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James Merett: God not in Constitution

To the editor:

In response to Dale Potter’s letter, “A counterargument,” I have this to say:

Many of our so-called founding fathers of our nation were not Bible-believing Christians; they were Deists. Deism was a philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution.



Its major tenets included belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems and belief in a supreme deity who created the universe to operate solely by natural laws. The supreme God of the Deists removed himself entirely from the universe after creating it.

They believed that he assumed no control over it, exerted no influence on natural phenomena and gave no supernatural revelation to man.



A necessary consequence of these beliefs was a rejection of many doctrines central to the Christian religion. Deists did not believe in the virgin birth, divinity or resurrection of Jesus, the efficacy of prayer, the miracles of the Bible or even the divine inspiration of the Bible.

It is true that the words — separation of church and state — are not found in the Constitution.

Guess what else is not in the Constitution? God. There is only one place where the word Lord is used in the Constitution. Found in the Signatory section, where the date is written thusly: “Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven.”

The use of the word “Lord” here is not a religious reference, however. This was a common way of expressing the date, in both religious and secular contexts.

The phrase separation of church and state generally is traced to the letter written by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to the Danbury Baptists, in which he referred to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution as creating a “wall of separation” between church and state.

Adultery in the Bible is sex with anyone but your first wife, not just your wife.

Jesus had this to say, from Matthew 5, “But I say to you that whoever divorces his wife for any reason except sexual immorality (fornication) causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a woman who is divorced commits adultery.”

We see it again in Mark 10, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her.

“And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery,” yet again in Luke 16, but you get the idea. Scripture throughout teaches the permanency of the marriage union.

The Bible has a history of being used in the United States to justify the keeping of slaves, keeping women from getting the right to vote and until the 1960s, to keep mixed race couples from getting married.

The Bible also teaches us the earth is flat with a sun that revolves around it. That explains why one adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth.

It is past time to stop using the Bible to spread hate of others that don’t follow your beliefs or your cherry picking of scripture.

James Merett


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