Couple of things I would like to add to this. I am not anti-religion. On the contrary, I think it gives people meaning and purpose in their life (and I still believe in God FWIW). But I don’t think our founding fathers were anti-religion either. They were just against religious compulsion in civil matters (i.e., anti-establishment of religion). Or perhaps anti-organized religion, at worst.
Also, I do have to make a correction on this article. It says Thomas Paine was an atheist. From what I understand, he was suspected as being one. That is probably why he died a pauper. But he was actually just a enthusiastic Deist.
Yeah, I think most of our founding fathers were Deists. Deists don’t believe in Divine Providence (so there goes prayer in public school, I guess;)). And they don’t believe in Divine Revelation (so there goes Creationism, I guess).
Today’s the Fourth of July, which is why I felt compelled to share this.
The Daily Kos article is a bit of a strawman. It is perfectly well recognized, even among many deeply conservative Christian circles, that some if not many of the Founding Fathers weren’t truly Christian, or Christian at all.
The founding fathers were most certainly not fundamentalists, since fundamentalist Christianity didn’t exist until long after they were dead. They would have found the concept bizarre, since they all had a background in the Enlightenment.
You are right that Paine was not an atheist. In The Age of Reason he specifically says that some deity must have been responsible for the order of the solar system. If he lived today he’d probably be one, though.
He sure as hell was not a Christian, since most of that book demonstrated how absurd the Bible is.
(When my ex wanted to take the piss out of a fundie she’d point out that Yeshua ben Yosef was born, lived, and died a Jew. Usually resulted in a poleaxed facial expression.)
Several of the texts linked are perfectly compatible with being a Christian. Not all Founding Fathers were, and they certainly didn’t belong to branches of Christianity which hadn’t been invented yet, but at that point in time a lot of people were pretty tired of religious persecution.
I wonder what the OP is talking about. His link does not seem to work and he did not feel the words he linked to were important enough to type or even cut-and-paste. If you want me to read what you write, then write it.
I have been mulling over in my mind whether you wanted a response or were just criticizing:).
The link certainly works for me. It works on my PC and my smartphone. And AFAIK it works for other people on the message board too.
I can’t copy and paste because that’s copyright infringement. If there was one or two quotes I wanted to share that’d be okay. But I wanted to share the whole thing. And copying en masse is definitely copyright infringement. (Plus I only go on my PC once or twice a week. And I haven’t figured out how to copy and paste a large amount of text on my smartphone.)
Right—maybe even all of them. For instance, it’s perfectly possible to be Christian and think that an established church (state-sponsored religion) is and has been a bad thing.
I suspect that at the time the primary concern among the founding fathers was not “Christianity will inflict its teachings and worldview by making them required of all American institutions (if we don’t do things to prevent that)” but more “Specific Flavor X of Christianity will inflict (etc)”.
Not that they might not have agreed that Americans should be free of state-sponsored Christianity altogether, but their familiarity (both personal and as followers of history) would have been with the intolerance exhibited by Flavor X towards believers & worshippers who ascribed to Flavor Y, including driving them out of communities and seizing their property etc.
And they are all compatible with the idea that they were simply against the actual coercion inherent in an establishment of religion. There is nothing to suggest that they would be against the mere peer pressure that may result from living in a community where the majority of people were religious and there was a desire to fit in and go to church or have to stand silently while a voluntary prayer was recited in a public school or see a nativity scene at the courthouse.
