This Thanksgiving Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln is the origin of our modern-day holiday orgy of meals, shopping, and football.
This was posted at Global Affairs (Thanks, Sarge), and as I read it, I was struck by the tone of the proclamation. Can you imagine the uproar today if a president wrote such piece? And I mean any president, not just President Bush.
No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
(Emphasis added).
Wow. How our world has changed. A government official who invoked God in such a way today would be ridiculed by the opposing party (and perhaps by their own party), sued by the ACLU, and publicly berated by most non-Christian religious leaders. But then, there was no question of acknowledging God’s hand in our lives.
I don’t know how atheists and agnostics felt at the time. It would be interesting to explore that idea. So often today as Christians, it seems we are under attack for publicly expressing our beliefs. I’d be curious to look into how things were in that regard so many years ago.
I think I was really “in the mood” to read your quote from Abraham Lincoln. It surely epitomzies how today’s worldwide population has changed in their attitude toward the Lord God, worshiped by Jews, Christians and Muslims. We are facing an “end of the world as we have known it” time, and whlle that definitely conforms to ancient Hebrew prophecies, it is turning the “unbelievers” even more strongly against religion. Evidently they believe that “not believing” would save the world, and I can understand how they reach that conclusion, since we are definitely engaged in a “holy war.” But, sadly, the “unbelievers” can’t help us by embracing the enlarged understanding of God, which the Prophets of all three religions offer–the combined teachings that could unite us and spare us the prophesied darkness of a nuclear winter.