MEL GIBSON, "UNDER GOD" DEBATE
Its about Antiochus, forced them all to deny their true GOD
Fri Mar 19 21:33:27 2004
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Searched the web for Contact Mel Gibson.

Gibson dumps Holy Bible
http://www.covenantnews.com/freedom/

Biblical 'Western' to follow Passion

http://www.online.ie/entertainment/viewer.adp?article=3094547
Mel Gibson
2004-03-19 13:03:23+00

Now he's given us his version of the crucifixion in the new film, The Passion Of The Christ, Mel Gibson has set his sights on another religious epic: he wants to bring the story of Chanukah to the big screen.

In the wake of accusations of anti-semitism in his treatment of Christ's death, he now says he's planning a movie based on the famous Jewish rebellion 200 years before the birth of Christ.

"The story that's always fired my imagination is the book of Maccabees," he says.

"It's about Antiochus, the king who set up his religion in the Temple and forced them all to deny their true God and worship at his feet and pray to false gods.

"Maccabees stood up and they made war, they stuck by their guns and they came out winning. It's like a Western," he says.

The victory of the Maccabees and a priest named Mattathias led to the celebration of Chanukah.

Judging by the success of his latest film, The Passion Of The Christ, the new one is likely to be another huge box office blockbuster.

Gibson is well known as a Republican supporter of President George W Bush. But the star is thinking of changing his allegiance because he disapproves of Bush's handling of the Iraq War.

"It's all to do with these weapons of mass destruction that we can't seem to find and I wonder why did we go over there?"

He says he's been "having doubts of late" about the President but in the run-up to the American Presidential election, Gibson does not say whether he'll give his support to presumed Democratic candidate, John Kerry.

Actors including Dustin Hoffman, Sean Penn, Martin Sheen and Susan Sarandon have all spoken out against the Iraq conflict.

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Debate over 'under God'
Arguments heading for Supreme Court Does it matter whether
http://www.daytondailynews.com/life/content/life/daily/0313pledgeweb.html

Does it matter whether the Pledge of Allegiance proclaims that the indivisible American republic is "under God"?

In a political sense, the answer is certainly yes. The attorneys general of all 50 states, the Bush administration and many members of Congress joined briefs backing the current wording, an issue to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on March 24.

But the religious answer to the "under God" question is more complicated, as indicated by the unusual lineup of groups taking stands and what they're saying.

Pledge proponents think general acknowledgment of religion is good for society, and dropping God would rewrite history or threaten religion's legitimate status.

Opponents, some of them religious believers, argue the phrase violates church-state separation as well as the religious rights of some Americans — or that it's just a meaningless phrase and possibly demeaning to persons of faith.

Formal support for deletion of "under God" comes largely from atheists, secularists, Unitarians and Buddhists. Grass-roots sentiment has silenced most Protestant and Jewish organizations that normally champion church-state separation.

In the biggest surprise, the American Jewish Congress, one of the most militant separationist groups, joined conservative religious organizations in asking the court to retain the God reference.

Marc Stern calls this the "most uncomfortable" decision the Jewish congress has faced during his 27 years as a lawyer there, but political realities left no choice.

Victory for "under God" is inevitable, Stern figured, so his group should offer a path to approval on narrow grounds. Further, he feared that if "under God" is banned, public fury might cause a "train wreck" — a Constitutional amendment undermining the Supreme Court's separation rulings since 1947.

Seven Orthodox Jewish organizations, meanwhile, made an openly religious appeal for the pledge. "Jewish tradition teaches that human recognition of God is the hallmark of civilization," they said. The pledge expresses peoples' universal acknowledgment that "man's destiny is shaped by a Supreme Being" but doesn't endorse any one religion.

With a slightly different tack, Jay Alan Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, a Christian legal agency, argues that the phrase states one of the nation's founding principles, that "rights emanate from God, not from government," something all faiths can agree on.

Many pledge proponents offer secular justifications to fit Supreme Court rulings. They claim "under God" isn't any sort of religious exercise or prayer but simply a factual acknowledgment of the nation's past heritage of faith, for patriotic rather than religious reasons.

If God is eliminated, they say, what about the Declaration of Independence ("endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights") or Gettysburg Address ("this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom") or the full text of the national anthem ("and this be our motto: 'In God is our trust' ").

Proponents also wonder if the constitutions of the 50 states would become unconstitutional, since all refer to the deity.

To Alan Wolfe, a Boston College political scientist and an atheist who accepts the pledge, such references to God are "relatively harmless" because most people think they point to "a kind of friend and counselor, rather than a commanding judgmental presence."

Wolfe says fellow atheists are "used to being offended" and "on the whole list of horrible crimes, this is not a big one."

"For the health of the country," he said, "the people loosely called the religious right ought to win one."

But pledge opponents don't want to give up the fight.

They say removing "under God" follows the logic of previous Supreme Court prohibitions of such school practices as Ten Commandment displays and prayers at graduations and football games.

They also raise religious principles.

"Under God" is a classic example of what scholars call "civil religion" or "ceremonial deism," the merest reference to a purposely vague deity acceptable to anyone.

That's exactly why the pledge is objectionable to believers like Episcopalian Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Barnard College, one of the interfaith religion scholars who filed a brief against "under God."

Balmer says such ritual recitations that mention a generic God "lead to a trivialization of faith."

A leading church-state theorist, Douglas Laycock of the University of Texas Law School, says that if "under God" is really as religiously unimportant as pledge proponents claim, then the government is asking students "to take the name of the Lord in vain," which violates the Ten Commandments.

Laycock and Balmer also say the pledge phrase violates the consciences of students who don't believe in the one God, or in any God. Mixing faith and government doesn't work, they say.

American churches flourish "precisely because government stays out of the religion business," Balmer says.

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Pledge of Allegiance: Politics Without Mirrors
Men's News Daily, CA - 26 minutes ago
... Newdow, an atheist, argues that the Pledge's reference to America as "one nation, under God," constitutes governmental establishment of religion. ...
http://mensnewsdaily.com/archive/g/garmong/2004/garmong032004.htm

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Pledge of Allegiance: Politics Without Mirrors
March 20, 2004
by Robert Garmong
http://mensnewsdaily.com/archive/g/garmong/2004/garmong032004.htm

In a current Supreme Court case, Michael Newdow has challenged the constitutionality of reading the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools. Newdow, an atheist, argues that the Pledge's reference to America as "one nation, under God," constitutes governmental establishment of religion. The Bush administration counters that the pledge is "a patriotic exercise, not a religious testimonial," and should be allowed.

This might seem to be a trivial case. But as part of a "culture war" between the religious Right and the secular Left, it has taken on an ominous significance. Both sides have demonstrated naked hostility to the independent mind: the Right, by its desire to force school-aged children to profess religious belief; the Left, by its demands for governmental support for secular ideas.

The First Amendment established what Thomas Jefferson termed a "wall of separation" between Church and State--a deliberate break with the then-standard European practice of establishing an official church by governmental edict and supporting it by taxes. The purpose of Church/State separation was to protect the right to disagree in matters of religion: to ensure that the power of the government would never be used to force a person to profess or support a religious idea he does not agree with. Government officials may make whatever religious pronouncements they wish, on their own--but they may not use the power of the government to promote their ideas.

On religion or any other topic, an individual's ideas are the matter of his own mind, decided by the application (or misapplication) of his own rational faculty. To force a man to adhere to a particular doctrine is to subvert the very faculty that makes real agreement possible and meaningful, and thereby to paralyze his mechanism for recognizing truth. The kind of forced "agreement" obtained by governmental edict is every bit as meaningless as was the Iraqis' "love" for Saddam.

Yet it is precisely this kind of forced agreement that the political Right seeks, through its support of religion. The Pledge of Allegiance is a perfect example: in 1954, when Congress replaced its original language, "one nation indivisible" with "one nation, under God," then-President Eisenhower expressed pride that "millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty." This can only mean the attempt to demand religious agreement by the power of the government, which means ultimately "agreement" at gunpoint. Whether this premise is implemented by means of a nativity scene on public property, prayer in public schools, or the Ten Commandments in a public courthouse--the meaning is that the government should dictate the contents of the individual's mind.

The political Left has properly condemned governmental support of religious ideas--but at the same time, it demands that taxpayers support secular ideas, via National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, among myriad smaller agencies. If the Right's attempt to impose religion by force is destructive of intellectual freedom, the Left's demand that taxpayers support their ideas is openly contemptuous of the intellect. Liberals do not care whether you or I in fact agree with or approve of the ideas and images our tax dollars support--be they the latest collection of paint splotches or a Madonna smeared with elephant dung--just as long as we hand over our taxes. Thus, our minds have been rendered irrelevant, our agreement or disagreement pointless, as long as we serve as cash cows for the "artist" or "intellectual" to exploit.

Conservatives, who properly argue against public support for secular ideas, endorse the use of publicly funded institutions to promote religious ideas. Liberals, who properly object to religious displays on public property, advocate public funding for their pet ideas. It's politics without mirrors: each group feels free to attack its opponents for violating rights, as long as they don't have to notice that they are committing the exact same crime.

This so-called "Culture War" truly is a war: a war against the individual mind. It is a particularly dirty kind of war, with both sides of the political spectrum vying for the right to enslave the minds of legally disarmed victims, and to do it by means of money expropriated from the victims themselves.

The only way to end this war is to re-assert the First Amendment, with its guarantee of intellectual freedom--and the only way to do that, is to get the government out of the business of supporting ideas.

Robert Garmong

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Robert Garmong, Ph.D. in philosophy, is a writer for the Ayn RandInstitute ( www.aynrand.org ) in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.. Send reactions to reaction@aynrand.org

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