Regarding recent letters about whether America was founded as a Christian nation:
It has been debated from time immemorial as to whether the foundations of our nation were based upon Christian values. Since all of the Founding Fathers are long deceased, it therefore has become an impossibility for us to ask them.
One thing that is ascertained by reading the words they have left here for us: The majority of them did believe in God. They were certainly not atheists, as nothing of any lasting value was ever built upon infidelity.
The Bible declares in Hebrew 9:27: “And it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.”
A casual conversation with any mortician or even an afternoon stroll by a cemetery will serve to prove to any skeptic that the first part of the verse is true.
Is there anyone out there who can prove conclusively that the second part of the verse is “too absurd for belief”?
— Mitch L. Canup
Kannapolis

As the executive director of WE R HERE, a coalition of small Web-enabled retailers with almost 300 members in North Carolina, I write to express disappointment with your decision to run Scott Mooneyham’s astonishingly inaccurate column regarding the Marketplace Fairness Act.
Mooneyham’s column is aggressively misleading, saying nothing about the burdens that that the Marketplace Fairness Act would place on small online retailers — many of them mom and pop specialty stores that are already paying local taxes, creating jobs and providing competition to the likes of Walmart and Amazon. If the MFA became law, it would force small online retailers to serve as tax collectors for almost 10,000 jurisdictions across the country – and open them up to audits from dozens of states where they have no presence.
This is precisely why House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia — widely recognized as one of the most thoughtful and tech-savvy legislators in Congress — has insisted that good legislation will embody the notion of “No regulation without representation.”
The truth of the matter is that the MFA is being pushed by Walmart, Amazon and other retail behemoths who see an opportunity to bury hundreds of their smallest competitors under a crushing burden of new regulation and audits.
Despite what Mooneyham would have you believe, small online retailers are a hugely dynamic sector of our economy, not a bunch of scofflaws. And what he doesn’t tell you is that the real and continuing threat to small, brick-and-mortar stores comes from the Wal-marts and Amazons of the world. Small brick and mortar companies should embrace the internet as consumers have rather than trying to resist it through protectionist legislation like the MFA.
— Phil Bond
Alexandria, Va.