This country was founded overwhelmingly by men and women steeped in the Bible. Their moral values emanated from the Bible, and they regarded liberty as possible only if understood as given by God. That is why the Liberty Bell’s inscription is from the Old Testament, and why Thomas Jefferson, the allegedly non-religious deist, wrote (as carved into the Jefferson Memorial): “God who gave us life gave us liberty.
The evidence is overwhelming that the Founders were religious people who wanted a religious country that enshrined liberty for all its citizens, including those of different religions and those of no faith. But our educational institutions, especially the universities, are populated almost exclusively by secular individuals and books who seek to cast America’s past and present in their image.
If you are undecided which side to fight for, perhaps this will help: Western Europe has already become a secular society with secular values. If you think Western Europe is a better place than America and that it has a robust future, you should be working to remove Judeo-Christian influence from American life. On the other hand, if you look at Europe and see a continent adrift, with no identity and no strong values beyond economic equality and possessing little capacity to identify evil, let alone a will to fight it, then you need to start fighting against the secularization of America.
Or, if you think that the university, the most secular American institution, is largely a place where wisdom, character and a discerning ability to distinguish between right and wrong prevail, you should be working to remove Judeo-Christian values from American life. But if you believe that the university is largely a place of moral foolishness, then you need to start worrying about the secularization of America.
If America abandons its Judeo-Christian values basis and the central role of the Jewish and Christian Bibles, its founders’ guiding text, we are all in big trouble, including, most especially, America’s non-Christians. Just ask the Jews of secular Europe.
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17:03, 18.12.2009
So, you think America was founded to be “free,” except for the freedom of religion? If that had been the case, then the founders who drafted the Constitution should have been much more explicitly clear that there is no “freedom of religion,” that Christianity is actually the state religion, and they should have left out the bit about “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;…”
17:03, 18.12.2009
sounds like a good plan.maybe you can suggest some place i can find the opinions of all elected officials on the subject.maybe the majority believes “rightious politcs” should be a campaign slogan.get the polititions on record, post the facts,maintain communications,influence decisions and hold people accountable.
17:03, 18.12.2009
So I take it you LIKE an America where some religious bigots can take away the civil rights of a group they don’t like?
The founding fathers were Deist at best….nice try though…..
They only mention ‘god’ or the ‘creator’ to appease the fundie majority. There’s a reason they put freedom of religion in the Constitution: it implies freedom FROM religion.
17:03, 18.12.2009
This country was founded BY men and women fleeing religious persecution and political persecution. However when they arrived they decided to start oppressing the natives when they didn’t convert willingly. They were HYPOCRITES like most religious windbags like yourself. JESUS SAVE ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS!!!!!!!
17:03, 18.12.2009
This was copied from Student News Daily:http://www.studentnewsdaily.com/commenta…
Are fundies completely unable to come up with an original thought?
17:03, 18.12.2009
Try again. The majority were not religious, especially not christian. For example, Ben Franklin was a satanist for a while there……
17:03, 18.12.2009
You know many people came here to escape the religious persecution going on by the church?
Not to mention many of the founding fathers were Freemason.
17:03, 18.12.2009
Um fwi; most of the founding fathers were what we’d call today deist. They believed in the watch-maker theory. They weren’t open about it because it wasn’t always considered socially acceptable.
17:03, 18.12.2009
Yes, freedom and liberty are the highest ideals.
17:03, 18.12.2009
“Congress shall pass no law…”
This means freedom FROM religion, no matter how you slice it.
17:03, 18.12.2009
So, then, are you saying that only YOUR religion makes us free?
17:03, 18.12.2009
Just because our founding fathers were a certain way, doesn’t mean they intended the US to be founded on their beliefs. This was why then intentionally put language into the constitution protecting everyone. They intentionally left their Christianity out of the countries politics. You are making a connect that just isn’t there. Their intent was to have a secular AND free country.
Western Europe is perhaps the most shining example of what Christians claim to be. It contains multiple countries that are more allied for common good then perhaps anytime in history.
If you want to have your Christian values in our society, integrate them in a secular manner as intended by the founding fathers. This is why universal values are seen in our society today.
17:03, 18.12.2009
The colonies themselves were founded with single-minded purpose, for the most part, either exploitation of the New World’s resources or freedom to practice their own unique minority religion. It wasn’t until they banded together to form the Confederacy and later the United States that the sins of the Old World relating to religious persecution and privilege were taken into account and banned. To the extent that there are any parallels between the Constitution and Judeo-Christian beliefs (and I have yet to see any), it would be because church government was the type of organization they were most familiar with, not because of any intent to explicitly base the new government on religious belief. Nice try, though.
17:03, 18.12.2009
Thomas Jefferson, anyone? Anyone???
“And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions…. error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it…. I deem the essential principles of our government…. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; … freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.”
– Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801
I am for freedom of religion, & against all maneuvres to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.
– Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, 1799
Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person’s life, freedom of religion affects every individual. Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the “wall of separation between church and state,” therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.
We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries.
– Thomas Jefferson, to the Virginia Baptists (1808) ME 16:320. This is his second kown use of the term “wall of separation,” here quoting his own use in the Danbury Baptist letter. This wording of the original was several times upheld by the Supreme Court as an accurate description of the Establishment Clause: Reynolds (98 US at 164, 1879); Everson (330 US at 59, 1947); McCollum (333 US at 232, 1948)
17:03, 18.12.2009
I agree that American culture is rooted in Christianity. Our government, however, was not ever founded on the principles of Christianity. Our government was meant to be secular. But America is not the same as it was 200 years ago. We are truly a pluralistic society. The only way to protect the rights of both Christians and non-Christians in America is to run a secular government that passes laws for secular reasons.
This is in keeping with what the founders wanted: read Federalist No. 10 for details.
17:03, 18.12.2009
Hi Genius,
Please take a look at history before you spout off a bunch of nonsense.
Did you know that the Fundamentalist Religious Right were the first people to put pressure on the government to redefine items in the bill of rights to better reflect religious freedoms? They were concerned that we didn’t have adequate freedom to believe whatever the heck we wanted.
Go get a freaking history book. Research how it is that our fourth president, Madison, got elected. Research what groups fought for him and why. And then tell me the Bible belongs in schools.
And don’t give me that crap about how religious the founding fathers were. RESEARCH IT. Speaking of Jefferson, he made his own Bible by cutting out everything but Jesus’ teachings. And now you want to use the Christian Bible, which in historical terms is full of absolute nonsense, in schools? The quote on the liberty bell is not from the Bible.
And for your rant on the role of a university- you obviously never attended one. If you had, you wouldn’t sound like an ignorant tunnel-vision Christian.
17:03, 18.12.2009
You are wrong.
Franklin likely an atheist/agnostic, as was Jefferson (and Lincoln), Washington and most of the others were Deists, which is NOT christian. Jefferson may have believed in “God” but it was not the god of your bible and more of a philosophical construct.
Even if the founding fathers were religious it does not follow that they created a religious nation.
If by Judeo-christian values you mean freedom and all those things associated with “life, liberty, etc.,” then you are wrong to say secularism amounts to abandonment of those values - it does not.
You are completely wrong to equate our religious freedoms to mean this nation is christian (read the treaty of Tripoli).