Tothesource

March 26, 2004
Dear Concerned Citizen,

On Wednesday Dr. Michael Newdow, a non-practicing lawyer and emergency room doctor, went before the United States Supreme Court to argue for the removal of “under God” from our Pledge of Allegiance.

Dr. Newdow is concerned that his daughter is being traumatized when school officials lead her through the Pledge each morning. He believes her school district is violating the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause by requiring schools to lead even willing students in the Pledge.

His 9 year old daughter doesn’t report being traumatized. She and her mother, Sandra Banning, are Christians. Sandra Banning wants “under God” left in the Pledge. Dr. Newdow is an atheist activist. He and Sandra never married. She has been battling the tenacious Dr. Newdow for years in a series of legal skirmishes over custody of the child.

So if we are being accurate we would say that it is Dr. Newdow who is traumatized that his daughter agrees with her mother and gladly says the words “one nation under God” every morning in school. If anything is traumatizing Dr. Newdow’s daughter it would most likely be his repeated legal harassment of her and her mother.

He was more honest when he told the court that, “when I see the flag and I think of pledging allegiance, it’s like I’m getting slapped in the face every time, bam, you know, ‘this is a nation under God, your religious belief system is wrong.’”

A bit of history is needed lest we become trapped inside Dr. Newdow’s sensibilities.

The separation of church and state does not mean yielding cultural control to the state. In fact, it means the exact opposite. If individuals do not posses inalienable rights based on “God or God’s nature”, history has taught us that individuals end up under the authority of a powerful few.

Even William of Ockham, that great defender of the individual, a full four hundred years before our forefathers signed the United States Constitution, insisted that our individual liberty comes from God or nature. Our natural positive right of use of things or to make laws and sit rulers can not ultimately be taken away. No ruler or state has absolute power because they can not remove these liberties granted to men by God and nature.

Our founding fathers agreed. Their declared rights of liberty and equality come from God, not from government. If our liberty comes from a government then that same government can take that liberty away. Our founding fathers believed that government is only the custodian of a liberty derived from a source that is beyond the authority of the state.

In short, we are a nation “under God”, not “under itself”.

"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis,
a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?"

Thomas Jefferson

The French revolution took place just after ours. Their source of liberty was the state. That revolution was short lived. It ended in a reign of terror followed by decades of despotic rule.

Our founder’s insistence on the separation of church and state was to sustain, not diminish, the people’s positive liberty to express their faith, whatever that faith is, even Dr. Newdow’s atheism.

But what would happen if we as a nation all agree with Dr. Newdow and no longer believe in God?

Nietzsche predicted the answer. He asserted that western civilization was built on the fiction that God exists and that he gives meaning to our lives. Belief in God sustains silly notions such as human equality and individual rights. Once God’s death is finally accepted the west would collapse into a great despair. Totalitarian strong men would be welcomed by the common person who is now hungry for meaning and order in a Godless world.

What is so chilling about Nietzsche’s prediction is that he was right. Following God’s funeral in 19th century Europe, the next century will be remembered as the age of atheistic totalitarianism. Nazism and Communism took 100 million lives, both mocking human equality and individual liberty.

So when our good friends, The Knights of Columbus, proposed in 1954 that Congress add “under God” to our Pledge of Allegiance the vote was unanimous. Not quite a decade out from its horrifying war with goose-stepping Nazis, America was entering a new conflict, this time a Cold War, with yet another atheistic totalitarian regime.

Atheistic totalitarianism was becoming a real pain in the neck.

"[The words 'under God'] will help us to keep constantly in our minds and hearts the spiritual and moral principles which alone give dignity to man, and upon which our way of life is founded."

President Dwight Eisenhower

Today Dr. Newdow and other evangelical atheists seek to undo all of this. It would be a remarkable concession to the power of the state and to exclusive secularism to decide to remove “under God” from the pledge.

Why would the court do this?

Because Dr. Newdow and his friends are employing a new strategy. They assert that faith statements can be offensive and violate our privacy. Maybe if we eliminate them from prominence we would all get along better?

But beliefs by their definition are worldviews lacking absolute knowledge.
This would include not only theistic beliefs such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but also secular belief systems such as atheism and scientism. They are all worldviews. Even Dr. Newdow admits his atheism is a ‘religious belief system’.

Belief is an integral part of what it means to be human, to be limited in our ability to know. We all are people of faith. The question is faith in what?

This fabricated new right, the right to be protected from being offended by what others believe, has the potential of becoming a moral cancer on America. It is also a ridiculous notion.

A recent poll said that 87% of the American public want “under God” to remain in the pledge.

It is essential for all of our liberties, including those of Dr. Newdow, that the Supreme Court leave it in.

The Rev. Dr. Michael A. Newdow, Esq. -- physician, lawyer and founder of the First Amendmist Church of True Science

Underdog or raging atheist activist? Many don't know that the Pledge controversy is only one of many legal battles Dr. Newdow is waging. Some wonder if his custody battles are a means to another end altogether.

Read more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26780-2003Dec1?language=printer

Jefferson's wall between church and state had less to do with the separation between religion and all civil government than with the separation between federal and state governments on matters pertaining to religion.

"On New Year’s Day, 1802, President Jefferson penned a missive to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut. The Baptists had written the new President a fan letter in October 1801, congratulating him on his election to the “chief Magistracy in the United States.” They celebrated his zealous advocacy for religious liberty and chastised those who had criticized him “as an enemy of religion[,] Law & good order.”
In a carefully crafted reply endorsing the persecuted Baptists’ aspirations for religious liberty, the President wrote:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & 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 & State.

"Jefferson’s wall, according to conventional wisdom, represents a universal principle on the prudential and constitutional relationship between religion and the civil state. To the contrary, this wall had less to do with the separation between religion and all civil government than with the separation between federal and state governments on matters pertaining to religion (such as official proclamations of days of prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving). The “wall of separation” was a metaphoric construction of the First Amendment, which Jefferson time and again said imposed its restrictions on the federal government only (see, for example, Jefferson’s 1798 draft of the Kentucky Resolutions). In other words, the wall separated the federal regime on one side from state governments and religious authorities on the other."

First Amendment - Religion and Expression

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

"One day I was just looking at the coins (that) is what brought this up. I saw 'In God We Trust' on my coins. I said, 'I don't trust in God,' what is this? And I recalled there was something in the Constitution that said you're not allowed to do that and so I did some research. And as soon as I did the research, I realized the law seemed to be on my side and I filed the suit. It's a cool thing to do. Everyone should try it."
Michaal Newdow

At The Signing -

Madison's original proposal for a bill of rights provision concerning religion read: ''The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretence, infringed.'' 1 The language was altered in the House to read: ''Congress shall make no law establishing religion, or to prevent the free exercise thereof, or to infringe the rights of conscience.''

Madison's original proposal for a bill of rights provision concerning religion read: ''The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretence, infringed.'' The language was altered in the House to read: ''Congress shall make no law establishing religion, or to prevent the free exercise thereof, or to infringe the rights of conscience.'' In the Senate, the section adopted read: ''Congress shall make no law establishing articles of faith, or a mode of worship, or prohibiting the free exercise of religion, . . .'' It was in the conference committee of the two bodies, chaired by Madison, that the present language was written with its some what more indefinite ''respecting'' phraseology. Debate in Congress lends little assistance in interpreting the religion clauses; Madison's position, as well as that of Jefferson who influenced him, is fairly clear, but the intent, insofar as there was one, of the others in Congress who voted for the language and those in the States who voted to ratify is subject to speculation.

Scholarly Commentary .--The explication of the religion clauses by the scholars has followed a restrained sense of their meaning. Story (Constitutional expert), who thought that ''the right of a society or government to interfere in matters of religion will hardly be contested by any persons, who believe that piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well being of the state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice,'' looked upon the prohibition simply as an exclusion from the Federal Government of all power to act upon the subject. ''The situation . . . of the different states equally proclaimed the policy, as well as the necessity of such an exclusion. In some of the states, episcopalians constituted the predominant sect; in others presbyterians; in others, congregationalists; in others, quakers; and in others again, there was a close numerical rivalry among contending sects. It was impossible, that there should not arise perpetual strife and perpetual jealousy on the subject of ecclesiastical ascendancy, if the national government were left free to create a religious establishment. The only security was in extirpating the power. But this alone would have been an imperfect security, if it had not been followed up by a declaration of the right of the free exercise of religion, and a prohibition (as we have seen) of all religious tests. Thus, the whole power over the subject of religion is left exclusively to the state governments, to be acted upon according to their own sense of justice, and the state constitutions; and the Catholic and the Protestant, the Calvinist and the Arminian, the Jew and the Infidel, may sit down at the common table of the national councils, without any inquisition into their faith, or mode of worship.''

''Probably,'' Story also wrote, ''at the time of the adoption of the constitution and of the amendment to it, now under consideration, the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and the freedom of religious worship. An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation.'' The object, then, of the religion clauses in this view was not to prevent general governmental encouragement of religion, of Christianity, but to prevent religious persecution and to prevent a national establishment.
This interpretation has long since been abandoned by the Court, beginning, at least, with Everson v. Board of Education, in which the Court, without dissent on this point, declared that the Establishment Clause forbids not only practices that ''aid one religion'' or ''prefer one religion over another,'' but as well those that ''aid all religions.'' Recently, in reliance on published scholarly research and original sources, Court dissenters have recurred to the argument that what the religion clauses, principally the Establishment Clause, prevent is ''preferential'' governmental promotion of some religions, allowing general governmental promotion of all religion in general. The Court has not responded, though Justice Souter in a major concurring opinion did undertake to rebut the argument and to restate the Everson position.

Findlaw.com

Michaal Newdow