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Wrong, the Thugs and terrorists may have had state sponsorship by being in the military or in the Government, but claiming that the entire apperatus was non Muslim is ignorant. The people were then and still are Muslim.
Further claiming that because yesterday Saddam did it and now today "Muslims" do it and it was ok before is pathetic.
The Muslim clerics that are leading the non AQ forces existed BEFORE Saddam was ousted. Their followers existed BEFORE Saddam was ousted.
Further Terrorists WERE in Iraq before Saddam was ousted. They may have not been attacking Government forces, but they were there as were the thugs.
Talk about clueless. You really believe your own shit? Think about it, what was saddam? His sons who raped women at their weddings, how about the jails for kids and the torture rooms, a day in the park?
You are fucking pathetically delusional
That topic has been beaten to death. THe bigotted anti Christians have not been able to come up with good counter arguements. In order to believe them, you have to totally ignore a wealth of information. They are so delusional, it isnt difficult for them. Most of the FF's were book signed Christians of varying denominations, and, THERE WERE STATE SANCTIONED CHURCHES AT THE TIME. The First amendment, like all the others, was simply making sure the feds didnt wrestly control of that issue from the states.
States rights was a huge issue, so huge, the first constitution had to be re written cuz it wasnt effective enough. They had to give the feds more power.
TOday , the wacky left and activist judges have made the COTUS meaningless. We are a nation of laws, but not under the Constitution. Those who claim it are only creating a delusional smoke screen, or do so out of political necessity. We have not been governed by the Cotus for some years now, Income taxes are unconstitutional.
Do you know when they started them? Dont look it up.
Saddam was notionally a Sunni. He ran a secular regime (uh-oh, I've done it now, secularism is in for it, oh well) which included Muslims as well as Chaldean Catholics, but given the regime was Ba'athist and secular I think it's a bit of a stretch you're trying there.
A casual reading of jillian's post would reveal that she was referring to motivation. NOW in Iraq there are Muslim thugs and terrorists. THEN in Saddam's secular Iraq there were simply state thugs and state terrorists. The invasion and occupation (war if you will) has opened the way for the Muslim thugs and terrorists to operate in what was previously a secular dictatorship.
http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/terror_94/statespon.html#IraqThe state apparatus was Ba'athist. A secular pan-Arab socialist party. Sure, individuals may have been Muslim, among other religions but the party itself and its apparatus were secular.
About the terrorists inside Iraq when he was still in charge, that's interesting. Who were they?
That isn't "terrorism"..
Go... do some reading... learn some things. It might help you...
or not.
Still, we were never a Christian nation and that was my point.
Still, we were never a Christian nation and that was my point.
The U.S. Supreme Court even fell victim to the "Christian nation" mentality from time to time. Religious Right activists frequently cite 1892's Holy Trinity Church v. United Slates decision as proof that the high court considered the United States a "Christian nation." But as usual, they don't tell the whole story.
In the ruling, Justice David Brewer flatly declared, "This is a Christian nation." To this day, historians debate what Brewer meant by the term. It is unclear whether he meant to say the country's laws should reflect Christianity or was simply acknowledging the fact that most Americans are Christians.
A strong case can be made for the latter proposition by examining a case that came along five years after the Holy Trinity ruling. The dispute centered on legalized prostitution in New Orleans. A Methodist church challenged a city ordinance allowing prostitution in one area of the city. The church argued that prostitution should be illegal everywhere in New Orleans, and said the activity was inconsistent with Christianity which the Supreme Court of the United States says is the foundation of our government.
Writing for a unanimous court, Brewer completely ignored the church's argument and upheld the New Orleans policy. Brewer's bypass in this case suggests that he did not mean to imply in Holy Trinity that the United States should enforce the dictates of Christianity by law. Had that been Brewer's intention, he surely would have upheld the Methodists' claim.
I do so love when people rely on Cliff notes to *get* what something says instead of reading about it themselves...
http://candst.tripod.com/case17.htm
I love the separation of church and state....
And, frankly, why anyone needs this to be a "Christian" nation is beyond me...
Not a theocracy, but Christian in beliefs, culture, govt, politically, yes.
We were and are so dominated and infused with Christianity and Christian values, to deny were are a Christian nation, is either denying the obvious, and/or semantics.
Go overseas, which I have extensively, and see what the rest of the world thinks about this. And I do know the libs are seriously concerned what the rest of the world thinks about us.
THe evidence is overwhelming:
C'mon.....it is Dial-A-Bride Boy after all...
; 43 percent support school holiday programs that are entirely Christian. (I remember such programs during my elementary school days at Boston’s William Lloyd Garrison public school during the so-called Great Depression.) Reversing the Supreme Court, 50 percent would permit public-school teachers to use the Bible as a “factual text” in history classes. 
Putting to Rest the 'Christian Nation' Myth
David R. Koepsell
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=koepsell_25_3
The following Op-Ed is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 25, Number 3.
The Council for Secular Humanism, its spokespersons, and Free Inquiry's editors and authors are often forced to respond to theists enraged over court decisions and legislation that aim to ensure the separation of church and state.
Consistently, we have sought to uphold the establishment clause of the First Amendment in its most literal sense. Our arguments in favor of the clear separation of church and state are based upon sound constitutional and historical grounds. The opponents of separation have often focused on two claims: (1) that the United States is a "Christian nation" because it was "founded by Christians" and (2) that the United States is a Christian nation because its civil and criminal laws are "Judeo-Christian in origin."
Both claims are illogical and historically inaccurate. Our Constitution only refers to religion where it seeks to actively exclude it from the government. The secular nature of the United States is clear. There is a substantial body of literature deconstructing the faiths of our nation's founders. It leaves little room for doubt that the founders, while by and large Christian, were generally only nominally so. Even the more pious were liberal Christians, far different from the strain of fundamentalist, born-again Christian that has recently emerged as a major class of proponents for the Christian nation myth.
It is certainly true that part of the revolt against the British involved distaste for the imposition of an Anglican bishop over the colonies, which, according to William Livingston, was a greater affront to liberty of conscience than the "deservedly obnoxious Stamp Act itself."1
Because of such vocal opposition, no Anglican bishop ever arrived in the colonies. But to understand the roots of the guarantees enshrined in the First Amendment that secured disestablishment, we must look to Virginia under the governorship of Thomas Jefferson.
In his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, drafted in 1777, Jefferson first proposed a radical disentanglement of state and religion, which the more conservative legislature was not yet ready to adopt. Staving off a challenge by Patrick Henry that would have denuded the bill and allowed for the establishment of Christianity as Virginia's official religion, James Madison gathered signatures for a "Memorial and Remonstrance" against Henry's proposed bill. Among Madison's arguments was that such a bill would not prevent future Virginians from establishing a particular sect of Christianity over another in the future.2
In 1786, Jefferson's bill was finally adopted, titled the Statute for Religious Freedom. It stated: "Be it enacted, that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or beliefs."
It is no accident that the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," is credited to Madison and Jefferson.
In commenting on the First Amendment, Jefferson described it in 1802 as "a wall of separation between Church and State." Jefferson described the spirit of the Revolution in general as a struggle against all "Lords Temporal or Spiritual."3 The faith of our Founders was clearly tempered by liberal sentiments and has been described as largely deistic.
Deism is an outgrowth of the French Enlightenment that rejects notions of a personal, involved god and instead ascribes to a god at most the status of Aristotle's "unmoved mover" or equates God with the natural laws of the universe itself. Surely, this view is reinforced by many of the statements the Founders left behind.
George Washington rarely mentioned God by name, referring instead to "the Grand Architect," a "superintending Power," the "Governor of the Universe," or the "Great Ruler of Events."
John Adams understood Christianity's greatest contributions to be introducing people to "the great principle of the Law of Nature and Nations: Love your Neighbour as yourself, and do unto others as you would that others should do to you."
And Jefferson said that if he were to found his own sect, it "would be the reverse of Calvin's: that we are saved by our good works which are within our power, and not by our faith which is not within our power."4
These notions of an impersonal, detached deity and a universe guided by reason and natural law bear the stamp of Enlightenment rationalism. Imported from Britain and France, rationalism lies at the roots of the American Republic.
Specifically absent, and disdained, is Calvinistic dogmatism, embraced by the Pilgrims but rejected by our founders both privately and publicly. But even had the Founders been Calvinists, or fundamentalist Christians of a modern variety, for purely logical reasons the United States is not in any sense a Christian nation.
According to the U.S. Department of State, "Turkey has been officially secular since 1924, although well over 95 percent of the population is Muslim."5 Turkey is officially secular because its constitution proclaims it so. It is not an Islamic state.
The First Amendment accomplishes the same for the United States, making it officially secular. Even if we were to imagine that the Founders were fundamentalist Christians, they created a secular state, in which no religion, despite its majority status, has any special privilege or status compared with any other religion or with atheism.
So, America is not a Christian nation, by virtue both of its history and the logic of its founding documents. Setting all of that aside, the nation is in any case becoming less Christian day by day, by virtue of its changing demographics.
Perhaps much of what lies behind today's desperate attempts to recast the United States as a Christian nation is the declining percentage of self-identified Christians in it and the fear this must provoke for those who foresee the day when Christianity is no longer the majority religion.
Since the 1990 census, the percentage of Christians has declined from roughly 86 percent to 76 percent, while the numbers of minority religionists and the religiously nonaffiliated have doubled, according to both the U.S. census and recent polls, to nearly 16 percent! What should the champions of the Christian nation myth draw from this fact? It should encourage them to embrace America's secular roots, because it is minorities that the Constitution protects.
These modern-day Calvinists forget that their ideological progenitors fled a nation in which the established religion and the religious majority persecuted them. It was their loathing of that history and a desire to protect freedom of conscience and belief, even nonbelief, that caused our founders to establish this secular, democratic republic-so that when today's Christians once again become a minority, they won't be relegated to second-class status as they now seek to do with members of minority religions and nonbelievers.
Notes 1. Edwin S. Schmidt and Leigh E. Gaustad, The Religious History of America (San Francisco, HarperSan Francisco, 2002), p. 123.
2. Ibid., pp. 124-25.
3. Ibid., p. 127.
4. Ibid., pp. 133-34.
5. The U.S. Department of State's Web site (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3432. htm)
What are cliff notes?I do so love when people rely on Cliff notes to *get* what something says instead of reading about it themselves... ...
show me in the Constitution where those words exist.
As are many things, like logic, reason, facts.And, frankly, why anyone needs this to be a "Christian" nation is beyond me...
Regarding your stuff in red, please explain how the ff's could want a complete division between religion and state, and then go formally and legally establish a state sponsored religion in their own states.
That amendment is simply taken out of context. It refers ONLY to the federal govt.
The original document governing our country didnt give the fed enough power , as the ff's were adament about States having the most power, and the country wasnt functioning very well, so they had a convention and came up with what we have now, giving the feds more power.
However, many refused to sign on unless some guarantees were made to prevent the feds from taking powers away from the states. Thats where the bill of rights came in. It was about states vs the feds. It is no accident that it is CONGRESS that shall make no law regarding....., states didnt even need to have a congress if they dont want to.
No, it is the Religious Right who have been destorting the facts. Our Founding Fathers were trying to ensure that our federal government would never become a dictatorship, especially one that would use religion to oppress, as the Catholic Church did in Europe.Dont forget, we are discussing how things were in circa 1776. Those who claim we were not founded as a Christian nation have to do many mind bending gymnastics to get there.
They have to ignore some things. like STATES establising their own religions
They have to distort others,
they have to take things out of context,
they have to take things as they are today to try and prove original intent.
Then you agree that federally, we are not a Christian nation and never were. Sure, there may be states that have a majority of Christian citizens, but none of them are declared as Christian states.
Even if they did, that does not make us a Christian nation.
No, it is the Religious Right who have been destorting the facts. Our Founding Fathers were trying to ensure that our federal government would never become a dictatorship, especially one that would use religion to oppress, as the Catholic Church did in Europe.
That isn't "terrorism"..
Go... do some reading... learn some things. It might help you...
or not.
