On 3/21/2014 10:08 PM, dhamiltony...@yahoo.com wrote: > Way too many triggers that run counter to all our essential > transcendent spiritual grain as Americans, the pundit thing has been > positioned is so fundamentally wrong as Americans would look at it. > The more we learn of it the more it plays fool with all our feelings > about “inalienable” rights as human beings as we understand them. Not > just that the pundit compound is planted out in the fields looking > like a Stalin work camp it all is too much like someone is actually > trying to tweak us; it sits right in the middle of so much of what we > have been wrangling for and about as Americans. It is way too loaded > as it has been executed. > An R-1 is a foreign national who is coming to the United States temporarily to be employed at least part time (average of at least 20 hours per week) by a non-profit religious organization to work as a minister or in a religious vocation or occupation.
The whole idea, Buck, is to promote religious diversity. The United State has a long history of supporting religious immigrants and non-immigrnt religious workers, teachers and ministers. Maharishi himself visited the U.S. on an R-1 visa. Go figure. Expelled from Massachusetts in the dead of winter in 1636, former Puritan leader Roger Williams (1603-1683) issued an impassioned plea for freedom of conscience. He wrote: "God requireth not an uniformity of Religion to be inacted and inforced in any civill state; which inforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civill Warre, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls." Williams later founded Rhode Island on the principle of religious freedom. He welcomed people of every shade of religious belief, even some regarded as dangerously misguided, for nothing could change his view that "forced worship stinks in God's nostrils." 'The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for cause of Conscience, discussed in a Conference between Truth and Peace' by Roger Williams 1644
