On 12/12/2012 9:45 AM, Warp wrote:
> Article 6 of the United States constitution says the following:
>
> "[...] but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification
> to any office or public trust under the United States."
>
> Article 6 of the North Carolina constitution states the following:
>
> "The following persons shall be disqualified for office:
>
> First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God. [...]"
>
> The contradiction could not be clearer.
>
> Could someone explain to me how this is *possible*? Does nobody in the
> United States actually enforce the constitution and make sure that the
> member states follow it?

There is a legal concept known in English as a "dead letter," which 
refers to laws which are still on the books but which are no longer 
enforced and which would certainly be tossed out if anyone tried to 
enforce them.

That being said, the people who wrote the US's founding documents wrote 
a lot of other stuff, too, and they they made it pretty plain that all 
of the talk about freedom of religion was meant to apply to variants of 
Christianity only.

Some of the men who held the pens by which our Constitution was written 
favored laws to purchase Bibles for schools and also favored laws making 
it punishable to publicly deny the existence of God; and these include 
men like Jefferson and Franklin.

For these men, the history of religious persecution that was most 
important to them was the European one, in which various Christian 
denominations managed to secure official status for themselves, and used 
the apparatus of the state to make life unpleasant for other Christian 
denominations.

Jefferson's famous statement about the separation of church and state 
was addressed to that very specific concern.  After the Constitution had 
been written, a group representing one of the Christian denominations 
(IIRC, Baptist) wrote asking if the newly formed government was going to 
have an official church, just like every European nation had an official 
church, which would behave towards other churches in the same way that 
the official state churches of Europe were accustomed to behaving. 
Jefferson's reply was directed specifically at that particular concern. 
  It was never intended to mean that the government can never do 
anything that appears to be religious; that is an interpretation that 
did not come about until long after the Founding Fathers passed from 
this life.

The reason they did not explicitly enshrine Christianity in the US 
Constitution is because they did not think it necessary.

Regards,
John

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