A Jewish friend of mine …

A Jewish friend of mine wrote this and I thought it deserved being seen.

Someone in the <deleted for the sake of anonymity> group argued that we are a Christian Nation.  As a Jew, I would say that makes me just a bit uncomfortable.  Not to mention that historically, it made Irish and Italian Catholics uncomfortable, too.  If we are a Christian Nation, we are a Nation of Salem Witch trials, of Pilgrims who fled religious intolerance only to practice it themselves, of Christians who justified killing the red (native-born) savages for not converting to Christianity, and of Christians who dressed in white robes to go on lynching rampages. Neither “Jesus,” nor “Christ,” nor “Christian,” nor “Christianity,” nor “Bible” are mentioned so much as one time in our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, or even the Federalist papers; not once (you don’t believe me, check it out).  Our Constitution is the only constitution in the Christian world not to mention God even one time.  The word God only appears in the Declaration and only when it is surrounded by a deistic modifier, "nature’s God."  All of our Founding Fathers (Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Paine) were deists, men who believed in a creator God who after he set the world in motion left it alone.  To many modern-day American Christians, a deist might as well be an atheist.  John Adams called Jefferson an atheist during their campaign for the Presidency, and Jefferson, whose Jefferson Bible strips the story of Jesus of all its miracles leaving only his speeches, did not bother denying it.  Not only were they not recognizably Christian (by today’s standards), most of them were Free-Masons.

Christian Nation?  No, America is NOT a Christian Nation, and thank God for that!

My Jewish friend likes to remind me that we used to call America a Judaeo-Christian nation when we were growing up.  Now we are looking at a Syrian Muslim refugee invasion!  And Donald Trump has gone bonkers!!  But the President calls for us to be generous Christians and to let 10,000 (that is 1 per 30,000 Americans) Syrian refugees into the country.  And it is not like we will just let them all in to scatter to the highways and by-ways of our land without extensive vetting.  There are reasons to be concerned, dozens of reasons to be concerned, and we will debate these reasons for the next 200 years, just as we are still debating whether we are a Christian nation 200-plus years after all our Founding Fathers resoundingly said NO.  We need to be careful what messages we send to the world, we need to be especially careful that we don’t prove what radical Islamic jihadists (call them what you will) will say about us to their moderate Muslim co-religionists: “Americans hate you, America is Christians and Jews and they all hate you, they hate every Muslim, and you have no place there among Islam’s sworn enemies; join us in our jihad against the infidel West.”   And for those of you who really believe we are or ought to be a Christian Nation, what is the difference between you and those who want to establish an Islamic caliphate across the entire Middle-East?

Not only is it the right thing to do – to welcome these unfortunate men, women and children who are fleeing the terrors of their own homeland, and not without vetting them properly – it is the wise thing to do, too. 

So, buckle up.