The Gaytheist Agenda

The Freedom from Religion Foundation based in Madison is after another Nativity scene, this time in Arkansas.

Their Web page has this statement, “The founders who wrote the U.S. Constitution wanted citizens to be free to support the church of their choice or no religion at all.” They claim to educate the public concerning the separation of the church and state.
To educate means to provide unbiased information. The First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Nowhere does it state or insinuate, “or no religion at all.”

On the contrary. People who don’t practice any religion are just as protected under the First Amendment as are those who practice religion. (Those who practice minority and “unpopular” are also protected.) The intolerance of religious bigots doesn’t change that.

The reason that the Congress added “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” was because of organizations and zealots who would eliminate our freedom to worship were there no laws to stop them.

It was also added because of zealots who would try to impose their religion on others who do not worship the dominant religion or do not worship at all. Sadly revisionists keep trying to misconstrue it as something it’s not. It doesn’t mean that RRRW Christians can run roughshod over America and rule it with an iron Bible.

The First Amendment is there to protect religion from the government, not to protect the government from religion. I quote from their Web page, “Our Constitution was very purposely written to be a godless document.” They never reference the Declaration of Independence, which says that we “are endowed by (our) Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

And by the way, the “godless” Constitution refers to the “Godly” Declaration of Independence in Article VII.

David Haile,

Wausau

The “Creator” loosely referenced in the DoE is not the meddle-in-everything God of the Christian Bible, particularly the RRW Dominionist style Christianity. It was the Deist God, and many of the Founding Fathers were in fact Deists rather than Christians.

The deist outlook also gained a foothold in the American colonies, where it became popular among the rich and well-born about the time of the Revolution. Of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, the theological leanings of some twenty have been identified. Three have been characterized as deists: Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, and Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island. Two others, John Adams of Massachusetts and George Wythe of Virginia, are described as liberal Christians strongly influenced by deism. Four, including Jefferson’s friend Benjamin Rush, were liberals not inclined toward deism. About eleven were definitely orthodox believers. Samuel Huntington, Philip Livingston, and John Witherspoon, president of Princeton University, were prominent in this last group.

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None of the Founding Fathers meditated more assiduously on religion than Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). He was brought up in the rituals and traditions of the Anglican Church, as it existed in Virginia at the time. In his college years at William and Mary he came to admire Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke as three great paragons of wisdom. Under the influence of several professors he converted to the deist philosophy. He made a careful study of the philosophical writings of Viscount Henry Bolingbroke, a strict deist whose God was remote and unconcerned with human affairs.

In his public pronouncements as a statesman and legislator, Jefferson expressed what he considered to belong to the common and public core of religion. He kept his more personal opinions to himself, refraining from putting them in any writing that might find its way into print, but he occasionally penned confidential memoranda for himself and a few friends.

Jefferson’s public religion appears in the Declaration of Independence, which refers to “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” to “inalienable” rights conferred upon all human beings by their Creator, and to “the protection of divine Providence.” In his first inaugural address, in 1801, Jefferson spoke of how the American people were “enlightened by a benign religion, professed indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and love of man, acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence.” In his second inaugural, four years later, he emphasized the nation’s need for the favor and enlightenment of Providence and asked his hearers to unite with him in supplication to “that Being in whose hands we are.”

Indeed. Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was a Deist. The “creator” he referred to in that document was the Deist God, a rational God. There were numerous differences between Deists and Christians, the most striking being that Deists rejected these particular core doctrine of Orthodox Christianity:

•The doctrine of the Trinity is false because there is no Scriptural evidence for it.
•Jesus was human, though an exceptional human, not God in any manner.
•Jesus’ death was not an atonement for our sins nor did God demand that someone suffer for our sins.
•The following doctrines are false: original sin, predestination of the elect, the inherent depravity of human beings, and eternal damnation.
•The “faith alone” doctrine of Protestants.

Again, the Founding Fathers were not all Christians as the revisionists would like us to believe they were. America is not and never has been “A Christian Nation”.

One of Jefferson’s firmest principles, as we know, was that of religious freedom. In 1777, as a legislator, he composed what later became the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, which embodies his personal conviction that the government should exercise no coercion in religious matters. In his famous letter of 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association he referred to the “wall of separation between Church and State”—a term that had previously been used by the Baptist Roger Williams.

The principles of religious freedom established through the efforts of Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers were not for the sole benefit of Christians . They were for everybody.

Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, noted above, established the Wall of Separation between Church and State that is so crucial in our nation. Many of Mr. Haile’s ilk are wont to point out that the Wall of Separation is not mentioned in the Constitution, and it is not. However that doesn’t mean that it is nonexistent or not important–for the state, for the religious and for the non-religious alike.

Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802 to answer a letter from them written in October 1801. A copy of the Danbury letter is available here. The Danbury Baptists were a religious minority in Connecticut, and they complained that in their state, the religious liberties they enjoyed were not seen as immutable rights, but as privileges granted by the legislature - as “favors granted.” Jefferson’s reply did not address their concerns about problems with state establishment of religion - only of establishment on the national level. The letter contains the phrase “wall of separation between church and state,” which led to the short-hand for the Establishment Clause that we use today: “Separation of church and state.”

The letter was the subject of intense scrutiny by Jefferson, and he consulted a couple of New England politicians to assure that his words would not offend while still conveying his message: it was not the place of the Congress or the Executive to do anything that might be misconstrued as the establishment of religion.

It is important to remember that Christianity was not the only religion practiced in the colonies. In fact a number of the founding fathers expressed some rather strong opinions about it.

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.” James Madison

 

“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.” Thomas Jefferson

 

“This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!” John Adams

 

America was never a “Christian Nation”. We have never been what the RRRW fundamentalists claim. The notion that the Founding Fathers were Bible-thumping RW Fundamentalists a-la Pat Robertson is a revisionist fantasy of theirs.

And while we’re at it let’s refer to the Treaty of Tripoli, which states: “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

The treaty was written during the Washington administration, and sent to the Senate during the Adams administration. It was read aloud to the Senate, and each Senator received a printed copy. This was the 339th time that a recorded vote was required by the Senate, but only the third time a vote was unanimous (the next time was to honor George Washington). There is no record of any debate or dissension on the treaty. It was reprinted in full in three newspapers - two in Philadelphia, one in New York City. There is no record of public outcry or complaint in subsequent editions of the papers.

So anybody who tries to claim that the United States is a Christian Nation, and that its government is based on Christian principles or the Christian religion, is either mistaken or lying.

Mr. Haile claimed that “To educate means to provide unbiased information” but he failed to do that. The information he provided in his LTTE was not only very biased but bigoted. It’s possible he’s just ignorant of American history, particularly with regard to the Founding Fathers, which is very common. I’m always glad to provide the truth, however.