OP/ED
Factions and Minorities
Time for "Don't Ask,
Don't Tell" to Go
Civil Unions and the
Destruction of Society
OP-ED
Factions and Minorities
by Lyle Glazier
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Lyle Glazier |
With all her eloquent best intentions, Rep. Nancy Sheltra, when praising the “godly purposes” of the US microcosm of Vermont “one hundred years ago” showed a nearly absolute ignorance of Vermont and U.S. history.
If she had looked back two hundred years to 1787, she would have discovered a Vermont so suspicious of political and religious authority that under the influence of Ethan and Ira Allen and their Green Mountain Boys, Vermonters hesitated to join the new Confederation. They controlled a rogue State, flirting with Canada and delaying till March 4, 1791, becoming the fourteenth state to ratify the Constitution.
St. John de Crevecoeur came to the colonies from France before the Revolution, and in 1782 wrote his famous third Letter from an American Farmer “What is an American?” describing a budding nation “…with no aristocratical families, courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion. …Here religion demands but little of him. …Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction, are the food of what the world commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here.”
James Madison, in The Federalist Papers No. 10 (1787), described what he called a pernicious influence of factions: “By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and activated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
Madison, like Franklin and Jefferson, was a Deist, above all skeptical of the divinity of Jesus, but praising Jesus’s social proletarian reformist views.
Jefferson, in his 1803 letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, defined his Deism: “To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense he wished any one to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to him every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other.”
His Declaration of Independence, which modern factional zealots quote from in order to prove his Christianity, begins with the phrase “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” which he further defines with the word “Creator” meaning what the 18th-century Enlightenment in England and France and Thomas Paine in America defined as the “First Cause,” meaning whatever unknown, non-human force created the universe.
Franklin’s 1790 letter to Ezra Stiles, who had asked him to record his religious views for the enlightenment of future generations, replied, “As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of morals, and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have with most of the dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity.”