Atheists Ban Bibles One Step At A Time

By Mark Rhoads

If the decision by the Air Force to bow to pressure from miliary atheists by removing the Bible for a guest lodging checklist at Air Force-approved lodgingwere only an isolated incident, then one could feel some sympathy for the gun-shy professional bureaucrat Secretary of the Air Force who seems to fear lawsuits from atheists more than enemy missiles.  But this incident is one of several recent suspicious examples of how the Air Force has retreated from any semblance of a recognition of any place for faith including a decision last year to cancel an official ethics course for too many religious references.  So like the frog in boiling water, the days of Bibles anywhere in military facilities are dwindling one small degree at a time.

 Atheists on the Left in general try to pretend that any recognition of faith in the public square somehow violates the fictional doctrine of "separation of church and state."  I say fictional because such a doctrine is nowhere spelled out in the Constitution.  In fact, almost the exact opposite, a constitutional guarantee of  freedom of religious practice is spelled out in the First Amendment which stipulates that Congress must not prohibit the free exercise of religion and also that the national government may not designate any particular denomination as the official religion of the United States as the Church of England was so designated under King George, III. 

The phrase "wall of separation of church and state" only appeared in an 1801 letter from President Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury, Connecticut Baptist Association.  Jefferson was sending a reply as to why he would not by himself designate a national day of thanksgiving as President Washington had done.  While not critical of Washington, Jefferson only said he did not want to issue such a proclamation without a bill from the Congress. 

But this "doctrine" has been blown up out of all context by the Left to justify their attacks on God in the public square and they have so distorted the original meaning of the First Amendment as to almost reverse the intent of that amendment.  The real reason that the Left attacks God in public places is to ensure that the secular god of Government has a monopoly on moral authority and so that government only is viewed as the only source of the rights of citizens and not the gift of the divine Creator.