Common Sense: An uncommon book review(Part 6)

For our next installment in the review of Common Sense, we will be looking at and analyzing a few random quotations.  Paine writes, "Alas! we have been long led away by ancient prejudices and made large sacrifices to superstition.  We have boasted the protection of Great Britain, without considering, that her motive was interest not attachment."  Have we not made the same sacrifices to superstition on behalf of a federal government that promises protection, security and happiness but delivers a destroyed economy, a trampling of individual liberties and an apathetic concern for the average citizen other than when looking to win their vote in order to stay in power.  Is the Federal Government truly working out of attachment to the governed or merely in its own self interest?  Unfortunately the answer is the same one that Paine gave as regards Great Britain. "But Britain is the parent county, say some.  Then the more shame upon her conduct.  Even the brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families."  And while the civil government is not our parent, yet they try to fill that role in promising the cradle to grave security that they can never offer and is rightly a responsibility of actual families.  Still, in reaching for that goal, are not we, the people made war upon through policies that strengthen the power of the "parent" to the detriment of individuals, families and even the state governments.
Paine continues in another section, "this new world hath been asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe...The Reformation was preceded by the discovery of America: As if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety."  And yet, have we not come full circle where the emigrants of Europe looking for religious freedom fled to a land which now, in our generation and through their posterity is not the friend or protector of the persecuted, but the bastion of the persecutor itself.  Case in point, when a State Supreme Court justice can say, in good conscience and with the admiration of society that a citizen should be willing to offend their own sincerely held religious views as a price of citizenship, then where are the bounds of what the civil government can, and ultimately WILL, require of its citizens.  I'm afraid Mr. Paine, that this New World, this land you saw as a beacon of hope and security, is no longer a home for religious liberty, no longer a sanctuary, but only a den of conformity to the morals of a civil government detached from God and bound to humanism..and a civil government under no authority other than itself is a beast most terrifying to its citizenry.