RELIGIOUS FREEDOM -- THEN, NOW AND ROMNEY

RELIGIOUS freedom -- THEN, now AND ROMNEY
Sun December 9, 3:47 Prime Minister ET

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Iodine had problem choosing a Pb for this column on Hand Romney's nice address about spiritual freedom last Thursday morning. I am for spiritual freedom and for freedom from religion. I am not for Romney, though, Supreme Being cognizes -- oops! -- he certainly looks like a president should.

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I considered four first paragraphs:

Lead 1: More than 175 old age ago, Alexis Delaware Tocqueville, an intellectual Roman Catholic, traveling in the new United States to compose a book he came to name "Democracy in America," wrote this in his notebook:

"It's incredible to see the infinite figure of subdivisions into which the religious sects of United States have got split. Each new religious sect offprints a small additional while nearing pure Deism. The reformed faith is a kind of compromise."

Lead 2: More than 20 old age ago, I received A bundle in the mail from a adult male named Chester A. Arthur Glauberman, in Newton, N.J., a topographic point my father often went to fish for trout he never caught. He said his father, Isadore Glauberman, who died in 1978, had establish a Book in the loft and thought it might be mine. The lettering on the first page read: "Presented to Richard Reeves by the Primary Department of The Church School of Old Bergen Dutch Reformed Church, September 22, 1946." It was mine and still is, well-thumbed and read, one of my most of import possessions.

Lead 3: Sometime in the early or mid-1970s, Iodine settled into my place on a United Airlines flight, and the adult male next to me, wearing a little gold cross in his lapel, turned to me and said: "Have you establish Jesus?" I reached for the operating expense button, then told the air hostess I wanted to change my seat.

Lead 4: In 1979, I had a conversation about faith in the White Person Person House with former President Nixon, who was raised a Friend and rather cynically began a tradition of White House supplication breakfasts, and he said something interesting: "When faith started talking about the multitude rather than what it could make for the individual, then faith went ..." Helium thrust both his pollexes down and made a noise something like "Phffft!"

I debated using one of those because I believe it would be violative and too provocative to get by saying that I see many of the dogmas of Mormonism to be very odd stuff. I can manage its rejection of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Place Ghost, in favour of a Supreme Being who is Himself a physical being.

But I will never acquire over my first visit to the museum of the Mormon Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. A great wall painting there pictures the beginnings of the phrase "Latter-Day Saints," the thought that when Jesus was resurrected he did not travel to the side of his Father, but instead stopped off in North American to prophesy to and convert Jews who were dressed as Indians. OK, believe what you will -- I agreed with Richard Nixon that faith should personal -- but all the plumes did me in.

Obviously, Romney did not desire to seek to support such as beliefs, though he did state he believed the philosophies of his faith. His Church of Jesus Of Nazareth Jesus of Latter-Day Saints have a singular form sort of problem. It was founded in 1830, while Alexis Charles Henri Maurice De Tocqueville was in America, and that agency it have modern records; it was all written down at the time. We retrieve historically that a cat named Chief Joseph Ian Smith was talking to angels and establish aureate plates from Supreme Being -- which no 1 else ever saw -- that ordered the creative activity of a new religion. And we cognize that the top of Mormon leaders, Brigham Young, the Moses who led his people to the promised land of Utah, had 56 children and 51 wives and was indicted for homicide in a slaughter of guiltless husbandmen heading West on the Beaver State Trail.

You can read all about these things in business relationships by participants and witnesses. Jews, Christians and Muslims are better protected because their faiths were founded before authorship was common, and their histories are essentially verbal.

As for us, we dwell in interesting times. I, for one, am thrilled by the diverseness of the campaigners in both parties. But I am appalled by the rise of public pietism that I began looking into after my aeroplane brush with a chap "born again." It is people like him, and their evangelical fundamentalism, who have got been determined to turn American democracy into a battle between religions, values and cultures. Not only have got got they succeeded, but they have been a drive military unit in turning American foreign policy into a cultural-religious war with Islam, a horrific, deathly confrontation that volition make neither side any good.

There was a ground our Founding Fathers, who had seen Europe rupture itself apart in spiritual wars, were so determined to divide Christian church and state. They were right then, and they are right now. The campaigners would make well to reaffirm that separation.

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