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To: Grunthor

“We have no right to not be offended in this nation, especially when we are sticking our noses into someone elses private life as long as they are harming no one else.”

That sounds like a standard libertarian fantasy having little connection with American history. Bernard Bailyn is perhaps the foremost scholar on America’s founding era. According to Bailyn the most cited text by the American founders and the First Congress was Deuteronomy. That particular book is full of commands for proper conduct and just about zero advocacy of radical individualism.

America was an overwhelmingly Protestant society that took its legal ideas from the bible and English common law. The law and culture of the country were rooted in the Christian ethos that permeated both of those sources, not in the radical individualism of the likes of Thomas Paine.

The idea that law should have little or no connection with religion wasn’t an American conceit, but it was one for Revolutionary France. So much so that it won the allegiance of Thomas Paine, who foolishly abandoned America for the paradise of the goddess Reason and her guillotine.


60 posted on 12/29/2011 7:47:36 PM PST by Pelham (Islam. The original Evil Empire)
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To: Pelham

So the second that we accept Christ, we have not only the right to not be offended, but the right to know exactly what is going on in the bedrooms of other people in case they might be doing something that could offend us?

I have never heard of these special rights granted Christians before.


62 posted on 12/30/2011 3:05:46 AM PST by Grunthor (Do you worship the State or do you worship the Lord? There is no middle ground.)
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