[Magdalen] 239th year since the birth of the United States of America as a nation

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

Well, I'm not sure I'd say our birthday is tomorrow, but everyone thinks
the Declaration of Independence represents our birth, so that ship (of
state) has sailed. The Constitution is really the mark of our birth. The
Confederation was not what we might call successful, but After Jimmy
Madison and company rebooted us as the USA, it was a different story.

I like, in general, the Four Marks of the Nation (ahem) that this Murray
puts out. I think we all see these things a bit differently. I think all
the geographical facts are exactly right. I would add, however, that it
took a certain level of risk to leave one's home to come to this strange
new world, so that selects for risk-takers.  Folks coming to our fair
shores were not just hard-working: they were willing to venture much for
the riches they hoped later on to enjoy (sorry about the horrible
paraphrase).  So while the whole Eastern seaboard is filling up with these
risk-takers, there were a bunch for whom the Eastern country was too darn
crowded. I know a bit about this, since my direct ancestor, James (Jamie)
Smith, decided to leave the predictable peaceful eastern Pennsylvania
farmland to move to Kentucky, where he was a part of that territory
becoming a state.

I'd say we started out as a nation of risk-takers.  Risk-takers would tend
to be willing to be solitary, to deal with difficulties without asking for
help unless absolutely necessary.  You know, this explains a bit of how we
got to be a nation of gun-abusers.



James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy

On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 7:48 AM, Zephonites--- via Magdalen <
magdalen at herberthouse.org> wrote:

>
> Folk
>
> Interesting article on this matter
>
> Any one agree with any/all of it?
>
> Blessings
> Martin
>
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> America celebrates her 239th birthday tomorrow.  According to a  recent
> survey, nearly two in three Americans say God has granted our nation  an
> exceptional role in human history.  Is this true?
>
> Charles  Murray earned a BA in history from Harvard and a PhD in political
> science from  MIT.  In American Exceptionism: An Experiment in History, he
> states  categorically: "American exceptionalism is a fact of America's
> past,
> not  something you can choose whether to 'believe in' any more than you can
> choose  whether to 'believe in' the battle of Gettysburg."  In its early
> years, the  United States was considered to be "exceptional" by foreign
> observers as much as  by Americans.
>
> According to Murray, four factors contributed to the  nation's uniqueness:
> 1. Our  geography: rich soil for farming, a frontier to encourage
> immigration, and the  Atlantic Ocean to separate us from European conflict.
> 2. Our people:  hardworking pioneers who formed close-knit families.
> 3. Our ideology: the  belief that humans possess innate rights which the
> state cannot bestow or  withhold.
> 4. Our religiosity: by separating church and state, we formed
> congregations composed of people committed to their faith, not just those
> born  into it.
>  John Adams was blunt: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral  and
> religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any
> other."
>
> Do these factors mean that our founders  were all Christians?  We sometimes
> hear that 52 of the 55 signers of the  Declaration of Independence were
> "orthodox" Christians, and that 24 held  seminary degrees.  But their
> personal
> spiritual commitments are actually  hard to determine.  We can characterize
> only about 20—half were biblical  Christians, while the rest were deists or
> non-orthodox.
>
> While America's founders were not all committed  Christians, they were
> clearly committed to a Judeo-Christian moral  standard.  Even Thomas
> Jefferson,
> himself a deist, insisted: "Injustice in  government undermines the
> foundations of a society.  A nation, therefore,  must take measures to
> encourage its
> members along the paths of justice and  morality."
>
> How can we take such "measures" today?
>
> Abraham  Lincoln warned, "America will never be destroyed from the outside.
>  If  we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed
> ourselves."  Spiritual renewal is critical to the future of our
> democracy.  Our
> greatest need today is not to make America a Christian  nation, but to help
> America be a nation of Christians (Matthew 28:18-20).
>
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