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Pariah said:
Ummm, where exactly in the bill of rights or the constitution does there say that there is seperation of church and state????

You answer me that and I'll let you have my password....

It doesn't..only the no laws for or against religion thing....


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wikipedia

In the United States, separation of church and state is governed by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and by legal precedents, some quite controversial, interpreting that clause. Many other democratic governments around the world have similar clauses in their respective constitutions. The actual term, "separation of church and state", does not appear in the constitution, but rather comes from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to a group identifying themselves as the Danbury Baptists. Ulysses S. Grant also called for Americans to "Keep the church and state forever separate."


Full Wiki article
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Thomas Jefferson:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.


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Regarding religion, the first amendment to the US Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" both these clauses, known as the "establishment clause" and the "free exercise clause" respectively, are significant. To give perspective, there was a great conservation of language in the Bill of Rights; the intention was to avoid creating loopholes, while still providing a buffer between the Legislature and the most basic rights of the people. It is significant, then, that there are two clauses where one would suffice, were the intention only to prevent religious establishment or only to protect free exercise.

At the time of the passage of the Bill of Rights, several states had established churches. For example, in 1854 the State supreme court of Maine declared that the local school board had the right to expel a 15 year old girl for refusing to read aloud a portion of the King James translation of the Bible to her class; her family's religion required her to read only the Douay Catholic translation of the Bible. [3] All of the early official state churches were disestablished by the 1820s, including the Congregationalist establishment in Danbury Baptists. It is commonly accepted that, under the doctrine of Incorporation - which uses the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as the vehicle by which the protections and restrictions of the Bill of Rights are applied to the states - they could not be reestablished today. (Justice Thomas has occasionally made note of a view, held by a small number of constitutional scholars, that the states could still establish official religions today; under this view, the establishment clause cannot be incorporated under the Fourteenth Amendment, because under its arcane wording, it is a "hands-off" directive aimed solely at Congress. Others take the view that so long as religion is established by the government, "establishment of religion" is "establishment of religion" no matter whether Congress is directly involved.)


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Prior to the inclusion of the Bill of Rights, the only mention of religious freedom in the Constitution was a clause forbidding any "religious test" for government employees. This has been called the "no religious test" clause, and is found at the end of Article VI, Section 3 (the final clause of the original Constitution save only for the Ratification Clause stating under what conditions the new Constitution would be deemed to be valid and in effect), which reads in part "but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or trust under the United States."


Just on a side note, this is in the Constitution and Bush saying that Miers' religion was an issue in his picking her kind of violates the constitution.
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The Tripoli Treaty of 1796 between the United States and the Barbary States, specifically stated that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion". Many are of the view that containing paragraph (known as Article 11), which was written in a document endorsed both by the Congress of the time and by then-president John Adams, taken in context with similar writings of the founding fathers, supports the idea of a secular state. It is of note that the document was revised in 1805 to exclude Article 11.


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The phrase "separation of church and state" became a definitive part of Establishment Clause jurisprudence in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947). Everson also was the first case to interpret the Clause as imposing a restraint on the states as well as the federal government, based upon the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In 1962, the Supreme Court banned from public schools all public prayers and religious readings done for religious purposes. The Supreme Court continued to allow private prayer. As such, any teacher, faculty, or student can pray in school, in accordance with their own religion. However, they may not lead such prayers in class, or in other "official" school settings such as assemblies or programs. Even "non-sectarian" teacher-led prayers are not allowed, e.g. "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our country," which was part of the prayer required by the New York State Board of Regents prior to the decision of the Warren Court in Engel v. Vitale.

The court noted that it "is a matter of history that this very practice of establishing governmentally composed prayers for religious services was one of the reasons which caused many of our early colonists to leave England and seek religious freedom in America."



Bow ties are coool.