Should the US be a Christian nation?

what bothers me is that like creationism, atheism is a belief (and a very legitimate belief, i hasten to add) that gets confused with (and promotes itself as) a conclusion of logic- which supposedly makes it legitimate on par with fact.

belief is fine, facts are fine, beliefs posing as facts that everyone is expected to accept bother me to my core.

other than that, i think atheism should be a tax-exempt institution- to use the word as loosely as possible.



nonsense, the only thing that bothers the tolerant left (the intolerant left is a minority like jews for jesus, which claims to support a thing that it opposes, and would be better off staying on its own side) is intolerant christianity.

they are "rubbed the wrong way" by inquisitions, crusades, missionaries swarming into places that the government just bombed back into the stone age, exploitation- you know, the things that the intolerant right thinks jesus would support, as if he were a new invention that the right - well, he must be, eh? the jesus of love, tolerance, a bit of disrespect for laws that stone women and paint everyone unforgiveable, this is the leftist jesus, and the only one i can find in the scripture.

the story about the jesus that turned over the money changing tables is told more often than makes sense, because i think it can be resolved with the leftist jesus. in fact, the far-right jesus seems to only exist in america and the vatican. christianity throughout the world seems to be of the genuine variety until there is a war, when it gets put back in the book until peacetime. even most catholics seem to be leftist, but then most catholics don't live in the vatican, do they?



perhaps christianity is making a comeback, actually. if 'beloved" means "supported vocally, but largely ignored' then yes, i would say there was more "love" for christianity some time ago, but that's a very shallow view of love.

while i'm disgusted to hear stories of the left bringing jesus into presidential campaigns (most inappropriate, it is exclusive of other religions more than inclusive of christianity, where have the ecumenical values of the allegedly-left politicians gone?) i would say yet that jesus has more room in the hearts of many than he did a few decades ago, while the so-called christianity that is incompatible with his message is under new scrutiny.

that's a good thing- there is more attack on religious hypocrisy, paving a wider road for the original christian message and teachings. you can call it whatever you like, but i think the reality is much different than the picture being painted.

didn't jesus go around calling people hypocrites who hid their hatred of their neighbors behind religion? it doesn't seem very un-christlike to me, it sounds absolutely christian. after all, anyone can repent of his hate and love his neighbor. what a wonderful, leftist concept that is- but christianity is welcome to share in the credit, just as *any* christian is welcome to be an example of christ's love at any time.

If their are any atheists trying to put a leash on christian's speach, it is only to return christians back into the acceptable boundries. Things are so out of balance. Christian's act is if they are privilaged, which if that's their belief: GREAT! But when that overflows into the government, they need to be put in their place.

For instance, prayer being "removed" from school. It shouldn't have even been an issue in the first place because it shouldn't have found it's way in their to begin with. Christians have abused their majority, and are acting mad because they are getting a yellow card.

T
K
O

Perhaps you didn't understand my question. There were 3 questions posed in the post in question. Please point out the manner any of those questions is: (a) a lie, or (b) intentionally deceitful.

To think, I just thought these were questions!?

Sure. if the intent is to make into a Christian Iran and kiss the concept of freedom of religion goodbye. Which is exactly what the evangelical christians would like.

What nonsense.

For totalitarianism, nobody can hold a candle to atheistic regimes of the recent times, like Communist China and the USSR.

Get a life.

Or better yet, be glad you have one.

If you practiced political dissent in atheistic utopias like China or the USSR, you likely might forfeit yours.

You are slinging a load religious BS. Are you attempting to justify religion by claiming democracy is not possible without religion. If so how do you suppose our founding fathers were able to form this nation scrupulously avoiding it. That in my opinion made the US the nation it is. And the one the religious nutcases are trying to destroy.

BOSTON: One of my proudest boasts as a schoolboy was an ability to both identify and spell what my teacher insisted was the English language's longest word: antidisestablishmentarianism.

I had, of course, no idea what it meant. Now I know that it defines America's political third rail onto which John McCain threw himself when he recently said that the United States was established as a "Christian nation."

No, it wasn't! Or so answered a chorus of critics, heading off an inevitable denigration of minority religions - and no religion. The disestablishmentarians always point out that the U.S. Constitution nowhere mentions God, and that the founders were Deist gentlemen whose God was so impersonally detached from history as to be not recognizably Christian at all. The framers of the American political system, appalled by what "establishment" had led to in Europe, took pains to set their government on a religiously neutral path.

But government is not nation. Just because McCain's assertion is dangerous - as I believe it to be - does not mean it is untrue. For one thing, what the founders intended may weigh less than how the nation developed over the next two centuries. The Constitution created "an open national space," in the scholar Mark Noll's phrase, but, Noll says, instead of it being filled with Alexander Hamilton's economic planning, Thomas Jefferson's yeomanry or John Adams's communalism, that space was seized by unexpected 19th-century "awakenings" of evangelical fervor.

Christian religion, from prairie preachers to elite universities, became the main "arbiter of national culture." Eventually, Protestant revivalism, immigrant Catholicism and African-American Gospel jelled into the public zealotries of "civil religion," a term coined by Robert Bellah in 1967 when such religion braced the nation - and the government - in its contest with "atheistic Communism."

Jewish participation in this implicitly Christian consensus was necessarily uneasy. When Dwight D. Eisenhower underwent baptism in the White House 12 days after his inauguration in 1953, he showed how these pressures could squeeze the national leadership. This was the era of Billy Graham's "Crusade," a word Ike himself had used to define his war making.
The danger in mixing religion and nation lies in the way these two enterprises have exploited one another, each to advance its separate cause. This is as old as the early-4th-century emperor Constantine, who used Christian orthodoxy as a club with which to enforce political control of his vast empire. At the same time, Christian leaders happily enlisted Constantine's legions to suppress heresy. When the word "Christian" is used today, the broad movement it defines owes as much to Constantine as it does to Jesus Christ.

Even pious Americans have been properly wary of efforts to use state power to enforce uniformity of conscience. The vaunted separation of church and state is a minimal protection from such abuse, but civil religion points to a need for the broader separation of religion and nation. That protection comes not from law, but from the knowledge of citizens, which is unreliable. The fact that, since the founding of the United States, Christianity has been much used, against the intentions of the founders, to justify governmental impositions and adventures is one cause for concern. That is what McCain's critics warn of, in the name of a better America. The last thing needed today is a Christian nation embarked on a new crusade, at home or abroad.

But a warning must be sounded in the name of a better Christian religion, too. What's bad for the state can be worse for the church. Jews, Muslims, Hindus and all religious minorities are assaulted by even implicit claims of a "Christian nation," but so are Christians. A government that blesses itself in the name of Jesus Christ, while waging war and advancing empire, must first demolish the meaning of who that man was - three centuries before Constantine.

Scholars know very little about this Galilean rabbi (nothing, for example, about his attitude toward homosexuality), but there are two things that can be said with certainty. Jesus lived and died in resistance to the Roman empire. And Jesus rejected violence. If there are two notes of identity that go to the heart of what America has become, they are violence and empire. A Christianity that makes its peace with those, as has so often happened, is an apostate religion. John McCain, and the objects of his appeal, betray the nation - and the faith.

Speaking of China.....

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2006/07/29/2003320930

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/politics/blog/2007/10/bush_ready_to_honor_dalai_lama.html

still waiting to see Diest's answer to Tico or xingu's answer to RL.

Either would be interesting.

James Carroll, the author of the piece you cut and pasted, is laboring under a delusion.

Broadbrushing 'the founders' as Deists is either dishonest or ignorant.

There were relatively few Deists among them; and many of those who are often cited as Deists were not.

This is not a minor point in his essay, but forms the foundation of that which he wishes to assert.

You should be more careful of your sources, au.

No, what I said was that religious and political freedom were not the goals nor the hallmark of atheistic governments such as the totalitarian regimes in the USSR and Communist China.

The Christian Nation Myth
Farrell Till
Whenever the Supreme Court makes a decision that in any way restricts the intrusion of religion into the affairs of government, a flood of editorials, articles, and letters protesting the ruling is sure to appear in the newspapers. Many protesters decry these decisions on the grounds that they conflict with the wishes and intents of the "founding fathers."

Such a view of American history is completely contrary to known facts. The primary leaders of the so-called founding fathers of our nation were not Bible-believing Christians; they were deists. Deism was a philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution. Its major tenets included belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems and belief in a supreme deity who created the universe to operate solely by natural laws. The supreme God of the Deists removed himself entirely from the universe after creating it. They believed that he assumed no control over it, exerted no influence on natural phenomena, and gave no supernatural revelation to man. A necessary consequence of these beliefs was a rejection of many doctrines central to the Christian religion. Deists did not believe in the virgin birth, divinity, or resurrection of Jesus, the efficacy of prayer, the miracles of the Bible, or even the divine inspiration of the Bible.

These beliefs were forcefully articulated by Thomas Paine in Age of Reason, a book that so outraged his contemporaries that he died rejected and despised by the nation that had once revered him as "the father of the American Revolution." To this day, many mistakenly consider him an atheist, even though he was an out spoken defender of the Deistic view of God. Other important founding fathers who espoused Deism were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, James Madison, and James Monroe.

Fundamentalist Christians are currently working overtime to convince the American public that the founding fathers intended to establish this country on "biblical principles," but history simply does not support their view. The men mentioned above and others who were instrumental in the founding of our nation were in no sense Bible-believing Christians. Thomas Jefferson, in fact, was fiercely anti-cleric. In a letter to Horatio Spafford in 1814, Jefferson said, "In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes" (George Seldes, The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey Citadel Press, 1983, p. 371). In a letter to Mrs. Harrison Smith, he wrote, "It is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me. But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest" (August 6, 1816).

Jefferson was just as suspicious of the traditional belief that the Bible is "the inspired word of God." He rewrote the story of Jesus as told in the New Testament and compiled his own gospel version known as The Jefferson Bible, which eliminated all miracles attributed to Jesus and ended with his burial. The Jeffersonian gospel account contained no resurrection, a twist to the life of Jesus that was considered scandalous to Christians but perfectly sensible to Jefferson's Deistic mind. In a letter to John Adams, he wrote, "To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise" (August 15, 1820). In saying this, Jefferson was merely expressing the widely held Deistic view of his time, which rejected the mysticism of the Bible and relied on natural law and human reason to explain why the world is as it is. Writing to Adams again, Jefferson said, "And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" (April 11, 1823). These were hardly the words of a devout Bible-believer.

Jefferson didn't just reject the Christian belief that the Bible was "the inspired word of God"; he rejected the Christian system too. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he said of this religion, "There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites" (quoted by newspaper columnist William Edelen, "Politics and Religious Illiteracy," Truth Seeker, Vol. 121, No. 3, p. 33). Anyone today who would make a statement like this or others we have quoted from Jefferson's writings would be instantly branded an infidel, yet modern Bible fundamentalists are frantically trying to cast Jefferson in the mold of a Bible believing Christian. They do so, of course, because Jefferson was just too important in the formation of our nation to leave him out if Bible fundamentalists hope to sell their "Christian-nation" claim to the public. Hence, they try to rewrite history to make it appear that men like Thomas Jefferson had intended to build our nation on "biblical principles." The irony of this situation is that the Christian leaders of Jefferson's time knew where he stood on "biblical principles," and they fought desperately, but unsuccessfully, to prevent his election to the presidency. Saul K. Padover's biography related the bitterness of the opposition that the clergy mounted against Jefferson in the campaign of 1800

The religious issue was dragged out, and stirred up flames of hatred and intolerance. Clergymen, mobilizing their heaviest artillery of thunder and brimstone, threatened Christians with all manner of dire consequences if they should vote for the "in fidel" from Virginia. This was particularly true in New England, where the clergy stood like Gibraltar against Jefferson (Jefferson A Great American's Life and Ideas, Mentor Books, 1964, p.116).

William Linn, a Dutch Reformed minister in New York City, made perhaps the most violent of all attacks on Jefferson's character, all of it based on religious matters. In a pamphlet entitled Serious Considerations on the Election of a President, Linn "accused Jefferson of the heinous crimes of not believing in divine revelation and of a design to destroy religion and `introduce immorality'" (Padover, p. 116). He referred to Jefferson as a "true infidel" and insisted that "(a)n infidel like Jefferson could not, should not, be elected" (Padover, p. 117). He concluded the pamphlet with this appeal for "Christians to defeat the `infidel' from Virginia"



The remainder of this article can be found @

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/farrell_till/myth.html

Real Life. perhaps you should take off your religious blinders.

You can quote a thousand articles making this type of false statement.

But it doesn't make it true.

One example of many:

A Deist would not believe in prayer to God.

Accounts of the founders' belief and practice of prayer are numerous.

That is a false statement.


http://www.deism.com/deism_defined.htm


http://www.deist.info/html/faq_s.html

I was referring to this statement from the article he had posted:



Sorry if that wasn't clear from the context.

Would you agree that this is accurate?

I agree that Deist do not believe in the efficacy of prayer. As the deist say, they pray to give thanks for what they have, not to ask God to smite their enemies, give us good health or save us from calamity.

Alright then, that is why I told au1929 that describing the founders as 'deists' is inaccurate.

Numerous accounts of the founders engaging in prayers to God for wisdom and guidance, victory in the war, unity among their countrymen, protection of their freedoms, safety of their families etc are wholly incongruous with the behavior of deists.

Do you agree?

How do you know what they were praying for?

To be a Christian you have to believe that Christ was a God, born of a virgin, not a mere human. The FF in question did not believe that.

So would you call them Christians?

Real Life
You are it would seem to be intent upon re-writing history. That should not surprise anyone since you believe in religion that has been rewriting history to coincide with it's beliefs from it's inception. .