Corporate religion in the United States holds the same influential status and uses the same lobbying tactics that the wealthy commercial corporations and wall street use to manipulate the government and its agencies to win privilege. Privilege, for all corporations, including the religion corporations means more money, more ease to get more money. Religion is a business. Like any business, religion has customers. Like any customer, the religion customer is drawn to a business by its promise of product and or service.
The religion customer is promised an imaginary, wonderful, eternal, next life and provided with instructions for meeting pre-qualifying terms to be accomplished during this life which are set by an imaginary, omnipotent, omiscient creator of this universe.
Many religion businesses operate throughout the world. The largest of those businesses are described by the previous paragraph. Many smaller religion businesses operate at some variance from the previous paragraph yet the general concept is accurate. That concept rests in the fact that some things about this universe and about human life are yet unknowable. We cannot yet study them, not yet test a belief about them to obtain knowledge.
The religion business leverages curiosity and fear of the not yet knowable. The business is established by providing explanations for the not yet knowable. The key is imagination. If an explanation is easily imagined and the business can seduce the use of the potential customer's imagination, the next tool is belief. The business must provide reason for the potential customer to choose the belief (explanation) offered. The business can, and most do, leverage fear to introduce reason against not believing the explanations.
Having secured the use of a person's imagination and successfully injecting a primary belief or beliefs, the business can provide reasons for the person to contribute money, on a regular basis, to sustain the business. From then on, the business has a customer.
A great deal more is left to explain the operation of religion businesses. The focus of this article is upon the operations of the christian businesses in the United States and their goals in lobbying the government for privilege and stirring their customers to support those goals.
The constitution of the United States bars the government from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof. Christian brands want to override that bar. One tactic is to claim that the very foundation of law, the English Common Law system was christianized before its migration to the States.
From rightwingwatch.org: quote
Eagle Forum’s assertion that the Constitution has a “Judeo-Christian foundation” because “the English Common Law in which American law is rooted was Christianized,” appears to challenge the beliefs of Thomas Jefferson, whose “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” is widely considered the basis for the First Amendment.
Professor Warren Throckmorton of Grove City College on Tuesday pointed to a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Thomas Cooper, in which Jefferson dissects and debunks claims that British common law is based in Christianity.
Jefferson: “But Christianity was not introduced till the seventh century; the conversion of the first christian king of the Heptarchy having taken place about the year 598, and that of the last about 686,” Jefferson writes, referring to the common law introduced by the Saxon settlers of England. “Here, then, was a space of two hundred years, during which the common law was in existence, and Christianity no part of it.”
And even more to the point:
In fact, Jefferson skewers those in England who tried to implement biblical law, much like many on the Religious Right attempt to do today, arguing that the gospel was
“intended by their benevolent author as obligatory only in foro concientiae” (obligations of conscience, not law), and that the Ten Commandments were never incorporated into common law
unquote rightwingwatch.org
Jefferson first drafted his “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” in 1777. Although it was not enacted into law until 1786, it firmly established the principles of religious freedom and the separation of church and state and provided the basis for the First Amendment’s clause on religion.
From Thomas Jefferson quote
Statute of Religious Freedom
I. Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his almighty power to do; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time; that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which in common with his fellow-citizens he has a natural right; that it tends only to corrupt the principles of that religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion, and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of the tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment; and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.
II. Be it enacted by the General assembly, 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, not shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, that that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.
III. And though we well know that this assembly elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding assemblies, constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act to be irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present, or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right.
unquote Jefferson
Regardless of the foregoing documentation and many other documentary and opinion sources of counter argument, the following petition is being pushed to the customers of christian brands to stir their support:
Sample Resolution on the Constitution, the Courts,
And the Public Acknowledgment of God
WHEREAS, the Constitution of the United States is, and must be, the Supreme Law of the Land, superior to all court decisions;
WHEREAS, the Constitution must be interpreted in the light of its text, constitutional tradition, and its Judeo-Christian foundation;
WHEREAS, the Constitution contains nothing that requires a "wall of separation between church and state";
WHEREAS, a total separation of religion and law/government is impossible;
WHEREAS, the Framers of the Constitution did not intend that a total separation be attempted;
WHEREAS, the English Common Law in which American law is rooted was Christianized;
WHEREAS, the U.S. Supreme Court does not require a total separation between "church and state";
WHEREAS, Reconstructionist (activist/liberal) federal judges have blatantly assaulted these fundamental Constitutional principles and have re-written them under the guise of interpreting them;
AND WHEREAS, We, the people, still possess the ultimate human political power in this nation and have delegated to the President and Congress in the Constitution very broad powers to establish and empower national courts;
BE IT RESOLVED THAT ____ actively supports
the Congressional denial of jurisdiction to courts to hear challenges to either the verbal or non-verbal acknowledgement of God — i.e., "God" meaning the Deity central to the Ten Commandments - on public property and in official utterances such as (but not limited to) the Pledge of Allegiance and national motto.
Congressional refusal to recognize, fund, or otherwise enforce court decisions that prohibit either the verbal or non-verbal acknowledgement of God — i.e., "God" meaning the Deity central to the Ten Commandments — on public property and in official utterances such as (but not limited to) the Pledge of Allegiance and national motto.
The christian brands claim support for the foregoing is given by precedent of a Supreme Courts decision rendered at Cary v. Curtis, 44 U.S. 3 How. 236 236 (1845). They lift one passage out of the context of that decision:
"Secondly, in the doctrines so often ruled in this Court that the judicial power of the United States, although it has its origin in the Constitution, is (except in enumerated instances, applicable exclusively to this Court) dependent for its distribution and organization, and for the modes of its exercise, entirely upon the action of Congress, who possess the sole power of creating the tribunals (inferior to the supreme court) for the exercise of the judicial power, and of investing them with jurisdiction either limited, concurrent, or exclusive, and of withholding jurisdiction from them in the exact degrees and character which to Congress may seem proper for the public good."
The christian brands want their customers to accept that passage as cause to believe that congress may override the courts when Justice Daniel was actually saying:
"To deny this position would be to elevate the judicial over the legislative branch of the government, and to give to the former powers limited by its own discretion merely. "
to reaffirm the three equal branches of government.
The cited case was about the collection of money from a shipping company by a customs agent and the transfer of that sum to the U.S. Treasury. The case had nothing whatsoever to do with the privileges that the christians brands want to wrest from congress and form no legal basis for winning them but the appearance of fact and official weight is sufficient to move customers who will not question that appearance.
All cited and quoted material above is accurate to its source and content. Additional commentary is my own. Steven Brungard, steve@religion-of-one.org
Interplay between competing web sites can be followed at:
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/
versus
http://www.eagleforum.org/
for persons interested in this issue.