Free Republic

A common and false impression about America’s Founding Fathers is that they were deists -- that is, they believed in a "watchmaker" God who set the universe in motion and then stepped aside to let it run itself. The deist god lacks the interest, or the power, to intervene in human affairs. Michael Novak, a celebrated theologian and author, convincingly rebutted this misconception in his book, "On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding." In "Washington's God," Novak and his daughter Jana turn their attention to the religious beliefs of America's first and greatest President. The...

Published online: 24 October 2005Charlotte SchubertY chromosomes reveal founding fatherDid conquest and concubines spread one man's genes across Asia? The Manchu warriors took control of China in 1644. © Punchstock About 1.5 million men in northern China and Mongolia may be descended from a single man, according to a study based on Y chromosome genetics1. Historical records suggest that this man may be Giocangga, who lived in the mid-1500s and whose grandson founded the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912. The analysis is similar to a controversial study in 2003, which suggested that approximately 16 million men...

In a more perfect United States there would be a separation of politics and government rather than an illegitimate separation of church and state. The fact that there is absolutely no mention of the latter in the US Constitution hasn’t stopped ideologues and activists from forcing that bit of fiction down our collective throats. Neither has the constitutionally derived authority of We the People thwarted them from hijacking the act of governing for the benefit of politics. I don’t blame those who haven’t a clue as to how our government is supposed to work for their lack of knowledge. US...

In this modern age, when we commemorate the 229th birthday of these United States, we may recite the rightness of our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain: "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, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People...

In a recent Supreme Court decision, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, "If the peasants sow the fields poorly, they should be helped – and this particularly applies to the poor peasants – by means of collective cultivation of the large estates. There is no other way of helping the poor peasants." Therefore, "the landed estates must be confiscated immediately." Actually, that was Vladimir Lenin writing in an issue of the Communist publication Pravda on June 2, 1917. I've compiled a small list of quotes for use in this article, but at times it can be hard to remember who used...

Opinions vary on the topic, between those with religion and those without. They vary between the politically motivated--those who believe in morality based self-governance versus those who seek man’s dominion over men through man-made, man-interpreted and man-enforced laws. They even vary among believers, some of whom believe in an unwritten separation of church and state versus others who believe only in that which was actually written into our Constitution by the founders. If you are looking for a debate, few topics will so readily attract opposition. Is it a question of faith or historical fact? It’s hard to get folks...

It is at this time of the year that some sentimental Americans reflect on the greatness of the Founding Fathers. Albeit, in the face of “political Correctness,” the “pop culture” mindset, and a government school system that has abandoned American history, the numbers who ponder such topics is shrinking. Nevertheless, several profound essays have been written on the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and their fates in the wake of that momentous occasion. It is worthwhile to consider just a few from among those perhaps greatest of Americans, how their examples spoke to the nation at its inception, and...

Founding fathers & mothers: How many crossed the land bridge?Contact: Joseph Blumberg blumberg@ur.rutgers.edu 732-932-7084 x652 Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. – Programs on the Discovery Channel and PBS have sparked fresh interest in the prehistoric peopling of the New World. Now, for the first time, we have a realistic estimate of how many ancients made that ice age trek across the long-lost land bridge from Asia to become the first Native Americans. Jody Hey, a professor of genetics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, has developed a computational method that uses genetic information...

Educating the Children of Illegal Immigrants By William John Hagan Houston Home Journal (Warner Robins, Perry, GA) May 18, 2005 When the United States finally became a union in 1789, one of the primary concerns of our founding fathers was the preservation of the sovereignty and protection of State Rights. Unlike Britain and Canada, the United States of America embraced a republican form of government rather than an all powerful parliamentary system. The formation of the United States Senate was not a throwback to the Roman Senate, but a unique historical creation which protected States with small populations from domination...

The American Founding as the Best Regime The Bonding of Civil and Religious Liberty By Harry V. Jaffa Posted May 15, 2002 In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than...

In God We Trust Patriotic Flash Movie Finished and posted just in time for Washington's Birthday! (BTW, it's hard to swallow polls that find Washington ranked as America's 7th greatest president.) The presentation features quotes from Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Henry, Lincoln, Reagan, and more on the subject of God and morality in government. Many of these quotes were taken from their own speeches to the American people as elected officials (sorry ye Newdows and ACLUers of the world)! Enjoy and spread freely! I created two versions--one for high bandwidth (T1, DSL, Cable), and another for those trapped in dialupland....

Tsunami Tyranny On February 2nd, 2005 US President George W. Bush said in his State Of the Union Address: The only force powerful enough to stop the rise of tyranny and terror, and replace hatred with hope, is the force of human freedom. (1) The attack on freedom in our world has reaffirmed our confidence in freedom's power to change the world. We are all part of a great venture: To extend the promise of freedom in our country, to renew the values that sustain our liberty, and to spread the peace that freedom brings. (2) How can we define...

The founding fathers never envisioned direct election of the president by the people. In the beginning the people voted for state representatives and congressmen. State legislatures selected two men to represent the state in the Senate. Each state legislature selected a man (from anywhere in the country) to be president and another (not from the same state) to be vice president. There was no campaign and no presidential candidate to select his own vice president. These names were given to electors who journeyed to Washington to meet with the electors from the other states. This was the original electoral college....

I've heard liberals express their dismay at all the fuss conservatives make over judicial activism. Some even claim to be unclear about the meaning of the term. Perhaps a recent remark of Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the incoming Senate minority leader, will serve as an illustration. Appearing Dec. 6 on Meet the Press, Reid was asked to comment on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a possible replacement for ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist. "I think that he (Thomas) has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written," said Reid.

I was doing reasearch this evening for a debate tournament I am participating in a couple of weeks when I came upon this quote: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." -John Adams It seems to me this just nails the aclu argument about separation of church and state. Here we have a founding father stating that the constitution does not work if the people are not moral and religious. It seems to me we should be using this quote much more often in debates with...

Lame Ducks and New Canucks When I was young, some thousands of my countrymen fled to Canada in order to avoid fighting the evils of communism in a distant land. More than thirty years later, some thousands of liberals are planning to ascend to the Great White North to avoid fighting the evils of conservatism in their own back yard. Although I’m not sure that flight is the proper response to the recent election results, I wish them a swift transition to a land more amenable to their sensitive, pacifistic dispositions and one that will accommodate their rampant Francophilia. Some...

A great man once told us, “A house divided against itself cannot stand”. He spoke with great eloquence in a dark time for our country, of a need for a united front against a great evil in our country. Despite Mr. Lincoln’s shortcomings in his knowledge of the Declaration of Independence, there is great wisdom in him. For a hundred years after, we heeded his words, creating a true American century, grinding great empires of evil to dust. Now we stand at a new crossroads, the great tenets of our country have been obliterated by liberal parasites. We face a...

AMERICA AT THE CROSS ROADS OF HISTORY When the terrorists attacked the United States on September 11th, 2001, it signaled that they were no longer satisfied to only attack US interests outside the United States. It signaled that they felt comfortable enough and were savvy enough to realize that the US is no longer a unified country, ethnically, socially, politically, or spiritually. Some may believe that it never was, and that comes from a lack of knowledge about the country. Of course, there were slaves, mostly black Africans, but there were also white slaves who bought passage to the New...

A Humbling Lesson: Congressman Davy Crockett Learns About Limited Government   In the following, excerpted from the book The Life of Colonel David Crockett (1884) compiled by Edward S. Ellis, the famous American frontiersman, war hero, and congressman from Tennessee relates how he learned -- from one of his own backwoods constituents -- the vital importance of heeding the Constitution and the dangers of disregarding its restraints. Crockett was then the lion of Washington. I was a great admirer of his character, and, having several friends who were intimate with him, I found no difficulty in making his acquaintance. I was...

by Michael Barone Other Articles by Michael Barone Forgetting the Founding Fathers 06/09/04 Are our great universities abandoning the study of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers? It looks like they are. Two of the leaders in colonial- and revolutionary-era scholarship, Bernard Bailyn at Harvard and Gordon Wood at Brown, are being replaced by historians with no apparent interest in the Revolution and the founding. The same happened some years ago at Yale when Edmund Morgan retired. Bailyn, Wood, and Morgan are members of a generation of American historians who have produced a luminous body of scholarship on colonial America,...