Reply #222: I've said this, before -- I don't play the "pull quote" game... [View All]

[Cats Against Frist]

...when it comes to this topic, because, as I'm sure you're well aware, a google search will pull up all kinds of pro-Christian web sites with just as many quotes, from the same people, that make it look like we should all have to wear a giant cross on our backs to qualify to be Americans.

You have to look at the context -- though I believe that MANY of the founders were deists and near-atheists or atheists, there were also some plain 'ol god-fearing orthodox/anglican/unitarian "Christians" who did believe -- and may have had beliefs, to some degree, that Christianity should play a bigger role in society.

And, just as now, one has to remember that while Jefferson was out carousing with French intellectuals and reading "Tristam Shandy," the puritains were busy playing "Hester Prynn" in some of the colonies, and trying to claim certain states/colonies as religious states.

The truth is that the origin and compromise of the Constitution, and the religious subtext, of the time, is rather complex, and does not boil down, in terms of HERITAGE or CULTURE to a yes-no answer on religion. HOWEVER, as I've repeated already -- twice -- the foundations of governance were quite consciously crafted under the influence of Rousseau, the Enlightenment, Deism, Intellectualism, Egalitarianism (to some extent) etc. -- and though the way Mr. Jefferson or Mr. Paine might have felt didn't necessarily apply to all of early American society, that the impetus behind the religious references in our most important documents points to secularism - but a very different secuarism, where some of what we would now call "religious tradition," was seen, to some extent, as simply cultural -- such as "moral education," and public prayer.

Remember -- these ideas are the mother/father of modern liberalism -- until Marx's most totalitarian and flawed interpreters came along and changed egalitarianism to "all under the control of the socialist state," these were our ideals.

I hate seeing our claim (meaning -- the left) to governance be distorted, not only by ignorant freepers, but by our own side's zeal to "one-up" the freeps. This doesn't just hold true in the "Christian nation" v. "Secularism" debate, but also the Federalism debate and the social safety net.