And Regent University was founded by–of all people–Jerry Falwell’s host in the last clip, this man (seen here with closeted homosexual rat-dog Ben Shapiro):
The law school, founded in 2004, “upon the premise that there is an integral relationship between faith and reason, and that both have their origin in the Triune God,” claims a vision “to see again all meaningful dialogue over law include the role of faith and the perspective of a Christian worldview as the framework most conducive to the pursuit of truth and justice.” The law school received accreditation from the America Bar Association last year.
The folly in this is evident straightaway. There is indeed a relationship between faith and reason: it is the relationship of opposites. Reason involves [ http://waronignorance.net/reasoning.html ] inductive observation, deductive thinking, analogical precision, and above all the rigorous treatment of evidence.
Faith, on the other hand, is [ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/faith ] “belief that is not based on proof.” We have “faith” in things that we cannot observe, cannot prove, and—to the unbearable anxiety of religious dogmatists—we are not programmed to know. So faith is nothing more than opinion.
I tell law students never to use the words “I think” or “I believe” in my classroom unless masochism is their bailiwick. In law, we reason [ http://waronignorance.net/reasoning.html ] from general premises (rules), apply them to minor premises (provable facts) and then arrive at legal conclusions. To resolve any syllogistic difficulties in this process, we use analogies, definitions, and common experience.
One of the most difficult things to get past as a law professor is our cultural disposition toward beliefs. We commonly hold beliefs—about ghosts, about UFOs, about the Bermuda Triangle, about the afterlife—that we have expended no intellectual travail in fostering. So beliefs are a dime a dozen, I tell students; check them at the door. In a court of law, you can either prove it or you can’t; no judge will have faith in your assertions and characterizations.
But Liberty Law School wants us to believe that both faith and reason have their origins in a Triune God. What role has reason played in discovering a three-part deity comprised of a human, an invisible spirit, and a man in the sky who’s in charge of the other two? What part of one’s belief in such a thing is anything but sheer faith?
When I was a kid, my mother once tried to prove to me with a sort of parable that the universe had to be created by an intelligent being. She said,
Imagine you are walking through a forest and you come upon an area where all the underbrush has been cleared away so that the bare ground is visible in the shape of a circle; and right in the middle of that circular patch of bare ground you see two sticks, each perfectly straight and equal in length, placed perpendicular to one another so that they form perfect right angles and are crossed exactly at the midpoints. What would you assume about how they got there?
I failed to see the point. I said, “I’d assume a person put them there.”
My mother continued, “Then how can you look at the order of the universe, infinitely more complex than those two sticks, and say that nobody put the universe here?”
I was not such an easy kid to “reason with,” so I shot back, “If God created the universe, wouldn’t God have to be far more complex than your two sticks? So who created God?”
And there’s even more to this example that merits rebuttal. The example (which I think my mother later told me was based on the writings of Thomas Aquinas) only works if the analogy between two meticulously placed sticks and an ordered universe is a good one; it’s not. Look around at the universe—it is not ordered; it is chaos [ http://www.imho.com/grae/chaos/chaos.html ].
All the crossed-sticks example shows is that nature is disordered, because only when the disorder of nature is cleared away by a person and something more structured than nature’s randomness is placed among the chaos of nature does evidence of intelligence emerge. Nature itself has no such order, so how does one conclude that the natural world–unaltered by man–was created by an intelligent being? The intelligence demonstrated by this metaphor is the intelligence of man, who creates order, not any god, since this god’s alleged creation is chaos.
As one might imagine, my mother was not pleased with my rejoinder, but she had provided me with a valuable lesson (although not the one she intended to): religion and reason don’t mix. Any attempt to make faith seem reasonable collapses under its own weight.
One needn’t have any opinion as to the psychological or spiritual advisability of faith to see that faith and reason are not compatible. If Liberty Law School wants to imbue its captive audience with faith, that’s between Liberty and its captive audience. But Liberty ought not conflate faith with reason and expect anyone intelligent to believe it.
Copyright 2011 Brendan Beery (emphasis in original)
(CNN) -- As America celebrates its birthday on July 4, the timeless words of Thomas Jefferson will surely be invoked to remind us of our founding ideals -- that "All men are created equal" and are "endowed by their Creator" with the right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These phrases, a cherished part of our history, have rightly been called "American Scripture."
But Jefferson penned another phrase, arguably his most famous after those from the Declaration of Independence. These far more contentious words -- "a wall of separation between church and state" -- lie at the heart of the ongoing debate between those who see America as a "Christian Nation" and those who see it as a secular republic, a debate that is hotter than a Washington Fourth of July.
It is true these words do not appear in any early national document. What may be Jefferson's second most-quoted phrase is found instead in a letter he sent to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut.
While president in 1802, Jefferson wrote: "Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State ... "
The idea was not Jefferson's. Other 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment writers had used a variant of it. Earlier still, religious dissident Roger Williams had written in a 1644 letter of a "hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world."
Williams, who founded Rhode Island with a colonial charter that included religious freedom, knew intolerance firsthand. He and other religious dissenters, including Anne Hutchinson, had been banished from neighboring Massachusetts, the "shining city on a hill" where Catholics, Quakers and Baptists were banned under penalty of death.
As president, Jefferson was voicing an idea that was fundamental to his view of religion and government, expressed most significantly in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he drafted in 1777.
Revised by James Madison and passed by Virginia's legislature in January 1786, the bill stated: "No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened (sic) in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief ..."
It was this simple -- government could not dictate how to pray, or that you cannot pray, or that you must pray.
Jefferson regarded this law so highly that he had his authorship of the statute made part of his epitaph, along with writing the Declaration and founding the University of Virginia. (Being president wasn't worth a mention.)
But more to the point, we are witnessing an aggressively promoted version of our history and heritage in which America is called a "Christian Nation."
This "Sunday School" version of our past has gained currency among conservative television commentators, school boards that have rewritten state textbooks and several GOP presidential candidates, some of whom trekked to Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in early June 2011.
No one can argue, as "Christian Nation" proponents correctly state, that the Founding Fathers were not Christian, although some notably doubted Christ's divinity.
More precisely, the founders were, with very few exceptions, mainstream Protestants. Many of them were Episcopalians, the American offshoot of the official Church of England. The status of America's Catholics, both legally and socially, in the colonies and early Republic, was clearly second-class. Other Christian sects, including Baptists, Quakers and Mormons, faced official resistance, discrimination and worse for decades.
But the founders, and more specifically the framers of the Constitution, included men who had fought a war for independence -- the very war celebrated on the "Glorious Fourth" -- against a country in which church and state were essentially one.
They understood the long history of sectarian bloodshed in Europe that brought many pilgrims to America. They knew the dangers of merging government, which was designed to protect individual rights, with religion, which as Jefferson argued, was a matter of individual conscience.
And that is why the U.S. Constitution reads as it does.
The supreme law of the land, written in the summer of 1787, includes no references to religion -- including in the presidential oath of office -- until the conclusion of Article VI, after all that dull stuff about debts and treaties: "No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." (There is a pro forma "Year of the Lord" reference in the date at the Constitution's conclusion.)
Original intent? "No religious Test" seems pretty clear cut.
The primacy of a secular state was solidified when the First Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights. According to Purdue history professor Frank Lambert, that "introduced the radical notion that the state had no voice concerning matters of conscience."
Beyond that, the first House of Representatives, while debating the First Amendment, specifically rejected a Senate proposal calling for the establishment of Christianity as an official religion. As Lambert concludes, "There would be no Church of the United States. Nor would America represent itself as a Christian Republic."
The actions of the first presidents, founders of the first rank, confirmed this "original intent:"
-- In 1790, President George Washington wrote to America's first synagogue, in Rhode Island, that "all possess alike liberty of conscience" and that "toleration" was an "inherent national gift," not the government's to dole out or take away
-- In 1797, with President John Adams in office, the Senate unanimously approved one of America's earliest foreign treaties, which emphatically stated (Article 11): "As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, -- as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen (Muslims) ..."
-- In 1802, Jefferson added his famous "wall of separation," implicit in the Constitution until he so described it (and cited in several Supreme Court decisions since).
These are, to borrow an admittedly loaded phrase, "inconvenient truths" to those who proclaim that America is a "Christian Nation."
The Constitution and the views of these Founding Fathers trump all arguments about references to God in presidential speeches (permitted under the First Amendment), on money (not introduced until the Civil War), the Pledge of Allegiance ("under God" added in 1954) and in the national motto "In God We Trust" (adopted by law in 1956).
And those contentious monuments to the Ten Commandments found around the country and occasionally challenged in court? Many of them were installed as a publicity stunt for Cecile B. DeMille's 1956 Hollywood spectacle, "The Ten Commandments."
So who are you going to believe? Thomas Jefferson or Hollywood? On second thought: Don't answer.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Kenneth C. Davis.
good piece, right on the money, some real history well presented -- though the author does quite overdo, duck the reality of, just how 'mainline Protestant' the founders 'with very few exceptions' actually happened to be, or not (as v. simply at some point or other publicly self-identified as such, George Washington [ http://www.adherents.com/people/pw/George_Washington.html ] as one example) -- I'd surmise the author did so perhaps because he figured he was already kicking over a big-enough hornet's nest without getting into that fight, which was not essential to, and his ducking of which he did not allow to undermine or cloud, his central point
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