The OP asks if the country was founded on Christianity, not what the amendment process was nearly a hundred years later and what the Supreme Court said two hundred years later.
Even if we concede that the entire Bill of Rights is applicable to the States because of the 14th amendment (even though the left wouldn’t have applied the 2nd amendment, but that’s another thread) it cannot be argued that the 1st Amendment is far stricter on the states than on the feds. This idea of no religion in public schools or government property would have been absurd at the founding and should be equally absurd today.
No one is arguing that the First Amendment should be “far stricter on the states than on the feds”. We are only arguing that the post-Reconstruction Era Constitution’s protections for individual rights should be equally strict on the federal government and on the states.
“Nefarious statements”?? As in, “wicked or criminal”? WTF are you talking about?
Anyway, all of your discussion of the states is utterly irrelevant to this thread, so I’ll step away. It’s not just technically true, it’s also actually true that this country was not founded on the Christian religion. You say that there are parts of the Constitution that came from the Christian bible but then failed to back that up, and instead changed to talking about the states.
As I mentioned above, this isn’t a fruitful debate, since you’re not actually debating my points or sticking to this subject, so I’ll bow out. MEBuckner, thanks for doing the heavy lifting! I love your point about states outlawing Christianity!
ETA: Can you stop with your bullshit broad brush “the Left” asides? It adds exactly nothing to the conversation and just makes it yet another bullshit partisan slog.
None of the reconstruction amendments placed any restrictions on the federal government. Not a one. You could argue that the 13th amendment prevented any sort of federal legalization of slavery (which was never contemplated), but the 14th and 15th applied to states only. Nothing in those amendments could reasonably be argued that a restriction of federal power in the BOR was more restricted.
My whole point which you have failed to acknowledge or accept is that I have never argued that the United States is a theocracy. However what really is beyond debate and I wish you would simply accept is that the United States was founded by a Christian populace and lived by Christian principles. As such, displays of Christianity at the courthouse or on government property were prevalent and continued to be for nearly two hundred years. This was so undisputed as to not be necessary to discuss it in a constitution which merely discusses the balance of power between states and a new national government it created.
If this new government was meant to prohibit religious displays on government property or otherwise require abject neutrality or hostility towards any displays of religion in this new society, it seems odd that they continued to allow states to do that and so much more.
This nonsense and LOLs about how the states could outlaw Christianity illustrates my point. In a Christian society, you do not have to worry about such a thing so you fail to address it.
If you would agree that “not founded on Christianity” does not equal “no religious displays on government property,” then we are good. But you want to equate them.
Let me know if you want to re-engage on the topic of this thread, and please bring the cite for the section of the Constitution that was “inherently Christian”. Until then, bye!
And if you do, you’re a Paulist, since Yeshua bir Miryam aka Jesus never claimed divinity, and Saul / Paul, the torturer and death-squad leader who founded Xianity, never quoted his supposed lord.
There’s a popular saying that is centuries old that often gets attributed to various people, Lord Beaconsfield is one. When people are inclined to ask another what is their religion, some reply, A religion of wise men. And when asked further what that may be, one replies, Wise men never tell. There are many times when George Washington was pressed to say one way or the other what his personal religious beliefs were. If he was some kind of Christian, I think it would have benefited him politically to do say so.
However, if he was a Deist, he had to be more careful, more so for total unbelief, it wouldn’t have been wise to say so (see what happened to Thomas Paine for just being a Deist). I think he went to his grave never showing his hand.
The Mt. Vernon site does use Franklin Stenier on occasion with some authors, something I wished they would have went to more, because he tracked down many of the popular sources trying to Christianize Washington posthumously. He also relied on his best source of all, George Washington’s personal diaries which he started writing at age 13, and often daily entries up until his death. His diaries are also on-line at the Library of Congress, although a difficult read due to his cursive style.
"The fair inference is that there was no common understanding about the limits of the establishment prohibition, and the dissent’s conclusion that its narrower view was the original understanding, post, at 2–3, stretches the evidence beyond tensile capacity. What the evidence does show is a group of statesmen, like others before and after them, who proposed a guarantee with contours not wholly worked out, leaving the Establishment Clause with edges still to be determined. And none the worse for that. Indeterminate edges are the kind to have in a constitution meant to endure, and to meet “exigencies which, if foreseen at all, must have been seen dimly, and which can be best provided for as they occur.” McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Ky., 545 U.S. 844 (2005).
Well, you are not a *mainstream *Christian. A Divine Nature of or in the Christ is a common theme to most Christianities. But are Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian? They do not consider Jesus to be God but just a Very Importand Dude in the Heavenly Court.
For precisely that reason a great many Christians of other denominations deny that the JWs are Christians.
This is essentially a semantic argument about the “correct” definition of the word Christian and, as such, (a) can have no conclusive answer, and (b) is both boring and unimportant.
Oh, the answer is quite simple. Believe what I believe and you’re okay, mate. Believe anything else and you’re a tool of Satan or, at best, a heathen scumbag bound for eternal immersion in a hot acid bath. Venus must be Hell, with immortality. See; simple!