I could not believe the amount of quality material on this site. The site is extremely eyecatching and pulls the reader straight it, the articles are great quality and are very professionally written. I have seen too many of these sites where it looks…

But to be fair you did use our Christian heritage and an attack on us by particular ethnic group in an argument to close the borders. There was at least precedence for me to make the comment. Also on the other side of the coin unless you know them those supporters of Al Queda, you spoke of, personally there is no way for you to know if they are immigrants or natural born citizens, they even may have gotten citizen status from or government. Which if any of these are the case even if we did close the borders they would still be down the street from you celebrating just the same, unless i musunderstand your point and you are actually promoting martial law.

The point i was trying to make with McVeigh is a simple example of a logical fallacy, a tool of debate. The fallacies were Non sequiter ( it does not follow) and Argumentum ad antiquitatem (the argument to antiquity or tradition). In Jeffs original post (218) he used christian traditions and a attack by terrorists that happen to be muslim as reasons to close the borders. I dismiss the heritage point because you cannot make any logical arguments based on heritage (example. the south was rich with exports when there was slavery, thus we should allow for it again) such arguments lack any logical backing. In regards to Non sequiter ( it does not follow) Jeff argued that (A) Terrorists attacked this country, plus (B) The religous beliefs of the terrorist should be taken into account and represent that group as a whole which equals (c) The deportation of those who fall into (a) and (b). That was the argument I made for McVeigh, he was (A) a terrorist, (B) a white, christian, veteran, and natural born citizen of this country, so according to jeffs argument A + B must = C if it can not be universally applied then it holds no logical basis and must be dismissed as invalid.

To clarify I am not on the side of the terrorists, I am on the side of freedom, which is the true great heritage of this country, but freedom comes at a cost, and you may have to endure living around or dealing with things you do not like, but for every person you do not like, there are probably just as many people who do not like you, and would enjoy nothing more to see you deported.

I do not follow your logic. In 1995 Timothy McVeigh placed a 5000lb bomb in a federal building in oklahoma city. That bomb killed 168 people and injured 800+ including children in the daycare. There are some interesting stats for McVeigh, He was a young, White, Christian, Male, who served for this nations Army and earned a Bronze medal, as a veteran of the Gulf war. Now if i understand you correctly as a result of this terrorist attack, we should wake up and realize that we should deport all White christian males, much less let them run for office. I am sorry but i cant follow this sort of logic.

And as a side note it is important to realize that being Christian does not make you a native just as being Muslim does not make you an immigrant.

An interesting question though is did Ellison say God when he took the oath.

For you liberals God IS in the oath.

John Adams

“I have examined all religions, as well as my narrow sphere, my straightened means, and my busy life, would allow; and the result is that the Bible is the best Book in the world. It contains more philosophy than all the libraries I have seen.” December 25, 1813 letter to Thomas Jefferson

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” –October 11, 1798

“[July 4th] ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.”
[letter written to Abigail on the day the Declaration was approved by Congress]

I give you the words of our founding father and President, Thomas Jefferson…

[When] the [Virginia] bill for establishing religious freedom … was finally passed, … a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.” — Autobiography, 1821.

Believing 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. — to Danbury Baptists, 1802.

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. — to Horatio G. Spafford, 1814.

The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man. — to Jeremiah Moor, 1800.

The law for religious freedom … [has] put down the aristocracy of the clergy and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind. — to John Adams, 1813.

The primary leaders of the 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.

These beliefs were forcefully articulated by Thomas Paine in Age of Reason, a book that so outraged his contemporaries that he died rejected and despised by the nation that had once revered him as “the father of the American Revolution.” To this day, many mistakenly consider him an atheist, even though he was an out spoken defender of the Deistic view of God. Other important founding fathers who espoused Deism were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, James Madison, and James Monroe.

Fundamentalist Christians are currently working overtime to convince the American public that the founding fathers intended to establish this country on “biblical principles,” but history simply does not support their view. The men mentioned above and others who were instrumental in the founding of our nation were in no sense Bible-believing Christians. Thomas Jefferson, in fact, was fiercely anti-cleric. In a letter to Horatio Spafford in 1814, Jefferson said, “In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes” (George Seldes, The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey Citadel Press, 1983, p. 371). In a letter to Mrs. Harrison Smith, he wrote, “It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me. But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest” (August 6, 1816).

Jefferson was just as suspicious of the traditional belief that the Bible is “the inspired word of God.” He rewrote the story of Jesus as told in the New Testament and compiled his own gospel version known as The Jefferson Bible, which eliminated all miracles attributed to Jesus and ended with his burial. The Jeffersonian gospel account contained no resurrection, a twist to the life of Jesus that was considered scandalous to Christians but perfectly sensible to Jefferson’s Deistic mind. In a letter to John Adams, he wrote, “To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise” (August 15, 1820). In saying this, Jefferson was merely expressing the widely held Deistic view of his time, which rejected the mysticism of the Bible and relied on natural law and human reason to explain why the world is as it is. Writing to Adams again, Jefferson said, “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter” (April 11, 1823). These were hardly the words of a devout Bible-believer.

Jefferson didn’t just reject the Christian belief that the Bible was “the inspired word of God”; he rejected the Christian system too. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he said of this religion, “There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites” (quoted by newspaper columnist William Edelen, “Politics and Religious Illiteracy,” Truth Seeker, Vol. 121, No. 3, p. 33). Anyone today who would make a statement like this or others we have quoted from Jefferson’s writings would be instantly branded an infidel, yet modern Bible fundamentalists are frantically trying to cast Jefferson in the mold of a Bible believing Christian. They do so, of course, because Jefferson was just too important in the formation of our nation to leave him out if Bible fundamentalists hope to sell their “Christian-nation” claim to the public. Hence, they try to rewrite history to make it appear that men like Thomas Jefferson had intended to build our nation on “biblical principles.” The irony of this situation is that the Christian leaders of Jefferson’s time knew where he stood on “biblical principles,” and they fought desperately, but unsuccessfully, to prevent his election to the presidency. Saul K. Padover’s biography related the bitterness of the opposition that the clergy mounted against Jefferson in the campaign of 1800

INTERESTING THINGS HAPPEN WHEN YOU READ!!!!