Happy 4th of July!

Fireworks_1

Today will be a blog day off, so go out and cook some burgers and dogs and set off some illegal fireworks or something.

Have fun!

Sorry to international readers, but I do need breaks from this stuff and may as well take them when everyone else (here) is.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

34 thoughts on “Happy 4th of July!”

  1. Cheers to the greatest nation on earth. I’ll drink to your health and your strength so that the next generations can still live in peace under your protective umbrella. IMHO, what an unbelievably terrible world this would be without America.

  2. Surely you’re not advocating breaking the law, what with all the law and order you’ve been talking about re: immigration recently…
    Hehe – just nitpicking. Have a great Fourth of July all ye free people of America!

  6. Amen!
    Oh, just for a booster– you would not BELIEVE how much the Japanese here in Sasebo are celibrating the fourth! They’re more excited than some of the Americans I know!

  8. Normally I’m not a nitpicker, but this is important. The reason we celebrate this day is NOT because it’s the 4th day of July. The name of the holiday is INDEPENDENCE DAY! This is the day we commemorate the blood, sweat, and tears of those who formally broke ties with Great Britain, touching off a bloody war in which most of the signers were either killed or impoverished to the point of dying a pauper’s death. I am not a conspiract nut, but there are those who suggest that referring to this holiday as “the 4th of July” is an orchestrated effort to make us forget the sacrifice and rugged individualism of those who founded this country, as we move in a direction built more on dependence and interdependence, built on a welfare state and on garbage organizations like the UN. But like I said, I am not a conspiracy nut.

  9. The Signers wrote that we ought to set off “illuminations” have musket fire and play games, so it can’t be illegal 😉

  10. Whatever it means to you, today is a great day to sit back and enjoy time and good food with family and friends; to watch the children play with sparklers, to reminisce on your own childhood celebrations, and to think about what is most important of all.
    God grant us peace in our world today.

  11. Happy Independence Day, my cousins to the south!
    And please note, we Canadians celebrated our national holiday, Canada Day, on July 1st — so Happy belated Canada Day, fellow Canucks!

  12. I am grateful to the men who struggled to give us our freedom as nation, and I hope we build on, and not just rest on, their accomplishments.

  15. Careful with the illegal fireworks. Superman might come along and take them all, and then hurl them into the sun.

  17. God bless all who are now serving, or who have ever served in our armed forces.
    Thank you all.
    We went to Grandma’s, grilled burgers and hot dogs, and watched the neighborhood fireworks all around us. The air throughout town is full of the acrid smoke of gunpowder.
    Ahhh… the sweet smell of freedom.

  18. I also hate to be a nitpicker, but it is a sin to violate civil laws that are not contrary to the moral law. Hence, no illegal fireworks please. This is how the Church understands “give to Ceasar what is Ceasar’s.”

  19. I jus lew o my le index ine lihin illeal iewoks. Whoo hoo! Happy Independence Day! Jus kiddin.

  20. Ben,
    I also hate to be a nitpicker, but it is a sin to violate civil laws that are not contrary to the moral
    Hear! hear! We redcoats tried telling that to these bloody colonials, but not a hearing would they give us. God bless the Queen!
    Francis

  21. Bad spammer!
    Re: moral laws/civil laws
    It could be argued that it’s immoral to ban things which are harmless (if used responsibly), fun, and beautiful. And hey, aren’t fireworks Art? Of course they are. Art is being censored, and the experience of performance kept away from the children and reserved to government and corporate users only!
    J/K, but it’s telling that you don’t hear this from the ACLU.
    Re: the redcoats
    Taxation without representation, coupled with violation of the social contract in many other ways, is immoral.
    And against the English constitution, too. If only the UK’d listened to Burke….

  22. isn’t USA the greatest country in the history of the world? amen… ain’t we great!!!!
    praise us! glory to us! thank you God that we can be your holy hammers and you can use us to pound the rest of the world into our idea of the way the world should be

  23. “isn’t(sic) the USA the greatest country in the history of the world?”
    Yes!
    “amen(sic)…ain’t we great!!!!”
    No, God is great. And the freedom He has given us is great. I thank Him especially for the brave men He has given us who have been willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to secure and maintain our freedom. “Greater love than this no man has, than to lay down his life for his friends.”

  24. Thanks to Ed Peters.
    The Johnsonville Brats were great mixed w/ the scrambled eggs this morning!
    🙂

  25. Chris,
    The Declaration of Independance was signed on July 2nd, 1776 (by John Hancock and one other guy) through 1781 (everybody else). The Continental Congress celebrated the signing on July 8th. What happened on July 4th? Nothing!
    That’s just the date on the document. 🙂
    Meretrice

  26. The Declaration of Independence was first publically read and displayed on July 4, 1776.

  27. I toasted King George III on Inependence Day. Compared with Presidents like Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, LBJ, and Clinton, I’ll take a fairly benevolent British monarch any day.

  28. And George the 3rd was about as “benevolent” as any lunatic who thinks he’s a chicken farmer can be. Except, of course, when it comes to giving ordinary respect to citizens with the audacity to live outside the eye line of said lunatic. Or to object to be shot down in the street. Or to having bands of armed men breaking into your house, & stealing everything that isn’t nailed down. Etc, etc, etc.
    But, hey, that’s me.

  29. I would say something myself, but John Attarian has already put it about as well as I could-
    “As anyone who’s actually read up on him can tell you, George III was a devout Christian, an unswervingly faithful husband, a fervent patriot, a gentleman, and a painfully conscientious ruler who meant well and did his honest best. His insanity was due to an unfortunate blood disease called porphyria. Who among the pack of knaves, villains and – at best – mediocrities who have governed us for most of the past century is worthy to touch the hem of Good King George’s coronation robe?”

  30. See, Dano, the problem is that a good king makes the whole king business seem like a great idea… until you get to a rotten king, and then the weakness of the system shows up in spades.
    Of course, the same could be said for a representative republic, but in that case the corrective is more readily accessible, as well as generally less bloody.
    Regnat populus, baby.

  31. ‘Who among the pack of knaves, villains and – at best – mediocrities who have governed us for most of the past century is worthy to touch the hem of Good King George’s coronation robe?” ‘
    Dano, Dano, Dano….All of them.Every single blessed one of them!!
    And, I’ll raise you one George Washington, 2 FDRs, 3 Abraham Lincolns, & a ;-)partridge in a pear tree….
    Heck, my late, lamented pug dog is more than worthy to not only touch the hem of the dang robe; he even deserves the right to use it as a bed.
    You really gotta get over this “divine right of kings” stuff…It was heretical then, & its heretical now. (Not to mention dangerous to life & limb).
    Thank you,:) Tim, for pointing out one of the biggest & most frequent problems with a monarchy.

  32. “Divine right of kings” may be heretical, but so is rule by the “divine will of the people”. Law is something to be discovered, not created. At any rate, Dante is held in higher regard by the Popes than Rousseau, even if he was a thorn in their sides whilst he lived. Republics are not any more inherently un-Catholic than monarchies, but in this day and age, they are more likely to be infected with the kind of modernist nonsense that IS un-Catholic. The Founding Fathers, though almost all religious men, were nonetheless children of the misleadingly named “enlightenment”, and it shows in the constitution they created.
    And as far as saying Abraham Lincoln is superior to George III, how is crushing the Confederacy any different than crushing the revolution of 1776? Actually, now that I ask the question, it is different- it’s more hypocritical. The United States of America rebelled against the central government in London, and yes, maintained the institution of slavery until the mid-1860’s. The Confederate States of America rebelled against the central government in Washington, and maintained the institution of slavery until the mid-1860’s. Claiming one is legal and the other isn’t is worse than claiming that both or neither was legal.
    At least George III didn’t have this particular hypocrisy on his head. Furthermore, the English government’s famed “burdensome taxes” were far, far lighter than any taxes levied by the US government today. Parliament even repealed most of them when the colonists complained. Parliament was certainly more responsive and more fair than our beloved “representative” assemblies (incidentally, “No taxation without representation” ought to read “No Taxation”, because colonial representatives sometimes had explicit instructions to reject any offers of representation in Parliament- to avoid having to pay higher taxes).

  33. Dano, my friend, all my ancestors fought in the Army of Northern Virginia, under Robert E.Lee & the great, great, Thomas (Stonewall) Jackson, so I do not speak lightly here:
    1. It was not Lincoln who “crushed the Confederacy”; that was the idiotic & probably demented J.W. Booth, who took out of the picture the one man who might have kept the Southern loss of the War Between the States from turning into the debacle that was “Reconstruction”.
    2. The “peculiar institution” that was slavery was NOT the cause of the War. The cause was states’ rights. Not a single state entered into the new United States of America in the days following the Revolution, that did not know & believe that they could, if they so chose, leave it.
    You may argue that the cause was “states’ rights to have slavery”, but it won’t wash. Even Northern historians will tell you the same.
    3. I never called George the 3rd a hypocrite. He was a liar, a lunatic, a tyrant, a rotten parent, and aboout as “devout & conscientious” as the present Prince of Wales. But he was no hypocrite. I grant you that much, at least.

  34. Oh, yeah, PS: This descendent of the proud member of the Stonewall Brigade would not allow the bloody Elector of Hanover George the Third to kiss the foot of Abraham Lincoln’s casket.
    But, as I said: Hey. That’s me.

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