Thursday, August 11, 2016

America's Values

In the Bill of Rights we spell out the rights each person is entitled to in our great nation.  Note the use of the word person, not citizen, so those who think it only applies to citizens are already trying to change its very nature.

The rights of the people includes all the people.  Of course in the first 70 years we excluded slaves and so it wasn't as inclusive as it should have been, but the language is inclusive.

These are the first 10 amendments to the constitution and we have added additional ones since then to expand and clarify the constitution.

Fundamentally the rights are fairly simple, Most of us take them for granted although far too many ignore them in practice.

Freedom of religion is guaranteed, not just religions the majority approve of.

I see so many attacks on Islam and Muslims simply because of the religion they follow and the assumption that because political terrorists in many cases grew up in that religion, the religion promotes terrorism.

For a bunch of complex reasons, many people in nations in the middle east where Islam is the predominant religion feel that America is the enemy.  This is partly because of our support of Israel, our military presence, our support for certain regimes or lack thereof and partly because we represent Western Culture which they view as evil.  They become terrorists because of these political motivations not because of their religion.

Irish terrorists were primarily Catholic, but Catholicism doesn't promote or condone terrorism.

Confusing religion with politics is common but wrong.  Sometimes the same religion can argue opposing points of view i.e. white and black protestants during the civil rights era.

This is only the first right mentioned in the first Amendment and I would certainly encourage all those people so fond of the second amendment to brush up on the entire document.

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