What was it really like when we had God?

La Shawn Barber has a post on Christians in St. Louis opposing the distribution of Bibles in the public schools. This prompts me to put down (or put up, I guess) my thoughts and recollections on the whole "prayer in schools" area of things.
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The history of the United States, clear back to a number of the original colonies (most notably Plymouth, but also Maryland and Pennsylvania come to mind) is religious freedom. We haven't always practiced it; we discriminated against Jews, for instance, but it has been our ideal. I believe it has now become "freedom FROM religion", pushed by people and groups who are opposed to God and religion and want to get rid of it or at least marginalize it.

(Many have written about the historical facts concerning "separation of Church and State", e.g. that the phrase, "a wall of separation", was first used by Thomas Jefferson, one of the least "religious" of the framers of the Constitution, to assure the Governor of Connecticut that if that state wanted to establish a State Church (i.e. a formal link between the State and a particular church denomination/heirarchy), the Constitution prohibited the Federal Government from prohibiting it. I'll pass on that exact discussion.)

Instead, I want to move to more recent historical sociology. The claim is being made that the America of today is not unlike the America of the past, that "the Cleavers" never existed, that the past has been whitewashed.

Sorry, not true. Perhaps we never had a "Norman Rockwell setting", but I can tell you from personal experience that we used to allow religion in schools and our society, and both school and society was much better than today, much less: drugs, crime, hate (with notable exceptions), broken families, welfare, to name a few.

At age 14, I ran my father's gas station by myself 5-10 PM. I wasn't in a bulletproof booth, either. (In fact, the cash register was out in the open and required no key or password.) Try that today!

In school, the most difficult behavior problems had to do with talking in class, passing notes, or chewing gum. There were a few occasional truants. Even the roughest kids wouldn't have dreamed of talking back to the principal. (I'm talking high school here, but in recent years I've seen elementary students read the riot act to the principal [who was, btw, an ex-football player]!) (Also, if you got in trouble in school, you got in trouble again when you got home. Very rarely did the parent blame the school, as is too common today.)

In those pre-Murray v. Board of Education days, we prayed and pledged allegiance to the Flag every morning. In high school, Catholic kids were bussed (by the school) to the church every Thursday, eighth period, for religious instruction. Jewish kids were allowed absences on Jewish holidays. (Of course, it's true, too, that the only diversity we had was Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish.)

A further account: In 1942, my aunt recounted in a letter how on a trip to the shopping district, her friend's car was blocked in by a double-parker, and how she got into the blocking car and her friend pushed, and they moved it out of the way. Just as they finished, the owner came along. He got mad at them for putting his car in where theirs had been (because it could get blocked in--he calmed when reminded he had blocked theirs). Notice a few things here:
1. They felt free to move some stranger's car.
2. They were able to move the car. It was not locked or alarmed.
3. The owner was not mad at them for moving his car, but for where they put it.

Okay, so do I look at the freedom from crime that's obvious in a first-hand report from that time, or do I believe the people today who assert that things were the same then as now?

Another contemporary report, this one from much earlier: In his account of the America of the early 1800s, de Tocqueville noted that women were safe walking along the street without escort, a marvel to the Frenchman. Today, we hear reports all too often of women being raped on college campuses and other seemingly safe places and of child abductions and molestations. Then and now, the same or different?

Do I think that the changing view of the place of religion in the public sphere has had an effect on our American way of life? Is Bin Laden a Muslim?

Is the Bible true and authentic?

On La Shawn Barber's blog, there's quite a discussion going about how one lives as an atheist or agnostic. It has gotten a little OT, so I decided to post here on a side discussion, the issue of whether the Bible is myth or fact, authentic or a bunch of fables.

I'm not an expert on this subject, but there is no shortage of those who are. I'll just hit the high spots here, and if readers want to comment, you're very welcome.

Basically, as independent research has shown, the Bible was written by about 40 different authors, and was written over a period of about 1400 to 1800 years. Many of these authors claimed to have had an encounter with a deity, whom they identified as God.

The content of the Old Testament (as Christians call it--pretty much the same as the Torah as the Jews know it) includes, among other things, verifiable history and prophecy. Some of the history has an intriguing story; it was doubted for centuries, then found only post-WWII to be accurate).

All the prophecy which foretold events which should have occurred by now has proven to be accurate; the events foretold actually happened, and happened as they were predicted.

The authenticity of the various books (that the claimed writers actually wrote them) has been shown by many evidences over the years.

Early manuscripts of the Old Testament/Torah do not exist from before about the time of Christ because as they were copied the old and worn copies were carefully destroyed. However, the copying process was so elaborately careful that we can trust the copies. Besides, we have enough copies from different transcription trails that all agree, that we can say for sure, on hard evidence, that what we have is very much what was originally written.

Early copies of the New Testament do exist (although not the originals). The letters to individuals and to churches which are a part of the accepted books of the Bible were much-copied and widely-distributed, so we have many different copies, and again, they agree.

In fact, we have many times as many manuscripts of Bible books as we have of the Greek classics, and the Bible copies are earlier.

I'm going to stop with this. I highly recommend Evidence That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell as one of many books which does a very full, scholarly, and fully documented discussion of this topic. It's listed on Amazon, and if you search on this title, you'll find some books by other authors on the same subject.