Have We Forgotten the True Value of 'In God We Trust'?

Hmmm ... re: that last bit ... do you have even one black friend? If not, so sorry, but if so, do you ever talk to them about what their experiences with racism have been? Like, is their name their own, or like many freed slaves, did their ancestors adopt their former owner's name? Do they know your views on this issue?

 

I do think its a really good phrase TBH

 

Seriously, stop with the hyperbolic hand wringing. White children are not being taught self-hate. CRT is not taught below college.

The CRT lexicon discusses things that have happened and some that still happen. Facts, those pesky things!

Do you really dislike historical facts so much that you simply refuse to believe them? Does that really work? Because believe me, I would love to be able to put a halo on America, but we earned some deep regrets. That doesn't mean we can't love ourselves or our country, it just means that we accept that we aren't perfect.

 

It's blatantly obvious you have no clue what the founding fathers believed.

 

so true... when one needs government to push their God beliefs

http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/history_of_the_separation_of_chu.htm

"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.
- Benjamin Franklin: in letter to Richard Price, October 9, 1780"

 

Or...

 

Hilarious coming from a supporter of the Poster Boy for the Seven Deadly Sins. I'll not be lectured to by such people.

 

Wanna hear something really cool?

The country this was when it was founded doesn’t exist, in fact it stopped existing a long, long time ago. Rules and values from 1776 don’t work here in 2024.

 

They were very enlightened persons a few generations out from the dark ages. They took their wnlightyand pushed it further creating a Republic for us to make more perfect if we can keep it.

 

Does that invalidate your constitution?

 

No it doesn’t. But the country and the world at large has changed immensely since the end of the American Revolution so it’s pretty stupid to try and carry over values from 230+ years ago as if things are exactly the same.

 

By all means, Christians should do that if they like.

Personally, I'd be satisfied if the Americans living today - most particularly the ones working in government - lived up to the challenge the Founders laid down for us in the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence:

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...

Hopefully, one day, we'll live up to that challenge, but we're not there yet.

It seems to me that E Pluribus Unum better expresses how we coexist in this country no matter our differences.

As for the motto/sentiment "In God We Trust", I think that might work for the Determinists amongst us, but for those of us who believe that God and Man possess free will I'm not sure exactly what we're supposed to be trusting in God? It seems to me that "God helps those who help themselves" would be more fitting.

 

No, it doesn't, and it doesn't invalidate the social contract expressed in the Preamble of our Declaration of Independence.

 

We most certainly have changed, but there are timeless values that haven't changed and hopefully will never change. For example:

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...

Is there something in that passage - our social contract - that you consider outdated?

 

God does not exist. Religion is just an older form of government.

 

Im not talking about that passage specifically, I’m talking about other aspects that are different, like how the Bill of Rights isn’t nearly as cut and dry in explanation as it was when it was first created, those rights aren’t as absolute now as they were in 1776.

 

OK, I'll bite - How so?

The Bill of Rights are pretty clear cut to me - they affirm the inherent natural rights of the individual, and some of those rights were recognized and affirmed long before the BoR and COTUS were written. They came from a legal and rights tradition that goes back centuries, whether it be to the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the Petition of Right (162, Magna Carta (1215) and the individual rights doctrines that began developing in Europe during the 11th and 12th Centuries after the Corpus Juris Civilis was recovered in its entirety and Gratian's Decretum was completed.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but reading your response leaves me with the impression that you don't understand what rights are. They aren't transient privileges that government can capriciously dispense or take away.

 

Lets take everyone’s apparent favorite law: the 2nd Amendment, the right to bear arms. After the Revolution, that just meant people are allowed to own firearms of any kind and that was it. In todays world, you are still allowed to bear arms but only with certain kinds of firearms, not just any machine gun or sniper rifle, since back then there wasn’t as big a variation of weapons as there is now. There’s also a ton of laws in the books on who can purchase weapons and how they can do it.

 

Founding fathers didn't have anything to do with 'In God We Trust.'