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We hope you and yours will mark 2008 with historical success January 1, the beginning of a New Year, with its open ended opportunities and chances for advancement, betterment and hope, is a date in history that also marks some interesting events. On Jan. 1, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in answer to a letter from them. In it, Jefferson explained his position on the state establishment of religion on the national level. The letter is the first time the wall of separation between church" and state became part of the American political ideology. History notes that it was not a letter that Jefferson wrote in haste; in truth he endured great personal scrutiny in formulating the words and consulted political and religious leaders. One of its key passages is as follows: Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his god, and he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state. ...I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties." Jefferson was vilified for his position, which was in opposition to that of his predecessors George Washington and John Adams. It is a note of history worth remembering. In other events Jan. 1, Russia adopted the Julian calendar in 990; Simon Marius, a German astronomer discovered the Jupiter moons but it is not reported until Galileo does in July of that year. In 1673, regular mail delivery begins between New York and Boston and in 1801, Ireland and Great Britain form the United Kingdom.
Happy New Year and we hope you and your family make wonderful history in 2008.
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