I just finished reading the article entitled An Historical Perspective on a Muslim Being Sworn into Congress on the Koran by David Barton. This is a PDF file and will take a couple of minutes to load on dialup. Read it. I like Barton's balanced approach to this problem. He views the swearing in as being problematic but does a great job of putting it perspective and provides excellent historical information in the bargain.
One of the points he makes is that the world has far more to fear from secularists being in power than muslims. He give statistics which show that secularists murdered more people in one century than all of the other sects did in the previous twenty centuries!
As I wrote about this in a different forum several weeks ago, I conjectured that this swearing in will ruffle many an evangelical's feathers. They'll go to and fro huffing and puffing about it not realizing that they gave up battle a long time ago. They really didn't fight it. And the way they did it was by agreeing to the general philosphy of pragmatism. Rather than arguing from scriptural precepts. They argued from natural law.
Do we see Elijah or the prophets giving pragmatic arguments? (Well if you consider that to not obey God's law will bring his curses on you, your nation, and family, it sounds pragmatic to me!) And don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that pragmatics aren't ever considered. Of course they are. But are they really a standard for ethics? No. Why? Because who ever holds the sword or the wallet gets to define what is pragmatic. Whoever can woo the public for five minutes defines it.
God's law rules the day weather we acknowledge it or not.
Read his Word. Learn it. Live it. Love Him. Share it.
This article by Barton is worthy of using during your family time, using it over a few evenings.
I would love to know what you think of it.
3 comments:
see the comment on the previous post (January 19 ) I hit the wrong button.
I am so grateful when someone like Barton turns the lights on for us. His article makes me want to look up a Henty book on the Barbary pirates, which I may just do. Thank-you for posting that, Art!
In regards to his suggestions on action, I'm thinking that a candidate who shares some of my basic values (pro-life, economically conservative, etc.) but who does not have an understanding of the biblical spheres of human government is not going to work in the right direction. We need a Christian culture which will demand that the civil government get out of the free-market arena, out of home government, and which will no longer undermine the individual's self-government.
Amen Larry, Amen.
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