Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Criminal Law as a product of Social Engineering Essay

Criminal Law as a product of Social Engineering - Essay Example When the number of inmates the various prisons also increases as a result of the high rate of crimes, then the catering of these inmates becomes another head-ache of the government. All these things do not allow governments especially in developing countries to be able to use the scarce resources they have on more useful and profitable things which will bring them more income to be able to develop their economies. This when studied further will in a long term becomes another cause of crime. This is because when a country's economy is very poor there will be no jobs for the citizens hence poverty will be on the increase. These citizens therefore in an attempt to be able to earn some money to feed themselves and their families tend to engage in criminal acts. This makes the whole process become more or less a viscous circle. The governments not only will not be able to generate more revenue to improve their economy ,but also they will not be able to provide the basic amenities all thei r citizens may need. these include good drinking water,electricity,medical services and so on. When it comes to the social effects crime has ,it is quite obvious that communities where crime rates are high ,the younger generations or citizens grow up to become very violent people .This is because they are e always surrounded by violence and this affects them psychologically. It makes them believe in nothing else but violence and illegal ways as the only way to get what they want. They have not even the slightest idea about what peace is really about or even what the laws of their country are and their significance. If a country or community has its younger generation who are supposed to be the future leaders of that community have such a character and wrong perception, you would agree with me that that community really has a lot to do to have a good future. Social engineering as labeled above as a very important issue in the combat against crime ,can be described as the use policies that are base don the findings of social science to deal with social problems of which crime is no exemption. Policies made by governments come in different forms, but the one that comes to light in this context is the regulatory policies. This policies as the name implies, are meant to give limits to individuals and co-operate bodies in their decision making and actions. These policies when made serve as a guideline or step to step actions or procedures the government needs to follow in order to be able to achieve a set goal. Before policies are made, various things are taken into consideration ,these include the purpose for which the policy is been made. These is when the governments need the ideas of the experts in the specific sector within which the policy is been made. that is whether it is an education, health, est. policy. When it comes to policies o f social engineering ,the ideas of experts in the social sciences are needed in order to structure out the policies in such a way to be able to achieve its set goal or purpose .Social science involves of how groups of people behave ,often in effort

Monday, October 28, 2019

Personal Identity Essay Example for Free

Personal Identity Essay Who am I? Descartes’ answer was simply I am a mind (sum res cogitans). Descartes arrived at this answer by introspection – by looking inside himself. David Hume offered a brilliant critique of the idea that one can find one’s self through introspection.   â€Å"When I turn my reflection on myself, I never can perceive this self without some one or more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive anything but the perceptions. It is the composition of these, therefore, which forms the self. † (Treatise, Appendix) In other words, we have no direct knowledge of or experience of the self; we only have knowledge of particular sensations, memories, and so on.   We must suppose that there is something that underlies or bundles together these sensations, and that is the self. Personal Identity When philosophers talk about â€Å"personal identity,† they are asking how it is that two distinct persons can be the same. Lets have persons a and b. Suppose a = you (aged 16) and b = you (now).   What makes you remain the same person? You are the same person over time because you have the same soul (dualism), also, if and only if you have access to the same store of memories, if there is a continuity of your organism (Animalism) and if and only if you have the same brain view over time.

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Partial Birth Abortion :: Biology Essays Research Papers

Partial Birth Abortion In the continuing debates on the legality and morality of abortion, "partial birth" abortions have become a hot topic. What exactly is a partial birth abortion? Nebraska state legislation defines it as "an abortion procedure in which the person performing the abortion partially delivers a living unborn child before killing the unborn child and completing delivery" (1). While this definition may be fine for legal purposes, it still does not address the actual procedures; we still do not know what an actual partial birth abortion procedure entails. The most common procedure is called Intact Dilation and Evacuation, or D&E. D&E involves dismembering the fetus inside the uterine cavity and then pulling it out through the already dilated cervix (1) . Another less common, but more controversial method is the dilation and extraction method, or D&X. This procedure requires a woman to take medication several days in advance to dilate the cervix. Once the cervix has dilated, she returns to complete the procedure. When she returns, the physician turns the fetus around in the uterus so that it is positioned feet first, and then delivers the fetus until only the head remains inside the mother's body. At this point, the physician punctures the base if the skull and suctions out the contents of the fetus' head, causing the skull to collapse. The dead fetus is then removed from the woman's body (2). In each case the head (or more) is left inside the woman's body because in order for a birth to have occurred under common law the head of the f etus must leave the mother's body. Under the current interpretation of the United States Constitution, a person must be born in order to be protected by the government, so by leaving the head in the mother's body the procedure is considered to be legally viable (1). Proponents of a ban on partial birth abortions cite what they see as the extreme cruelty of the procedures as violating the constitutional rights of the fetus. They believe that birth should be defined as occurring as soon as any part of the fetus' torso above the navel is visible, or when any of the fetus' body has left the mother (1). Many argue that since the fetus in undoubtedly alive during the procedure, the issue of whether or not an actual birth has occurred should be of little consequence (3).

Thursday, October 24, 2019

Carrie Chapter Eight

She lay on her bed, looking at the ceiling, sweating. ‘Carrie! Supper!' ‘Thank you, (i am not afraid) Momma.' She got up and fixed her hair with a dark-blue headband. Then she went downstairs From The Shadow Exploded (p. 59): How apparent was Carrie's ‘wild talent' and what did Margaret White, with her extreme Christian ethic, think of it? We shall probably never know. But one is tempted to believe that Mrs White's reaction must have been extreme †¦ ‘You haven't touched your pie, Carrie.' Momma looked up from the tract she had been perusing while she drank her Constant Comment. ‘It's homemade.' ‘It makes me have pimples, Momma.' ‘Your pimples are the Lord's way of chastising you. Now eat your pie.' ‘Momma?' ‘Yes?' Carrie plunged. ‘I've been invited to the Spring Ball next Friday by Tommy Ross-‘ The tract was forgotten. Momma was staring at her with wide my ears-are-deceiving-me eyes. Her nostrils flared like those of a horse that has heard the dry rattle of a snake. Carrie tried to swallow an obstruction and only (i am not afraid o yes i am) got rid of part of it. ‘-and he's a very nice boy. He's promised to stop in and meet you before and-‘ ‘No.' ‘-to have me in by eleven. I've-‘ ‘No, no, no!' ‘-accepted. Momma, please see that I have to start to, to try and get along with the world. I'm not like you. I'm funny – I mean, the kids think I'm funny. I don't want to be. I want to try and be a whole person before it's too late to-‘ Mrs White threw her tea in Carrie's face. It was only lukewarm, but it could not have shut of Carrie's words more suddenly if it had been scalding. She sat numbly, the amber fluid dripping from her chin and cheeks on to her white blouse, spreading. It was sticky and smelled like cinnamon. Mrs White sat trembling, her face frozen except for her nostrils, which continued to flare. Abruptly she threw back her head and screamed at the ceiling. ‘God! God! God!' Her jaw snapped brutally over each syllable. Carrie sat without moving. Mrs White got up and came around the table. Her hands were hooked into shaking claws. Her face bore a half-mad expression of compassion mixed with hate. ‘The closet,' she said. ‘Go to your closet and pray.' ‘No, Momma.' ‘Boys. Yes, boys come next. After the blood the boys come. Like sniffing dogs, grinning and slobbering, trying to find out where that smell is. That †¦ smell!' She swung her whole arm into the blow, and the sound of her palm against Carrie's face (o god i am so afraid now) was like that flat sound of a leather belt being snapped in air. Carrie remained seated, although her upper body swayed. The mark on her cheek was first white, then blood red. ‘The mark,' Mrs White said. Her eyes were large but blank, she was breathing in rapid, snatching gulps of air. She seemed to be talking to herself as the claw hand descended on to Carrie's shoulder and pulled her out of her chair. ‘I've seen it, all right. Oh yes. But. I. Never. Did. But for him. He. Took. Me . . .' She paused, her eyes wandering vaguely toward the ceiling. Carrie was terrified. Momma seemed in the throes of some great revelation which might destroy her. ‘Momma-‘ ‘In cars. Oh, I know where they take you in their arms. City limits. Roadhouses. Whiskey. Smelling †¦ oh they smell it on you!' Her voice rose to a scream. Tendons stood out on her neck, and her head twisted in a questing upward rotation. ‘Momma, you better stop.' This seemed to snap her back to some kind of hazy reality. Her lips twitched in a kind of elementary surprise and she halted, as if groping for old bearings in a new world. ‘The closet,' she, muttered. ‘Go to your closet and pray. ‘No.' Momma raised her hand to strike. ‘No!' The hand stopped in the dead air. Momma stared up at it, as if to confirm that it was still there, and whole. The pie pan suddenly rose from the trivet on the table and hurled itself across the room to impact beside the living-room door in a splash of blueberry drool. ‘I'm going, Momma!' Momma's overturned teacup rose and flew past her head to shatter above the stove. Momma shrieked and dropped to her knees with her hands over her head. ‘Devil's child,' she moaned. ‘Devil's child. Satan spawn-‘ ‘Momma, stand up.' ‘Lust and licentiousness, the cravings of the flesh-‘ ‘Stand up!' Momma's voice faded her but she did stand up, with her hands still on her head, like a prisoner of war. Her lips moved. To Carrie she seemed to be reciting the Lord's ]Prayer. ‘I don't want to fight with you, Momma,' Carrie said, and her voice almost broke from her and dissolved. She struggled to control it. ‘I only want to be let to live my own life. I†¦ I don't like yours.' She stopped, horrified in spite of herself. The ultimate blasphemy had been spoken, and it was a thousand times worse than the Eff Word. ‘Witch,' Momma whispered. ‘It says in the Lord's Book: â€Å"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to bye.† Your father did the Lord's work-‘ ‘I don't want to talk about that,' Carrie said. It always disturbed her to hear Momma talk about her father. ‘I just want you to understand that things are going to change around here, Momma.' Her eyes gleamed. ‘They better understand it, too.' But Momma was whispering to herself again. Unsatisfied, with a feeling of anticlimax in her throat and the dismal rolling of emotional upset in her belly, she went to the cellar to get her dress material. It was better than the closet. There was that. Anything was better than the closet with its blue light and the overpowering stench of sweat and her own sin. Anything. Everything. She stood with the wrapped package hugged against her breast and closed her eyes, shutting out the weak glow of the cellar's bare, cobweb-festooned bulb. Tommy Ross didn't love her, she knew that. This was some strange kind of atonement, and she could understand that and respond to it. She had lain cheek and jowl with the concept of penance since she had been old enough to reason. He had said it would be good-that they would see to it. Well, she would see to it. They better not start anything. They just better not. She did not know if her gift had come from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she did not care which, she was overcome with an almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders. Upstairs, Momma continued to whisper. It was not the Lord's Prayer. It was the Prayer of Exorcism from Deuteronomy. From My Name Is Susan Snell (p. 23): They finally even made a movie about it. I saw it last April. When I came out, I was sick. Whenever anything important happens in America, they have to gold-plate it, like baby shoes. That way you can forget it. And forgetting Carrie White may be a bigger mistake than anyone realizes †¦ Monday morning: Principal Grayle and his understudy, Pete Morton, were having coffee in Grayle's office. ‘No word from Hargensen yet?' Morty asked. His lips curled into a John Wayne leer that was a little frightened around the edges. ‘Not a peep. And Christine has stopped lipping off about how her father is going to send us down the road.' Grayle blew on his coffee with a long face. ‘You don't exactly seem to be turning cartwheels.' ‘I'm not. Did you know Carrie White is going to the prom?' Morty blinked. ‘With who? The Beak?' The Beak was Freddy Holt, another of Ewen's misfits. He weighed perhaps one hundred pounds soaking wet, and the casual observer might be tempted to believe that sixty of it was nose. ‘No,' Grayle said. ‘With Tommy Ross.' Morty swallowed his coffee the wrong way and went into a coughing fit. ‘That's the way I felt,' Grayle said. ‘What about his girl friend? The little Snell girl?' I think she put him up to it,' Grayle said. ‘She certainly seemed guilty enough about what happened to Carrie when I talked to her. Now she's on the Decoration Committee, happy as a clam, just as if not going to her Senior prom was nothing at all.' ‘Oh,' Morty said wisely. ‘And Hargensen – I think he must have talked to some people and discovered we really could sue him on behalf of Carrie White if we wanted to. I think he's cut his losses. It's the daughter that's worrying me.' ‘Do you think there's going to be an incident Friday night?' ‘I don't know. I do know Chris has got a lot of friends who are going to be there. And she's going around with that Billy Nolan mess; he's got a zooful of friends, too. The kind that make a career out of scaring pregnant ladies. Chris Hargensen has him tied around her finger, from what I've heard.' ‘Are you afraid of anything specific?' Grayle made a restless gesture. ‘Specific? No. But I've been in the game long enough to know it's a bad situation. Do you remember the Stadler game in seventy-six?' Morty nodded. It would take more than the passage of three years to obscure the memory of the Ewen-Stadler game. Bruce Trevor had been a marginal student but a fantastic basketball player. Coach Gaines didn't like him, but Trevor was going to put Ewen in the area tournament for the first time in ten years. He was cut from the team a week before Ewen's but must-win game against the Stadler Bobcats. A regular announced locker inspection had uncovered a kilo of marijuana behind Trevor's civic book. Ewen lost the game – and their shot at the tourney – 104-48. But no one remembered that; what they remembered was the riot that had interrupted the game in the fourth period. Led by Bruce Trevor, who righteously claimed he had been bum rapped, it resulted in four hospital admissions. One of them had been the Stadler coach, who had been hit over the head with a first-aid kit. ‘I've got that kind of feeling,' Grayle said. ‘A hunch. Someone's going to come with rotten apples or something.' ‘Maybe you're psychic,' Morty said. From The Shadow Exploded (pp. 92-93): It is now generally agreed that the TK phenomenon is a geneticrecessive occurrence – but the opposite of a disease like haemophilia, which becomes overt only in males. In that disease, once called ‘King's Evil,' the gene is recessive in the female and is carried harmlessly. Male offspring, however, are ‘bleeders.' This disease is generated only if an afflicted male marries a woman carrying the recessive gene. If the offspring of such union is male, the result will be a haemophiliac son. If the offspring is female, the result will be a daughter who is a carrier. It should be emphasized that the haemophilia gene may be carried recessively in the male as a part of his genetic make-up. But if he marries a woman with the same outlaw gene, the result will be haemophilia if the offspring is male. In the case of royal families, where intermarriage was common, the chances of the gene reproducing once it entered the family tree were high – thus the name King's Evil. Haemophilia also showed up in significant quantities in Appalachia during the earlier part of this century, and is commonly noticed in those cultures where incest and the marriage of first cousins is common. With the TK phenomenon, the male appears to be the carrier.. the TK gene may be recessive in the female, but dominates only in the female. It appears that Ralph White carried the gene. Margaret Brigham, by purest name, also carried the outlaw gene sign, but we may be fairly confident that it was recessive, as no information has ever been found to indicate that she had telekinetic powers resembling her daughter's. Investigations are now being conducted into the life of Margaret Brigham's grandmother, Sadie Cochran – for, if the dominant/recessive pattern obtains with TK as it does with haemophilia, Mrs Cochran must have been TK-dominant. If the issue of the White marriage had been male, the result would have been another carrier. Chances that the mutation would have died with him would have been excellent, as neither side of the Ralph White – Margaret Brigham alliance had cousins of a comparable age for the theoretical male offspring to marry. And the chances of meeting and marrying another woman with TK gene at random would be small. None of the teams working on the problem have yet isolated the gene. Surely no one can doubt, in light of the Maine holocaust, that isolating this gene must become one of medicine's number-one priorities. The haemophiliac, or H-gene, produces male issue with a lack of blood platelets. The telekineticn or TK-gene, produces female Typhoid Marys capable of destroying almost at will †¦ Wednesday afternoon. Susan and fourteen other students – The Spring Ball Decoration Committee, no less – were working on the huge mural that would hang behind the twin bandstand on Friday night. The theme was Springtime in Venice (who picked thew hokey themes, Sue wondered. She had been a student at Ewen for four years, had after two Balls, and she still didn't know. Why did the goddam thing need a theme, anyway? Why not just have a sock hop and be done with W): George Chizmar, Ewen's most artistic student, had done a small chalk sketch of gondolas on a canal at sunset and a gondolier in a huge straw fedora leaning against the tiller as a gorgeous panoply of pinks and reds and oranges stained both sky and water. It was beautiful, no doubt about that. He had redrawn it in silhouette on a huge fourteen-by-twenty-foot canvas flat, numbering the various sections to go with the various chalk hues. Now the Committee was patiently colouring it in, like children crawling over a huge page in a giant 's colouring book. Still, Sue thought, looking at her hands and forearms, both heavily dusted with pink chalk, it was going to be the prettiest prom ever. Next to her, Helen Shyres sat up on her haunches, stretched, and groaned as her back popped. She brushed a hank of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving a rose-coloured smear. ‘How in hell did you talk me into this?' ‘You want it to be nice, don't you?' Sue mimicked Miss Geer, the spinster chairman (apt enough term for Miss Mustache) of the Decoration Committee. ‘Yeah, but why not the refreshment Committee or the Entertainment Committee? Less back, more mind. The mind, that's my area. Besides, you're not even -‘ She bit down on the words. ‘Going?' Susan shrugged and picked up her chalk again. She had a monstrous writer's cramp. ‘No, but I still want it to be nice.' She added shyly: ‘Tommy's going.' They worked in silence for a bit, and then Helen stopped again. No one was near them; the closest was Holly Marshall, on the other end of the mural, colouring the gondola's keel. ‘Can I ask you about it, Sue?' Helen asked finally. ‘God, everybody's talking.' ‘Sure.' Sue stopped colouring and flexed her hand. ‘Maybe I ought to tell someone, just so the story stays straight. I asked Tommy to take Carrie. I'm hoping it'll bring her out of herself a little †¦ knock down some of the barriers. I think I owe her that much.' ‘Whom does that put the rest of us?' Helen asked without rancour. Sue shrugged. ‘You have to make up your own mind about what we did, Helen. I'm in no position to throw stones. But I don't want people to think I'm uh †¦'

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Contribution of Arts in the Uplift of Society Essay

The meaning of â€Å"art† has changed since the industrial revolution and a clarification has to come if we should be able to handle the problem from our own angle. First of all, the esotery of art must disappear; its limitation to specialists; the mysticism around it; the looking out for geniuses only. It is good to believe that in the future art may be explained in intellectual terms with greater clarity than it is possible today. Psychoanalysis already shows the mechanics of dreams, the role of the unconscious. The hope is justified that the mechanics of creative work and its sources will be unveiled one day as well. This may be the preliminary step to understanding its necessary community function and also its vital importance for the individual. He must be activized by doing instead of being merely a receptive participant. Our mass-produced civilization, the tiresome work at the conveyor belts, the cheap narcotics given in records, books, papers, magazines, cinema, radio and, of course, the disappearance of leisure killed folk art. The artist who already started to become a specialist in the craftsman-guilds of the middle ages took over every aspect of its functions. Specialization was forced upon us through hundreds of ungoverned happening and their mostly unforeseen effects; through hastened decisions in accepting and developing the machine as the only means of production; through a first unexpected but later forced gigantic growth of population, profit motives, etc., all claimed today as providential or â€Å"economic† necessities. For the time being, very few people know that the present form of specialization is a terrible weapon against us, against human nature. I am not speaking against the machine or the machine age. The machine is a splendid invention and will form the new basis for a more developed human society. But after the glorious technomania of the twenties, we know today that man cannot master the machine until he has leanred to master himself. But how can he achieve this when he even does not know what he possesses, what his abilities and capacities are? He has delivered himself to thoughtless specialization which results in the development of certain of his faculties and—as a consequence of this—in a rather unnatural passivity outside of his specialized work. People are taught that the best way of living is to buy other people’s energy, to use other people’s skill. In other words, a dangerous metropolitan dogma developed that the different subject matters are best handled by experts and no one should violate the borders of his specialized work of profession. So through the division of labor and the mechanized methods not only the production of daily necessities and goods has passed into the hands of specialists but almost every outlet for the emotional life as well. Today the artist-specialists have to provide for emotions. They are paid—if they are—for that. The sad consequence is that the biological interest in everything within the spheres of human existence becomes suffocated by the tinsel of a seemingly easygoing life. Man who has biologically the potential to comprehend the world with the entirety of his abilities, to conceive and express himself through different media, the word, tone, color, etc., agrees voluntarily to the amputation of these most valuable potentialities. Nothing proves better the lost feeling for the fundamentals of human life than the fact that has to be emphasized today: Feeling and thinking and their expression in any media belong to the normal living standard of man; to live without them means starvation of the intellectual and emotional side of life as missing food means starvation of the body. The non-verbalized expression of feeling is what we may call art, but not art on a pedestal. Art is a community matter transcending the limitations of specialization. It is the most intimate language of the senses, indispensable for the individual in society. Its function is to be a seismograph of the relationships of the individual to the world, intuitive re-creation of the balance between the emotional, intellectual and social existences of the individual. Everywhere in the world, since about 1910, young artists have tried to understand this. They searched for the best way to express themselves, to solve the problems which painting, sculpture, writing, composition brought to them. They did not search for â€Å"art†, but for sincere expression. Intuitively they returned to the fundamentals of the media—the painter to color and light, the sculptor to volume, the architect to space, the composer to tone, the writer to the word. Their work opens the way to the lost emotional sensorial sources and to a kind of socio-biology of the human being. But yet there is a great lag in the people’s mind concerning the benefits of this appro ach. Nothing more surprising has happened in the life of a nation, expcept perhaps in Russia, than the establishing of the Federal Art Project in the United States of America. Though it started as a part of the Social Security Act of the WPA it grew in a short time beyond this relief aspect. The Federal Art Project gave the country a new valuation of the arts, badly needed as the pioneers bringing civilization over a continent with audacity and hard physical work could not see in the arts for a long time anything but luxury. The Federal Art Project broke down this fallacy. It represented a gigantic educational work, not in the sense that it â€Å"brought art to the people† or created art for the people, but that it tried to anchor it in, with, among, and of the people. Since the Federal Art Project is liquidated, a greater responsibility lies with the educators of this country than ever before. It is up to them to see that art should be a part of life. This could be done early, but not as a timetable subject segregated from the other branches of the curriclum, but as an interpenetrating reality with all of them. If the unity of art can be established with all the subject matters taught and exercised, then a real reconstruction of this world could be hoped for—more balanced and less dangerous.

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

F.Scott FitzgeraldS The Great Gatsby Essays - The Great Gatsby

F.Scott FitzgeraldS The Great Gatsby Essays - The Great Gatsby F.Scott FitzgeraldS The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby One of the most prominent themes in F. Scott Fitzgeralds novel, The Great Gatsby, is of the American Dream. This dream can be many things to many different people, but everyone does have some sort of goal that they want to accomplish in their life. For Jay Gatsby, the dream is that through wealth, power, and financial stability, one can acquire pure happiness and self-satisfaction. This happiness that he is reaching for is to be reunited with his love from days past, Daisy. Before Gatsby went off to fight in the war, he and Daisy had been involved. Gatsby, realizing that Daisy was from a wealthy family, knew that he couldnt financially support Daisy if he were to ask for her hand in marriage. Then Gatsby went off to war and Daisy married Tom Buchanan, who was also from a wealthy family. Returning from war, Gatsby decides to become a completely different person. He begins this transformation by changing his name from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby. Then, through illegal dealings in organized crime, he becomes wealthy and able to afford anything to get closer to Daisy. Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay (83), and he fills his estate with many luxuries and throws many extravagant parties to impress people, hoping that it will lead him to Daisy. Unfortunately for Gatsby, there is a foul dust that preys on him (6). This foul dust is made up of societys twisted views of the classes. Tom, Daisys husband believes that because he is from a wealthy family, then he can do whatever pleases him, which, in this case, is an affair. Because Gatsby is part of the nouveau riche, he is not as accepted and welcome into that class of society. Gatsby, however, will not rest until he fulfills his dream of pure happiness by being with Daisy. In the pursuit of his disillusioned goal, Gatsby ends up dead and never able to carry out his American Dream of finding true self-satisfaction in life.

Monday, October 21, 2019

In God We Trust and the First Amendment essays

In God We Trust and the First Amendment essays There might be contentions in some sectors of the American society that putting the In God We Trust phase in U.S. currencies violates the First Amendment rights which states that: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances (The United States Constitution). But if the amendment is carefully dissected, it states a general clause that tempers the government from prohibiting the free and democratic exercise of believing in a supreme deity. It does not specifically promote or condone a particular religious sect or faith but rather gives a universal perspective of practicing ones beliefs provided one religious belief does not curtail the practice of another. The In God we Trust phrase can also apply to any religious group because the term God can be interpreted as a generic term for a supreme being believed by any religious group. Indeed, there is the separation of the Church and the State in the United States, and putting the In God We Trust does not uphold any particular religious organization but rather gives a sweeping idealistic notion that the political government of the United States promotes freedom of ones chosen religion but will not specifically represent any one specific religion. Thus, if I were to give a final judgment on whether the In God We Trust phrase violates the First Amendment, I would surely say it does not in the general sense because it simply expounds on the Founding Fathers belief in a supreme deity without getting into specifics. Only if a particular group challenges my judgment or complains that the phrase is actually a connotation that supports religion or is against the concept of separation of the Church and the State will I take at second look at the ...