Posted: Wednesday, December 1, 2010 8:01 pm

Time to bring ‘God’ back

To The Editor:
Something I hear quite frequently from people of all ages is what a great country we live in. I always like to hear it but I wonder from what perspective they are coming from. Considering that I was born after the Great Depression and before World War II, obviously my observations are considerably different than what is present today. I still feel our country is the greatest in the world, but today we have too many narcissistic personalities in Washington, too many liberal judges in our court system and some college professors that use negations to illegitimately modify our textbooks.
We are completely losing our identity that was handed down to us by our Founding Fathers. We have forgotten that our freedom comes at a very high price and a lot of our young men and women are still paying that price today. It is true that we do have some inalienable rights, but others are not the private possessions of individuals; they must be recognized by other citizens in our society.
Our Declaration of Independence was signed by 52 deeply committed Christians. The other three believed in the Bible as the divine truth. George Washington, the father of our nation, said in his farewell speech in 1796: “It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible.” In 1782, the United States Congress voted this resolution: “The congress of the United States recommends the Holy Bible for use in all schools.” Of the first 108 universities founded in America, 106 were distinctly Christian, including Harvard. Even our present U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, completed in 1935, has the Ten Commandment on the large oak doors to the Supreme Court’s court room.
In 1947, the Supreme Court banned a prayer that acknowledged God and asked blessings upon them, their parents and teachers and their country. In 1963, the Supreme Court outlawed Bible reading in the public school system. In 1965, the Supreme Court denied the rights of students to pray audibly over their food. In 1980, the Ten Commandments were outlawed in our public schools. Obviously the standards are far too high for today’s society.
Now that they have removed the Ten Command-ments from public places, removed “In God We Trust” from our money, ignored our Founding Fathers and neglected the Constitution, let’s see how well we are doing.
The Associated Press in 2008 reported that 17 of the nation’s largest cities had a high school graduation rate lower than 50 percent. The national graduation rate is about 70 percent. There is about 1.2 million dropouts annually. These stats are staggering but what can we expect when one-parent families are very common now. The news reported a couple weeks ago that in one ethnic group, the rate is 72 percent. If that is the case, who is preparing our young children to enter school?
Maybe I have it all wrong and maybe I’m just a senile old man, but when I read in the paper of college students desecrating the flag and shredding the Bible, high school kids using foul four-letter words, school teachers having intimate relations with students, scholastic achievements that are considerably lower than countries like Finland and prayers banned at school athletic events when some foreign immigrants can pray openly in our streets, I begin to believe it is not just my imagination that something is terribly wrong.
Gary Spence
Troy
Published in The Messenger 12.1.10