Alright. I’ve been trying to get something like this down for awhile, but due to schedule issues recently I knew I wouldn’t be able to maintain the OP very well. Now though, I should be able to keep it running as long as you guys want it to.
Specifically, I was hoping to get a little debate going on the Religious vs Secular direction our country will/should/might be taking now and in the future. One main reason for this thread is the fact that it seems so many threads end up getting into this big argument, but we don’t seem to attack it head on very often. Now if you think this is dumb…or think I’m just an idiot…then by all means keep the little snub comments to yourself; I’m just here stir an *intellectual *pot and calling me dumb would, to my mind, only serve to either, one, lower my self-esteem, or two, fuel a more virulent opinion of mine of the OPFor. I’ll do the best I can to respond to all of you, but keep in mind with such topics and a fundamentalist in the mix on straightdope, one tends to get a little swamped.
I’ll just come straight out and tell you how I see things. Seeing as to how this conversation will, as it almost always does, end up getting at the founding fathers, it might be best to just start with them. I for one, certainly do not believe that that the founding fathers mantained the same secularist view, or at least not the modernist secularist view that so many will assert today. That doesn’t ignore the fact that so many relgious right-wingers paint the FF as the same as they themselves are–but I see constantly the other side doing it as well. For whereas the fundamentalist will portray Washington, Madison, and Jefferson as these Tea Party loving, snake charming baptists, the irrelgious secularist will paint the founding fathers as these fellows who look at the world with our same modernist eyes. That the founding fathers believed this absolute government secularism that so many do today. Its really just a fallacy. Unfortunately as with so many controversies it seems, I think the most accurate anaylsis is that they are both wrong. Admittedly, being on the right side of things, I think secularists are *more *wrong, but either way I feel people on both sides of things need a little refresher on whats up. Now I’m going to try to keep the arguement away from what side of the political spectrum the fathers were on, and moreso strictly to this–did they want religion in our government or not. After everything I have researched, I have been led to think that nearly every founding father, with exception of Jefferson, expected the religion of Christianity to be, in some way or another, intergrated with American society for the whole of its liftetime. Washinton constantly claimed the importance of a religious society in order to produce “Good Citizens” (Washington was obessed with the idea of Good Citizens of whom can only come from religion.) John Adams co-authored the Massuchessets constitution in which dictated in, Article III I believe, that parsons would be subsidized by the government whenever and wherever necessary. Jefferson, however, certainly shows a break in the suite. He seemed to constantly be bumping heads with other politicions of the time who were trying to maintain some form of relgiosity within the government–yet, even he, if examined closely, will be found to be a, if anything, profoundly religious man. I don’t feel the need to provide extensive quotes, we can perhaps leave those to further discussion.
My main statement about the FF topic on the whole is this–if you don’t agree with them, then simply say it! I would have much more respect for the man that claimed that “the FF’s were smart dudes but the world is different now and we know better,” then I would of the men who ignore the simple facts about the founding fathers and the extreme intensity into which they attempted to intergrate both their religion and their government. But, as we have so many today who feel that religion should not be *within *the government, the argument becomes more then a simple Historical back and forth; and much moreso an ideological debate–which is always more intresting. Such topics as that of “In God we Trust” and the pledge come quickly to mind. I feel that the founding fathers on the whole believed in Christianity–which is why they attempted to intergrate it into our government, even in subtle ways. In the same sense, we today are, as much as some would deny it, an overly christian nation. The states themselves should be allowed to choose for themselves on such topics, and if they maintain at least 66.6 percent for getting rid of God in both the pledge and on our money, then thats what we should do. As a Christian, I certainly wouldn’t agree with it, but I also don’t agree with Christians who expect our country to be Christian until kingdom come. If the majority of our country isn’t Christian, then it would be just stupid to have us pretending that it is so. As it stands, however, our country is mostly Christian, and will naturally eradiate Christian values and ideals. If you hate Christians that bad, then…go to Denmark…they’re not too big on religion over there.
Of course though, if strict secularists are planning on staying for the long haul, then we’re gonna need some sort of compromise on the whole education aspect of things. This would bring us into my somewhat on-the-fringe belief, and that is that there shouldn’t be public education. This idea of mine bears more then just religious significance, and I feel it might be best to explain it a bit. I first started feeling this when I took a close look at both WWI and the writings of John Stuart Mill. WWI however is a nice example. You have eleven million men going to their deaths, for what exactly? I think its brilliantly portyed in All Quiet on the Western Front. In case you havent read it, it opens with a brilliant scene of the german protaginst and his friends just sitting around, happy they aren’t in any sort of action. They get to talking, and eventually one exclaims how he doesn’t understand why he is killing frenchmen, and goes onto the thinking that a frenchmen has never done anything bad to harm him. He actually says that he has never seen a frenchmen except to kill him. Baumer, the protganist, will go home on leave at one point and see his old professor, the professor who had convinced Baumer and all his classmates to go join up in the war, telling them how glorious it would be. Of course it wasn’t at all, and most of Baumer’s classmates choked to death on poisen gas, or got caught up in barbed wire. One main point the author intended to point out is how the professor, the archetype for the german professors at the time, was a key element in getting all those men to go die. You have a massively sychronised education system, run by the government, which means that at anytime the curriculums can be created in a way that childeren learn what the government wants them too, and in doing so allows for a enormous mechanism of possible abuse to be in place. Now certainly such abuse does not directly occur here in the States. But the ability for it to happen is there, and should not be allowed. Most atheists tell me how we need to have straight evolutionist teaching accross the board, as dictated by the government. These are the same people, however, who cringe at the way religion ran education at so many points in history. One seperate entity or idealogy should not have a monopoly on the system of education. I don’t think that we should have creationism taught alongside evolution, thats just absurd–we might as well start teaching every single worldview known to man in our schools. As my biology teacher put it-- creationsim is really just Christianity in disguise, which is absolutely true. Yet equally true, is how evolution is really just atheism in disguise. My on-the-fringe view of education boils down to, simply put, that all education should be in the hands of private institutions. The government can help with financial aid…otherwise, butt out.
Now I had a bit more I had wished to intergrate with most of this, but its getting late, so I’ll let you guys deal with this stuf for now. Have at you.