wande quoted-
Quote:The unusual move shows that a U.S. trend for religiously based attacks on the theory of evolution is also worrying European politicians,
Well wande- Simon Jenkins had a long article in last weekend's Sunday Times to the effect that if we allow politicians to become unworried they will soon be behind the woodshed going through our pockets so I would suppose Mr Jenkins thinks that European politicians being worried is an excellent thing for democracy.
Personally, I don't think they are worrying about this topic so much as worrying about where they are going to have their conferences to discuss it and who will be attending them and whether the hospitality can be claimed for on the expenses form and what to wear and such like.
How old are you wande?
Wandel is "young at heart," but with the wisdom seldom - if ever - seen in "your" neighborhood.
One hundred and forty-nine eminent evolutionary scientists responded to a recent poll about their views on religion. In a change from the methodology used in previous studies of such beliefs, the authors allowed their subjects to place themselves at one of several points on a ternary scale (above). The majority (78 percent) described themselves as naturalists (A). Only two claimed to be full theists (F), but two also described themselves as more theistic than naturalistic (D). Those who considered their beliefs to be midway between naturalism and deism chose J, and one evolutionist chose M, indicating no preference for any description. Three percent did not answer.
Barbara Aulicino
Of those evolutionists who claimed a belief in God, the majority placed themselves somewhere on the right side of the ternary diagram on the facing page (a). Nonetheless, when asked simply whether they believed in God, nearly 80 percent said no (b). When asked if they believed in immortality, an even larger majority (almost 90 percent) said that they did not. These results are unsurprising, matching well with polls done in 1914, 1933 and 1998.
Stephanie Freese
When asked whether they believe in free will, most scientists surveyed said they did, apparently viewing the philosophical concept of free will to be equivalent to choice.
Stephanie Freese
xingu writes-
Quote:"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."
THOSE WORDS, PENNED IN ARTICLE 11 of the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, are as succinct a statement as we have from the Founding Fathers on the role of religion.
Perhaps the Founding Fathers liked to pull each other's leg a bit. It is a kinder explanation than that they were completely stupid which they would have needed to be to actually mean that statement.
when did you accomplish anything besides warming a barstool spendi? Claiming that something is stupid from where you sit is particularly funny since weve all been entertained by your own witless and vapid musings.
anyway, you miss the entire point of reference implicit in xingus quote you dummy.
In fact, from the very beginning of our nation in 1783 until the end of the second Barbary War in 1816, United States merchant vessels were preyed upon by Algerine and Tunisian and Lybian pirates, known in the aggregate as the Barbary pirates. This was also true of the French and the English. Although the Royal Navy sometimes took action against them, basically their attention was focused on the French, especially after the Revolution. The English, the French and the Americans all used a mix of diplomacy, threats of military action, military action and paying bribes--"tribute." In the treaty referred to, the Americans agreed to pay a set fee to the Algerine pirates, and made the specific statement that the United States is not a christian nation because if the local boys declared it a holy war, the pirates had an excuse to murder American seamen out of hand, or to sell them into slavery. Far from being a stupid thing to have written, it was very canny, and gave them a reason under international law to hold the Bey of Algiers responsible if any American seamen were murdered or sold into slavery.
Because of the War of 1812, the Americans were prevented from paying the tribute which they had agreed to by treaty, and the Algerines used that as an excuse to seize American shipping again. The English and French had taken no military action against the Barbary pirates for the duration of the Wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Before the War of 1812, the Americans had launched military operations by sea and by land against the Barbary pirates, and had, in fact, knocked the Bey of Tripoli out of the war. With the War of 1812, the Americans could neither pay tribute nor take military action, because they were fighting the Royal Navy. After 1815, however, the English began to patrol again, and the Americans launched heavy attacks against the Algerines and the Tunisians, resulting in the final defeat of the Barbary pirates as organized, state-sponsored terrorists by 1816. Thereafter, piracy from the North African coast was on a free-lance basis, and Royal Navy and United States Navy patrols were able effectively to deal with it.
The only completely stupid individual i see here is someone so dense as to comment on complex historical events without knowing the context or any of the details.
The FFs couldn't help but be Christians.
It was in their mother's milk and the air they breathed.
And the same applied to the millions of immigrants who followed them from Europe.
How many buildings dedicated to Christian forms of worship are there in the US?
When it is said that they were "very canny" that means they were pulling somebody's leg.
But what does all that bull about pirates have to do with the point?
spendi, In the little town of Ohrid, Macedonia, they once had 365 churches. You can put that in your memory bank for future reference.
The competition for the collection plate fiasco must have resulted in some fancy niche marketing in such an environment.
You betcha. Can you imagine 365 priests/ministers in one small town?
If nobody is prepared to estimate how many buildings of Christian worship there are in the US, offering a red herring instead, could anybody say how many religious cults deriving from Christianity there are in the US?
We are discussing the statement-
Quote:"The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."
rather than events in a small town in the Balkans.
A scientific mind would not go diverting the issue into irrelevant areas. That really is dishonest.
I don't mind if nobody answers the two questions about Christian buildings and cults. I know that the answers to both are "a lot" and that xingu's statement in his signature is false.
Ina more pensive moment , Jefferson revealed to James Smith(quoted from Steiner's"The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents"...)
"The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God, like any other Cerberus, with one body and three heads, HAd its birth and growth in the blood of thousands of martyrs"
or as Mortimer Adler stated:
"One of the embarrasing problems for the early 19th century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six presidents of the US was an Orthodox Christian"
Set had attempted to inform you of the context and meaning of the Jefferson quote that xingu uses as his sig line. Spendi, You miss the point of historical reference again, youre the village idiot. Wear it proudly.
From Google.
Quote:President George Washington was an Episcopalian. He was a member of the Episcopal Church, the American province of the Anglican Communion, which is a branch of Christianity, and which is usually classified as Protestant.
Quote:President John Adams was a devout Unitarian, which was a non-trinitarian Protestant Christian denomination during the Colonial era.
Quote:President Thomas Jefferson was a Protestant. Jefferson was raised as an Episcopalian (Anglican).
The list goes on. Was Adler spinning on the word "orthodox".
A quickie-
Quote:4 James Madison Episcopalian (deist?)
5 James Monroe Episcopalian (deist?)
6 John Quincy Adams Unitarian
7 Andrew Jackson Presbyterian
8 Martin Van Buren Dutch Reformed
9 William Henry Harrison Episcopalian
10 John Tyler Episcopalian (deist)
11 James Knox Polk Presbyterian; Methodist
12 Zachary Taylor Episcopalian
13 Millard Fillmore Unitarian
14 Franklin Pierce Episcopalian
15 James Buchanan Presbyterian
16 Abraham Lincoln raised Baptist; later no specific denomination (deist)
17 Andrew Johnson Christian (no specific denomination)
18 Ulysses S Grant Presbyterian; Methodist
19 Rutherford B. Hayes Presbyterian; Methodist (?)
20 James A. Garfield Disciples of Christ
21 Chester A. Arthur Episcopalian
22 Grover Cleveland Presbyterian
23 Benjamin Harrison Presbyterian
24 Grover Cleveland Presbyterian
25 William McKinley Methodist
26 Theodore Roosevelt Dutch Reformed; Episcopalian
27 William Howard Taft Unitarian
28 Woodrow Wilson Presbyterian
29 Warren G. Harding Baptist
30 Calvin Coolidge Congregationalist
31 Herbert Hoover Quaker
32 Franklin Delano Roosevelt Episcopalian
33 Harry S. Truman Southern Baptist
34 Dwight D. Eisenhower River Brethren; Jehovah's Witnesses; Presbyterian
35 John F. Kennedy Catholic
36 Lyndon B. Johnson Disciples of Christ
37 Richard M. Nixon Quaker
38 Gerald Ford Episcopalian
39 Jimmy Carter Baptist (former Southern Baptist)
40 Ronald Reagan Disciples of Christ; Presbyterian
41 George H. W. Bush Episcopalian
42 William Jefferson Clinton Baptist
43 George W. Bush Methodist (former Episcopalian)
If we finally knew the truth. If we had an accurate description of what the US Founding Fathers thought in their bedrooms at night, would it change anything about our world? Should it?
In many cases, we do know what these men thought publicly. Jefferson, of course, first coined the phrase "wall of separation" in his letter to the Danbury, Connecticut Baptists. Jefferson is also well known for condemning organized religion, and writing his own version of the new testament to remove what he considered to be the Pauline dross which had been larded over the report of the teachings of the putative Jesus.
But it doesn't really matter what any of those gentlemen thought in their "heart of hearts" in the long watches of the night. What matters is what they proposed, or did not propose, to be the place of religion in public life. For example, in the list above, Andrew Jackson is listed as a Presbyterian. For ought that i know, he may well have been, life-long, a devout Presbyterian. However, his attitude to religion in public life can be seen very clearly from a particular incident which occurred in 1832, at a time when he was running for re-election to the office of President. A cholera epidemic was raging in cities on the Atlantic coast. Medicine in that day had no weapons to battle that disease, so some reputedly pious Senators called for a resolution to authorize a day of fasting, humiliation and prayer.
Andrew Jackson demurred, writing: "I could not do otherwise without transcending the limits prescribed by the Constitution for the president; and without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion now enjoys in this country in its complete separation from the political concerns of the General Government."
As was the case when Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists, the principle at issue was not simply that government had no place in religion, and religion had no place in government--but a greater underlying principle was that the complete separation of religion and government serves to protect the religious liberties of all citizens. This is a concept which i am sure will shoot right over the head of any mealy-mouthed contrarian who lives in a nation with an established church, to the excellence of which institution he pays pious, hypocritical lip service, while spending his sabbath either recovering from his drinking binge of the night before, or in the local soaking up yet more cheap booze.
Set, It's too bad Bush is ignorant of this history, and have pushed his religious belief on all the citizens of this country.
There are two court cases involving "viewpoint discrmination" in U.S. schools. One is Morse v. Frederick where the nine supreme court justices may announce an opinion soon. The other is Association of Christian Schools v. Roman Stearns, involving a complaint against University of California admissions policy that includes not giving high school credit in biology for courses that use creationist textbooks.
For many years, Phillip Johnson and other evolution opponents have argued that schools refusing to teach creationism alongside evolution are practicing "viewpoint discrimination".
It's amazing what one might learn simply by suggesting that xingu's signature is a bit iffy.
When Diogenes was caught wanking in public he remarked to his detractors, who mattered to him not in the slightest- "Tis a pity hunger can't be assuaged as easily." In Greek I mean- that's a rough translation.
Or as Lincoln said during the Civil WAr'God may truly be on our side, but to tell the truth, Id rather have Kentucky"
As far as Washington (we can start with him) He attended church with his wife in the last few years of his life. His beliefs had been mostly romanticized as per paintings by tyhe PEales or Gilbert Stuart. AS Bishop White said
Quote:"Philadelphia, Aug. 15, 1835.
"Dear Sir: In regard to the subject of your inquiry, truth requires me to say that Gen. Washington never received the communion in the churches of which I am the parochial minister. Mrs. Washington was an habitual communicant.
... I have been written to by many on that point, and have been obliged to answer them as I now do you. I am respectfully.
"Your humble servant,
"WILLIAM WHITE."
(Memoir of Bishop White, pp. 196, 197).
If you're in a sinking boat, you can pray, but swimming is more productive.
