Thanks Be To God

PowerLine sums up very nicely my thoughts on all the recent nonsense regarding the secularist's attempts to adorn their fabled Separation of Church and State Wall with minefields or, in my opinion, the more Orwellian EU attempts at rewriting history (Huh? -- Ed. Just read here, here, here and here and realize what we Red Staters have known for years -- fortunately now Blogs are shining a light on the anti-Christian prejudices of government officials as well as that which has been laughingly called objective and mainstream media).

There have been a number of stories in the news this year about schools that have banned any reference to God in connection with Thanksgiving. Which raises, obviously, the question: to whom are we giving thanks, if not to God? I think the real answer, although always unspoken, is that instead of being thankful to God for our blessings, some would have us be thankful to the government.

In the end--and the end may be quite far off, for, as Adam Smith said, there is a lot of ruin in a country--there are only two alternatives for any nation: religious faith and tyranny. Because if each individual is not, as the Declaration says, endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights, then those rights are only the creation of governments. And what governments give, they can, and surely will, take away. In the end, it is only the religious belief that each person, by virtue of being created in the image of God, is of transcendant value that stands between all of us and the boot heel of tyranny. Absent such belief, people are but cattle and, sooner or later, will be treated as such.

So on this holiday, we're thankful for lots of things, and we're thankful to lots of people, including the troops who are serving around the world. . . . But let's not forget to say, as we Lutherans do at the end of every service: Thanks be to God.