God's greatest gift to man is original thought. Our greatest safeguard to preserving that gift is to value it in others. Devalued one time, it can be devalued in anyone at any time and at anyone's whim.

Dr. Frank Crane, a Presbyterian minister, speaker and journalist, published a ten volume set of books called Four-Minute Essays in 1919. (The newsletter you read now respectfully borrows its name from it.) In one essay he made the case: "Is not this the core of all religion-the finding of one's own personality and the being true to it?"

We have a responsibility to our uniqueness...to what we really are and what we really think. And we have a responsibility to others to let them show the same.

Interestingly, the Neanderthals roamed Europe for some 400,000 years, progressing and changing little. The Cro-Magnons migrated from Africa, and within a relatively short period of time, the Neanderthals disappeared.

According to Brian Fagan, author of Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans, the most profound difference between the two was...original thought. Original thought made the Cro-Magnons more adaptable to the ever-changing conditions of the world. It was the elemental key to their progress, prosperity, safety and survival.

Neanderthals, on the other hand, could copy anything perfectly. If you showed any one of them a spear, they could copy it to a T, and their craftsmanship was superb. But they could not come up with a new spear.

They learned what Ralph Waldo Emerson later learned, "that imitation is suicide."

Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer Prize winning 1997 book, Guns Germs and Steel, makes the observation that from the beginning of time the societal governments that bred the most success were those that had a loose application of leadership, allowing and encouraging the maximum amount of ingenuity and original thought.

(Business leaders take heed.)

America's own John Adams said "the foundation of democracy is the freedom to think." And his colleague Ben Franklin echoed "the freedom to think is the beginning of wisdom."

I'm writing this on 9/11. I'm convinced that what has made America great is not that we are America and that somehow we have more inherent value than any other people or are smarter or in some way more moral or are for whatever reason God's chosen people.

The arrogance of those positions seems unsustainable to me.

No...what has made America special is one thing and one thing only: it is this zealous protection of original thought. This is the single reason we are admired. This is the main reason people want to come here. We are the land of opportunity only because of the creative ingenuity and energy birthed from the freedom of original thought.

Take care. All of our success stems from it.

If original thought is God's greatest gift, then those who suppress it and take it away commit the biggest crime of all.

For example...maybe if I was the Imam I might not build my Mosque so close to Ground Zero. I don't know. But I'm not him, and I'd be less offended by the building of it then if my government didn't allow him to.

And I'm glad Pastor Terry Jones called off his Quran burning. Mostly because the burning of someone else's original thought is abhorrent to me. But I'd have been more offended if my government had stepped in to stop it. They rightly implored him, but they did not threaten him.

If you stop Terry Jones then you can stop anyone.

It seemed to me the temperature of American freedom was taken last week with issues that flush the human heart. I held my breath a bit. But, alas, the one constant for the large majority of Americans no matter what side of the arguments they came down on was that preserving people's freedom to think was still paramount.

I breathed a sigh of relief at week's end. And I am proud of us.

The day we no longer protect and value original thought is the day we are no longer America. That's the day we lose the key to all of our success and the source of all of our pride...

It's the day that would make all of the lessons of 9/11 moot and the deaths that occurred that day meaningless.