manning5 Loc: Richmond, VA

Believe in God, and practice Christian morality—including faith, hope and charity.

Believe in and live by a virtues ethic: especially prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude. Live with integrity.

Recognize and account for the fact that man is imperfect, sinful, and capable of dastardly acts.

Practice self-governance, independence, and morality and fight to ensure an end to secularization.

Live by God’s natural law, natural rights, and natural duties, and reject provably disastrous ideas of atheistic collectivity.

Recognize that our government exists because it was formed and is maintained by the consent of the governed.

We must fight to maintain our liberty and freedoms, and understand how constitutionalism has created a stable and free nation.

Uphold the Constitution of the United States of America, and support right-sizing of the government.

Preserve our traditions, customs, conventions and institutions-- including marriage between a man and a woman.

Practice good citizenship, enlightened patriotism, self-reliance and independence. Help the needy, the weak and the poor.

Revise the educational process to install sound curricula, reduce the influence of unions, and produce better educated students.

Defend the nation and its freedoms; support a strong military, and honor treaty commitments worldwide.

Preserve private property rights as a major bulwark of freedom.

Institute fiscal responsibility: realize debt and debit reduction; and, ultimately, balance the budget.

Ensure free markets with willing partners, including appropriate regulations to prevent abuses.

Promote family as a building block, honor our heritage, and ensure future continuity for our children.

Make effective contributions to alleviate disasters worldwide, to global stability and to economic growth.

Promote scientific, engineering and manufacturing contributions to our way of life.

Use proper and cost-effective management and regulation of our natural resources and environmental conditions.

Develop and support strong community p***e, spirit and cooperation. Extend this spirit throughout the nation.

Revamp immigration control, seal the border, allow supervised migrant workers, and reduce i*****l i*********n.

Believe in just war to defend the nation, and in just k*****g--both for self defense and for the death penalty.

Preserve citizen’s second amendment rights to own and use guns and ammunition legally.

Provide for health care at reasonable cost, and ban elective a******ns. Resend Obamacare.

Maintain our sovereignty: deemphasize the United Nations organization and misguided or disastrous international movements.

Work hard, be industrious and entrepreneurial, create and hold wealth, make jobs available, and live well.

Reject siren calls for confiscatory redistribution of wealth by the government. V**e for a flat consumption tax.

Restrict the courts from legislating from the bench in favor of the correct route through Congress.

Changes will be needed but they must be carefully vetted and instituted gradually to preserve continuity.

(It needs to be said about realizing these actions: the devil is in the details! Let us dig into them and find the “hows”.!

WWG1WGA

Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

That is a program of perfection!

The realization of these goals would, to a very large degree, recreate the country of my remembered childhood.

But, we must stop the wholesale legalized murder of our unborn before the Almighty could begin to take us seriously.

We must delegitimize (I know that is not a word) legitimizing the union of two men or two women as Holy Matrimony. It is neither Holy or matrimony.

Somehow, somewhere, we must regain a modicum of decency and common sense.

PeterS

End secularization? The constitution made this country secular. Congress can make no law respecting religion nor prevent the free exercise thereof. The constitution allowed for Man to worship, or not worship, as they chose. That's secularization--why in the hell would you want to end it? Do you want the government to control religion? You can't have it both ways...

bahmer

Amen and Amen

manning5 Loc: Richmond, VA

Zemirah, I thank you for your comment, and I do agree that a******n must be stopped. Further, I also agree that same sex marriage is an a*********n. We seem to be on the same page of life, and that is a blessing.

manning5 Loc: Richmond, VA

Bahmer, you are the third here in signing up to a far better nation, if only we could count on millions to do the same! Thanks for your support!

Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

How far you stray from authentic history, PeterS,

Our United States Constitution knows nothing of "secularization."

How did America so lose their religious founding, flooring and footing?

Well-known American philosopher John Dewey, as part of his agenda, co-authored and signed the Humanist Manifesto in 1933. Secular Humanism is a worldview that focuses on human values and concerns, attaching prime importance to people rather than on a divine or supernatural being. Dewey was the principal figure in the Progressive Educational Movement in the United States, analyzing the human mind and the way human knowledge is acquired.

He offers an empiricist theory according to which ideas are acquired through experience, and he was the most influential of all modern American educationalists with tendencies towards socialization and secularism quite apparent in all of his work.

Christopher Dawson, in referring to Dewey said: “In his views our purpose for education is not the communication of knowledge but the sharing of social experience, so that the child shall become integrated into the democratic community. He believed that morals were essentially social and pragmatic and that any attempt to subordinate education to transcendent values or dogmas ought to be resisted.”

To such a nefarious degree was Dewey’s stand for the socialization of education that he can be held responsible for “the establishment of the mass mind, or as he puts it: ‘The pooled intelligence’ of the democratic mind.'”

Dewey, in turn, was influenced by the French writer of philosophy, Jean Jacques Rousseau, author of Emile ou de l’Education where he claims that education comes to us through three types of teachers or what he calls “maîtres:” 1) from nature, 2) from listening to contradictory lessons taught by false teachers, and 3) from experience."

He believed "Of these types of education, only the one acquired from nature brings up healthy and normal children. This is the only way to bring up well-educated men and women into the world."

Dewey's objective was to change the fundamental approach to teaching and learning and contribute to the establishment and development of public schools in America. Is there a touch of socialization and government interference in the educational system successfully proposed by Dewey? The simple categorical answer is YES.

In sociology, secularization is promoted as the t***sformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward nonreligious values and secular institutions.

The Humanist Manifesto is the title of three manifestos laying out a Secular Humanist worldview. They are the original Humanist Manifesto, the Humanist Manifesto II, and Humanism and Its Aspirations which John Dewey originally authored, and he and other secular humanists also signed.

This manifesto arrogantly and erroneously stated: "The time has come for widespread recognition of the radical changes in religious beliefs throughout the modern world. The time is past for mere revision of traditional attitudes. Science and economic change have disrupted the old beliefs. Religions the world over are under the necessity of coming to terms with new conditions created by a vastly increased knowledge and experience."

They further claimed: "There is great danger of a final, and we believe fatal, identification of the word religion with doctrines and methods which have lost their significance and which are powerless to solve the problem of human living in the Twentieth Century."

God, however, does not and has not changed. His demands and expectations for His creation has not changed, and His plan for the future of mankind and the earth He created has not, and will not change.

The American Humanist Association, whose motto is "Good Without God," has as their purpose, according to their website:

"Advocating progressive values and e******y for humanists, atheists, and freethinkers."

The Bible has not and will not change, for God has declared it through the "Living Logos," the Word of God, His beloved Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,

as derived from the prologue to the Gospel of John "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God",

as well as in the Book of Revelation, "And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God."

Succinctly the secularization thesis expresses the idea that as societies progress, particularly through what they idolize as "modernization and rationalization," religious authority should diminish accordingly in all aspects of social life and governance.

The expanded version is that Secularization Theory's profound hope and expectation is that as society advances in "modernity," religion retreats and becomes increasingly hollow. The theory holds that intellectual and scientific developments have undermined the spiritual, supernatural, superstitious and paranormal ideas on which religion relies for its legitimacy, and, the differentiation of modern life into different compartments (i.e. work, politics, society, education and knowledge, home-time, entertainment) have relegated religion to merely one part of life, rather than an all-pervading narrative.

As this continues, religion, it is theorized, must become more and more shallow, surviving for a while on empty until loss of active membership forces it into obscurity - although most theorists publicly insist that this is only for organized "public religion," not for private spirituality...

The world, however, is not secularizing evenly. Academics can be found asking "is the situation best captured by secularization theory, or by the notion of resurgence of spirituality? By the decline in traditional religiosity, or by the upsurge of what they patronizingly term fundamentalism?"

Some of the exceptions to secularization (even in the developed world) are pronounced enough to count as evidence against Secularization Theory. Sociologist of religion Rodney Stark condemns secularization theory "to the graveyard of failed theories." Others (erroneously) believe it is only a European phenomenon.

Atheists (those who do not believe in any god), and humanists (those who embrace a morality that does not appeal to any supernatural source), and others who consider themselves non-religious, are a growing population across the world. A detailed survey in 2012 claims that religious people make up 59% of the world population, while those who identify as "atheist" make up 13%, and an additional 23% identify as "not religious" (while not self-identifying as "atheist").

"Congress can make no law respecting religion nor prevent the free exercise thereof."

This Constitutional command, which you misrepresent, is against ordaining, promoting or singling out any one religion as "state sanctioned" to the exclusion of all others.

The government is to keep its hands off all religion, nor is it to regulate to prevent them meeting and worshiping as they choose.

That, however, is NOT Secularization, which would eliminate all religious values and religious people from being able to operate equally in the public arena, with all other peoples and areas of endeavor.

manning5 Loc: Richmond, VA

A most thorough answer to PeterS, far more than I could come up with! Thanks for the help!

Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

The platform toward which you propose our nation strive is of paramount importance if we are to survive as a Representative Republic.

It does become tiresome to hear false claims and false responses continually thrown up in posts and as responses to other's posts, without documentation, and containing not a word of t***h, but declared as though gospel.

Lies should never go unanswered, and the t***h is readily available online.

manning5 Loc: Richmond, VA

The lies we are reading here every day become extremely tiresome to answer with right and t***hful sentences. Sometimes it is simply not possible to come back on these deceitful persons. My count of them has reached 36 now, and too many appear too often! Some lies sneak through despite our best efforts to answer them!

bahmer

I am hoping that after the Nov. E******n that many if not all of the liberal liers will disappear from this site altogether.

manning5 Loc: Richmond, VA

I agree, all 36 or so radicals on OPP should limit themselves to far fewer posts! Not to silence them, but for them to reduce the lies and distortions they favor that tend to drown out the t***h.

Zemirah Loc: Sojourner En Route...

Our only remedy at present is to exercise our own freedom of speech more fully, while we still possess it, exposing the blatant lies for what they are by countering them with the t***h, the whole t***h and nothing but the t***h.

manning5 Loc: Richmond, VA

I agree, but it doesn't seem likely!

bahmer

Unfortunately