Edwin Gaustad Famous Quotes
Reading Edwin Gaustad quotes, download and share images of famous quotes by Edwin Gaustad. Righ click to see or save pictures of Edwin Gaustad quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.
The first phrase of the First Amendment spoke to the freedom uppermost in Jefferson's mind when it provided that, 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' Here a double guarantee could be found: first, that government would do nothing to give official endorsement to a religion or to set one faith above another; second, that government would do nothing to inhibit the freedom of religion.
One seeks to know the self better in order to know God better.
Most of the founding fathers, sympathetic with and influenced by the European Enlightenment, saw religion - natural religion, that is - as a potential good, but with equal clarity they saw the religions of existing institutions and religions based on a fixed scriptural revelation as meddlesome, wrong-headed and hopelessly obsolete.
What good deed can government do for religion? The best deed of all: leave it free and unencumbered, burdened by neither enmity nor amity.
If history teaches us any lessons at all, it teaches us that force applied to religion creates not a purity of faith but a river of blood.
Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other.
