Quote:
Originally Posted by chuckpedrey
American was founded on a Christian ethnic. It is the Christian Bible that the founding fathers based their lives on.
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That is an insidiously wrong statement pushed by some of those of the Christian faith. This country was founded by a bunch of nearly agnostic men who wanted financial and political control over this territory. They had absolutely no disagreement with England over theological concerns and in fact were far LESS religious than the monarchy which claimed to derive its legitimacy from Jesus et al.
Jefferson removed all Jesus is God references from his Bible, actually cut those passages out with a knife. Our Constitution has exactly two references to religion and both strongly state that religious affiliation has no place in our governance.
The ethic of the founders was not rigid evangelical Christianity is was instead based on liberal ideology of natural rights as proposed by Locke and others. The founders were so against religious dogma determining United States governance that they made sure the Post Office, one of the few functions of the Federal Government at the time, operated on Sunday, you know the Christian day of rest and prayer on which you shall refrain from work and keep it holy, the Post Office functioned on Sunday the same as any other day of the week.
" In 1828, the Kentucky Senator Richard M. Johnson, chairman of the Senate Committee on the Post Office and Post Roads and a devout Baptist, declared any federal attempt to give preference to the Christian Sabbath to be unconstitutional. The line between church and state when it came to Sunday mail delivery, he argued, "cannot be too strongly drawn." "
No, what has happened is that once again the real history of the US is being subverted by many who wish to believe that what they now hold true was held true in the 18th century.
Thomas Paine called Christianity a fable.
Many were simply Deists, a religious belief that a God does exist but that he [or she] is not actively involved in our day to day life and that "human experience and rationality—rather than religious dogma and mystery—determine the validity of human beliefs."
That was overwhelmingly the ethic of our founders and where it overlapped with the liberal Protestantism of the day, that was ok. Real history. You can look it up.