it.
Why, then, should we abhor the word God, and fall in love with the word fate? We know there exists energy and intellect enough to produce such a world as this, which is a sublime and beautiful one, and a very benevolent one, notwithstanding all our snarling; and a happy one, if it is not made otherwise by our own fault.
Ask a mite in the centre of your mammoth cheese, what he thinks of the ‘το πᾶν.” I should prefer the philosophy of Timæus of Locris, before that of Grimm, Diderot, Frederic, and D’Alembert. I should even prefer the Shaster of Indostan, or the Chaldean, Egyptian, Indian, Greek, Christian, Mahometan, Teutonic, or Celtic theology. Timæus and Ocellus taught that three principles were eternal: God, matter, and form. God was good, and had ideas; matter was necessity, fate, dead, without form, without feeling, perverse, untractable, capable, however, of being cut into forms of spheres, circles, triangles, squares, cubes, cones, &c. The ideas of the good God labored upon matter to bring it into form; but matter was fate, necessity, dulness, obstinacy, and would not always conform to the ideas of the good God, who desired to make the best of all possible worlds, but matter, fate, necessity, resisted, and would not let him complete his idea. Hence all the evil and disorder, pain, misery, and imperfection of the universe.
We all curse Robespierre and Bonaparte; but were they not both such restless, vain, extravagant animals as Diderot and Voltaire? Voltaire was the greatest literary character and Bona the greatest military character of the eighteenth century; there is all the difference between them; both equally heroes and equally cowards.
When you asked my opinion of a university, it would have been easy to advise mathematics, experimental philosophy, natural history, chemistry, and astronomy, geography, and the fine arts, to the exclusion of ontology, metaphysics, and theology. But knowing the eager impatience of the human mind to search into eternity and infinity, the first cause and last end of all things, I thought best to leave it its liberty to inquire, till it is convinced, as I have been these fifty years, that there is but one being in the universe who comprehends it, and our last resource is resignation.
This Grimm must have been in Paris when you were there. Did you know him or hear of him?
I have this moment received two volumes more; but these are from 1777 to 1782, leaving the chain broken from 1769 to 1777. I hope hereafter to get the two intervening volumes.
France was guilty of such an apostasy to the practice of atheism in its conduct of the revolution, and rather than leading it to "Liberte, egalite, fraternite" (Translated into English as "liberty, equality, and fraternity"), it resulted in the deaths of thousands nationwide during the Reign of Terror. The basis for the founding of the new French Republic was empty on both promise and virtue. To use a very popular cliche, revolutionary France was built upon a foundation of quick sand.
Conclusion: The Rev. Joe Wright's Phenomenal "Prayer for Our Nation"
(Above: The Rev. Joe Wright, who delivered the famous "Prayer for Our Nation" before the Kansas House of Representatives in January 1996.)
With the Left in America having almost completely succeeded at transforming America from a society found upon the principles of such things as Jefferson's "the Laws of Nature and the Laws of Nature's God," and Adams' "Principles of Christianity... and the general Principles of English and American Liberty," the seeds of apathy and social and moral decay have wrought destruction to God's guarantee of liberty to all American citizens. Those who cling strongly to their Christian faith are derided as "mean-spirited" and "intolerant of people of different faiths." The online periodical Catholic Online describes President Obama's speech on the subject in Belfast, Northern Ireland that offended Catholics around the world:
Comparing religious schools to segregation in the American South, Obama told the Irish they should not have separate schools for Catholics and Protestants in the historically divided region.
BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND (Catholic Online) - Obama told a town hall meeting that included students, "Because issues like segregated schools and housing, lack of jobs and opportunity--symbols of history that are a source of pride for some and pain for others--these are not tangential to peace; they're essential to it. If towns remain divided--if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs--if we can't see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division. It discourages cooperation."
Obama referred to painful episodes in American history including the Civil War and segregation to drive home his point that separations can be harmful to society and that unity is better.
However, President Obama omitted the fact that even in the United States, divisions remain. There remain Catholic and Protestant schools, as well as secular for example. Would Obama break these schools?
President Obama has been one of the most hostile presidents in history to the Catholic Church. His healthcare plan features a provision that directly affronts Catholic (and all Christian) moral teaching, and despite the protections promised by the First Amendment, he insists on imposing his will on all Christians.
At his order, Catholics are expected to bend the knee and pay for contraceptives, abortifacients, and ultimately abortions, despite their incredible moral cost.
In Northern Ireland, Christian education is entirely laudable, be it Catholic or Protestant, if it properly forms the mind of a child. Moral Christians do not murder, do not discriminate, and do not impose their inhuman will upon others.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Obama.
© 2013, Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.
An intriguing pair of ironies are that 1) While Americans are being arrested for criticizing the manner in which Muslims practice their religion due to the vast majority of them engaging in violent acts against people of other faiths since they are seen by Allah as infidels, and 2) Paula Deen was fired yesterday by Food Network for racial slur comments she made many years ago, the president can insult Christians and Jews, spy on conservatives, promote inconsequential licentiousness by granting greater legal accesses to abortions for women, et. al., and do so with absolute impunity. For the longest time, his approval rating remain steady around the 50-53% range, but now that revelations have been disclosed about the various abuses of constitutional authority by his administration that are violating the First, Second, Fourth, and Tenth Amendment rights of the American people, people no longer trust nor approve of him as a leader, and he has lost his credibility.
One man who has stood for The Greatest Benefactor America has ever known in securing its sovereignty is none other than Rev. Billy Graham. At the age of 94, he is still cognizant enough to realize that America has been led astray in such a fashion under President Obama and in the worst possible way imaginable under any president that it is on the brink of meeting the same fate as that of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. For those of my readers not familiar with the story of those two godless cities, the following information, courtesy of Wikipedia, will brief you on their significance in the history of the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam:
Sodom and Gomorrah were cities mentioned in the Book of Genesis and throughout the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and Deuterocanonical sources, as well as the Qur'an. According to the Torah, the kingdoms of Sodom and Gomorrah were allied with the cities of Admah, Zeboim and Bela. These five cities, also known as the "cities of the plain", were situated on the Jordan river plain in the southern region of the land of Canaan. The Jordan river plain (which corresponds to area just north of the modern day Dead Sea) has been compared to the garden of Eden,[Gen.13:10] being a land well-watered and green, suitable for grazing livestock.
Divine judgment by Yahweh was then passed upon Sodom and Gomorrah along with two other neighboring cities that were completely consumed by fire and brimstone. Neighboring Zoar (Bela) was the only city to be spared during that day of judgment.[Deut.29:23][Gen.10:19] In Abrahamic traditions, Sodom and Gomorrah have become synonymous with impenitent sin, and their fall with a proverbial manifestation of God's wrath.[Jude 1:7] Sodom and Gomorrah have been used as metaphors for homosexuality and vice viewed as a deviation. The story has therefore given rise to words in several languages, including the English word sodomy, used in sodomy laws to describe a sexual "crime against nature" consisting of anal and/or oral sex, either homosexual or heterosexual.
It has been widely believed that among the reasons the Roman Empire fell was because of vices such as the sinful ones committed in Sodom and Gomorrah. The Rev. Joe Wright, who is/was the senior pastor of the 2,500 member congregation at Central Christian Church in Wichita, Kansas, believed this was occurring as early as 1996, during the first term of the presidency of Bill Clinton, and delivered the following prayer that would become mistakenly attributed to Rev. Billy Graham and late radio personality Paul Harvey before the Kansas House of Representatives in January 1996 (Courtesy of Snopes.com):
The website also provides the background for the prayer that took the nation by storm over 17 years ago:“Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, 'Woe to those who call evil good,' but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called it ambition. We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Amen!”
The “Prayer for Our Nation” piece reproduced above has in recent years come to be attributed to venerable evangelist the Rev. Billy Graham, and before that it was circulated as “Paul Harvey’s Prayer” (or “Paul Harvey’s On Air Prayer”). However, it was neither written nor first presented by either of those men.
This prayer burst into the public consciousness back in January of 1996, when the Rev. Joe Wright, senior pastor of the 2,500-member Central Christian Church in Wichita, KS, was invited to deliver the opening prayer at a session of the Kansas House of Representatives. On that occasion he offered the following “Prayer of Repentance” (which as not entirely of his own crafting but rather was a version of a prayer written in 1995 by Bob Russell, who had offered it at the Kentucky Governor’s Prayer Breakfast in Frankfort).
Rev. Wright had been invited to serve as the Kansas House’s guest chaplain by Rep. Anthony Powell, a Wichita Republican who was also a member of Wright’s church. Accordingly, Rev. Wright read the prayer at the opening of the legislature on 23 January 1996 and then departed, unaware of the ruckus he had created until his church secretary called him on his car phone to ask him what he had done.
Reportedly, one Democrat walked out of the House in protest, three others gave speeches critical of Wright’s prayer, and another blasted Wright’s “message of intolerance.” House Minority Leader Tom Sawyer (also a Democrat) asserted that the prayer “reflects the extreme, radical views that continue to dominate the House Republican agenda since right-wing extremists seized control of the House Republican cause last year.” Rep. Jim Long, a Democrat from Kansas City, said that Wright “made everyone mad.” But Rep. Powell, who had invited Wright in the first place, claimed that House Democrats were only trying to make political points with their criticism and affirmed that he supported the them of the prayer.
Rev. Wright said afterwards: “I certainly did not mean to be offensive to individuals, but I don’t apologize for the truth.” His staff stopped counting the telephone calls about the prayer that came in from every state and many foreign countries after the first 6,500 or so. Wright appeared on dozens of radio shows and was the subject of number television and print news reports in the aftermath of his appearance at the Kansas House of Representatives, and his prayer stirred up controversy all over again when it was read by the chaplain coordinator in the Nebraska legislature the following month. Wright later explained: “I thought I might get a call from an angry congressman or two, but I was talking to God, not them. The whole point was to say tha twe all have sings that we need to repent -- all of us… The problem, I guess, is that you’re not supposed to get too specific when talking about sin.”
What to make of all the fuss? Syndicated religion columnist Terry Mattingly probably explained it best when he wrote: “The easy answer is that he read a prayer about sin. The complicated answer is that Wright jumped into America’s tense debate about whether some things are always right and some things are always wrong.”Let it be known that despite one of the founding principles of America being Christianity, a disturbing trend is taking place among our population (Courtesy of Wikipedia):
Christianity is the most popular religion in the United States, with around 73% of polled Americans identifying themselves as Christian in 2012. This is down from 86% in 1990, and slightly lower than 78.6% in 2001. About 62% of those polled claim to be members of a church congregation. In the mid-1990's the United States had the largest Christian population on Earth, with 224 million Christians.To conclude this article, Jean Jacques Rousseau, a philosophe of the European Enlightenment of the 18th Century, encourages his pupil to proclaim God's sovereignty over humanity in front of philosophers who would denigrate his name in his famous work on education, Emile, or On Education (Courtesy of The Religious and Philosophical Beliefs of Rousseau, 1762):
"My good youth, be honest and humble; learn how to be ignorant, then you will never deceive yourself or others. If ever your talents are so far cultivated as to enable you to speak to other men, always speak according to your conscience, without caring for their applause. The abuse of knowledge causes incredulity. The learned always despise the opinions of the crowd; each of them must have his own opinion. A haughty philosophy leads to atheism just as blind devotion leads to fanaticism. Avoid these extremes; keep steadfastly to the path of truth, or what seems to you truth, in simplicity of heart, and never let yourself be turned aside by pride or weakness. Dare to proclaim God in front of the philosophers; dare to preach humanity to the intolerant. It may be you will stand alone, but you will bear within you a witness which will make the witness of men of no account with you. Let them love or hate, let them read your writings or despise them; no matter. Speak the truth and do the right; the one thing that really matters is to do one's duty in this world; and when we forget ourselves we are really working for ourselves. My chill, self-interest misleads us; the hope of the just is the only sure guide."
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32)
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