I personally do not believe in natural rights. If they were natural rights they wouldn’t be able to be taken away by others would they? We have a right to life, but only for so long as we can maintain it. By virtue of having been born at all we had the right to some life, but there is no right that it may continue for any guaranteed period of time. If there were a right to liberty we wouldn’t be able to be made into slaves. There are no rights, only agreed upon privileges that stem from the will of the people. The very notion of natural rights is faith based.
Well they are abstract, so they don’t really exist, and so don’t “come” from anywhere.
I suppose you want me to say they came from God, but it would be slanderous to say that God only gave rights to white people until after the Civil War. The rights were also suspicisiouly absent from the 10 commandments which were the only concrete communication from God. In fact the rights specified in the Constitution are at odds with the 10 commandments.
Texas represents less than 8% of the US population. Does it really stand to reason that the wacky views in Texas schoolbooks would dictate what the other 92% can buy? It would make more sense for schoolbook publishers to just charge Texas more for ordering stuff that is non-mainstream.
For means of comparison, California represents 12% of the US population. If that logic followed, then Texas schoolbooks should be more liberal (assuming California schoolbooks are in fact, liberal) because they order so many books.
It might stand to reason that it reduces the options for other, smaller states, but states are going to order whatever books they order. I’m fairly sure that some of my kids schoolbooks have even been Florida specific, although I have no idea why the state does that.
The impact comes because Texas buys it’s school books state wide, vs most places which buy school books at the district level. I must say it showed great foresight to plan ahead for a convenient place to shoot a liberal president from.
That was the point of my first paragraph. The God who gave inalienable rights was the Deist god, not the Christian God. If it were the latter surely Jefferson could have cited chapter and verse. The argument that we were imbued with rights as part of being created is a more subtle argument than reference to Scripture.
Establishment was not surprising given that many colonies had religious origins. The American Revolution was certainly not an anti-religion one, the way the French Revolution was. The crucial point was not that there were holdover established churches, but that the new government, the one established from scratch, had no establishment - and eventually the First Amendment. Which did not give any special rights to Christianity as a whole.
Obviously such a radical step was not done unanimously. But those we respect most highly today were not the most religious. Remember, Washington went to church, but he never took communion.
A deity, but not the Christian one. Teaching that the founders were atheists would be just as incorrect as teaching that they were devout Christians. Even Paine explicitly said that he was not an atheist, and gave a reason why there had to be a god - the structure of the solar system. What he’d be today is an interesting question.
I don’t see how. Let’s try this. I think the word that might be confusing things is “belong”. The point is from where these rights originate. The DofI states that man’s rights are imbued in him by God, and that they cannot be separated from him. Prior to that, in Europe, the rights people may enjoy were due to the whim of the King. He could grant any right is wished, and he could take it away. The Dof I states that they come directly from God and are unalienable.
It was the relationship between the two, and what gives birth to which.
Europe: God > King/Government > Rights > People
USA: God > Rights > People > Government
I don’t think the fact that he didn’t cite chapter in verse holds much water. It would not have fit in the tone of the DofI. Keep in mind that the body of the document is the grievances they enumerate. It was a an announcement of severance and a list of the reasons why. Citing chapter and verse would have been clunky and unnecessary. I understand the Deism argument, and it may be correct. But my guess is rather than the document being crafted and agreed to by a bunch of Deists, the people were devout religionists of various Christian stripes. The document jives with either interpretation. I hold to the non-Deist interpretation because most of the founders were quite religious. Even Jefferson was quite religious. He just didn’t believe in the miracles and the divinity of Christ. When he started his university, their was Christian religious instruction and places of worship.
But there was no state (national) because 1) that would have encroached on the rights of the states, which were likely to have a state religion and 2) it would have given one strain of Christianity a nod over the others. This is what the letter from the Connecticut Baptists was about, to which Jefferson responded with his “wall of separation” line.
The founders, Jefferson among them, were not afraid of religion, they were afraid of the nation making any one religion (any one flavor of Christianity) the national religion (like England had), which would then conflict with the religious wishes of each of the individual states. They were not trying to keep religion out of their government, they were trying to keep the national government out of the religion business. Again, unlike England.
I think this is supported by the religious beliefs of the founders themselves and their including prayer and mentions of God in their governing.
Here is an interesting document, that I offer by way of example. It is the Constitution of Maryland, drafted in 1776, after the DofI was signed. In it we see:
- that although the state’s official religion was The Church of England, Marylanders were free to worship outside of that. But the Legislature could levy a tax for support of the Christian religion, allowing each person to steer their payments to their particular Christian sect.
- that no one could hold office if they were not Christian.
Many of the states had this arrangement. Even if there was a state religion, people could worship as they pleased; taxes could be levied for Christianity, but each person could direct those taxes to their strain of Christianity. Some states, like Maryland, allowed one’s payments to be applied to something as seemingly secular as the poor, but all those options were construed to be within the teachings of Christianity.
Public school students here get at least 2 years of Texas history. Which includes the sad tale of Cynthia Anne Parker.
All those years ago, our teachers didn’t state it quite so clearly–but it was evident to anybody learning her story that she should have been allowed to stay with the Comanche. She had married a chief & wanted to return; eventually, she starved herself to death because of grief. Her son Quanah became a great chief of the Comanche.
All this sideline discussion is fascinating, but the topic of this thread is the damage the State Board of Education continues to do to our public schools. The Texas Freedom Network is fighting against them:
There’s lots more information at the above link. Blathering on about definitions of Deism should not distract us from these Neanderthals who want schools to preach their very narrow definition of Christianity, treat Creationism with respect & tell kids that all they need to know about sex is “Abstain!”
Next year’s elections might help rid us of these cretins. Directly & indirectly: Governor Perry is also up for reelection. An ally of said cretins, he’s been playing to the cheap seats lately, with his talk of secession, because he’s worried that Kay Bailey Hutchision will run against him next year. In the general election, I’ll proudly vote for the Democratic candidate for governor; it really hasn’t been that many years since Ann Richards. But some Democrats are planning to cross the line in the primaries & vote for Hutchison; she’d make a far better governor than the former Aggie Yell Leader who only got his job because the Supreme Court installed Bush in the White House. In 2006, he was re-elected with a measly 39% of the vote because of the candidacies Carole Keeton McClellan Rylander Strayhorn (who, like Governor Good Hair, started out as a Democrat & switched for the most meretricious reasons) & poor Kinky Friedman (who sincerely didn’t realize he was a Republican tool.)
Yes, there’s a cultural war in Texas. Since we buy so many textbooks, our state policies will affect texts used in other states. Which side are you on?
I think you’re wound up a little too tightly about the concept of natural rights. To me, and I think to most people, the phrase just means those rights that people should have, what we should strive for. Then it’s up to a good government to ensure those rights as legal rights.
A lot of ink has been spilled in the past 50 years about this process. As it turns out, it is probably not democratic at all.
A lot of ink has also been spilled on rights theory, and some of it is quite interesting. This is a pretty good place to start reading.
See, this is why this stuff is insidious.
I don’t really see us taking 2 weeks out of an already-too-short school year to explain the sociocultural non-existence of Atheism in the 18th century. Everything 99.9% of people did back then was filtered through a lens of religion (whatever the religion may be); it wasn’t because that’s “just what they believed” or because it was natural or bla bla bla - it was that they would get burned at a stake for being a witch or a demon if they didn’t believe it. Ok, maybe not that bad, but you get the point: you weren’t entirely free to divorce your thoughts from religion back in the 1700’s, especially not if you wanted to form a popular government. Think it’s tough being an Atheist (or at least a skeptic) and getting elected, today? Try 1776.
Secularism didn’t exist as a concept until the mid 1800s - I don’t think anyone currently operates under the delusion that the founders of this country were all godless, and people recognize that the founders’ (almost mandatory) adherence to a religious belief (invariably Christian) colored their view on things, but explaining anything more (especially as a causal factor for anything in our history) than that requires a lot of philosophical musing about why that’s the case.
Entire University departments are dedicated to religious history and its effects on human civilization - I’m not quite sure you can distill that knowledge into a paragraph or two saying “Jefferson was down with Jesus”.
:dubious:
Historically speaking, taxation does coerce people into adopting a religion, In medieval times the Muslims tolerated Christians and Jews and allowed them to worship as they pleased, as long as they paid a tax for the privilege. Just in Northern Africa many Christians realized that conversion gave one benefits. So many converted to Islam that IIRC the fall of revenue was a factor in the fall of the caliph in the region, the new caliph changed the taxation rules.
Even though states pushed laws to benefit religion, the reality is that in the end they were considered intolerant to other faiths. One notices that the language referring to the Maryland constitution is in the past tense, it is because the amendments of the US constitution ran over it.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/texas1.htm
I still have the impression that the yahoos that are trying to over inject religion the Texas curriculum are not aware that American history in reality is not too flattering to the past bigotry of organized religion.
Sometimes I wonder if the best thing to do is just implement the conservative’s policy literally. I’d love to see the religious fights if school’s did start out with a prayer. I know that I was forced to say a Roman Catholic version of the Lord’s Prayer in my public school. I bet the evangelical yahoos would go nuts about “papists” influencing their kids. How about posting the 10 commandments; which of the several versions would they choose? Can you imagimine a test where they asked “What is the 2nd commandment?” and a kid was marked wrong for giving the answer in his church’s version. Imagine the horror if it was explained that some of the founding father’s did not believe in the Trinity or Jesus’ divinity. Imagine bible readings: there would be riots in the streets over what version to use (this was the issue that led to Catholic schools). How about if your teacher were a Seventh Day Adventist and gave a test asking what day was the Sabbath? We’d have parts of Boston teaching Catholocism, NYC teaching Judaism, and Silicon Valley teaching Hinduism. Berkeley might have Wiccan’s in to teach. It’d be great! Can you envision World History class? There’d be fights on whether to start the timeline 6,000 years ago or use the more liberal interpretation of Genesis. Since more and more Chinese and Indian kids are at the top of their classes we can have much more interesting commencement speaches: “please sit in the lotus position with me and recite ‘rom nyo hai hai ku’”. Biology class would be really cool if you had a Santeria teacher: “let’s start by sacrificing this chicken and smearing it’s blood on the ground”.
This’d be the best spectator sport since Swift’s fights between the big-endians and little-endians (I wonder if he knew Intel would win?).
“We hold these truths to be self-evident.” We don’t argue, we don’t respond to calls for a Holy Cite, we assert a dogma of human rights and refuse to argue, its a secular leap of faith.
Works for me.
There are two different questions. One is what the founding fathers believed, and believed they were creating. Another is the degree to which we are today bound by those beliefs. My comments went to the first question. Yours to the second. The OP is talking about history class, which goes to the first.
I’m sure he could have worked in a reference or quote of an appropriate verse - though I am at a loss as to what a good verse about rights would be. The Christian nations of Europe did not incorporate these rights, and the philosophers who inspired Jefferson never seemed particularly religious to me - at least not in the traditional Christian sense.
In 1776 the country was between revivals, so though the general public was devout compared to you and me, establishment didn’t seem to be a big issue. In contrast, Jefferson got called an atheist in the 1800 campaign.
Yet the Virginia case shows that they were not against keeping religion out of state government also. As for other states. even if they were against establishment at the state level in general (and I’ve seen no evidence of this) doing anything about it would be politically infeasible. The question at hand in this hijack is if America was a Christian nation. (As opposed to a nation of Christians, which it clearly was.) Answering this in the negative does not require evidence that Christianity was tp be expunged from the public arena, especially not if it was already there.
I don’t think you can draw too many conclusions from this. Lincoln, whose religious convictions are certainly unclear at best, spoke of prayer and God all the time.
This is an excellent example. Maryland was certainly a Christian state as of 1776. This demonstrates that if the founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation, they could easily have added a religious test for office - but they explicitly prohibited such a test. Sure establishing a church might have been infeasible, but supporting churches the way Maryland did would not have been. Referring to Jesus in the Constitution (outside of the date) would have been simple to do. So, a model for a reasonably non-denominational Christian state existed, but the founders did not choose to use it.
The real issue here, not that you disagree, is that teaching that America was a Christian state would be teaching a value judgment as fact. Teaching the facts of the matter, which have been presented by both of us in this discussion, is values free and very appropriate. All all for teaching about religion, I’m just against teaching any is better or more correct than any others. My daughter’s high school world history text had a very good section on religion that did just this - if superficially.
Sure they were stealing land from each other and were engaged in constant warfare, but it’s hardly the same kind of warfare. Indian warfare consisted of raiding, not the total annihilation of the other side. As such, wars between tribes could be continuous for generations. Warfare among native North American tribes was hardly the outright genocide that European settlers brought to the continent.
The US government often had little control over it’s citizens? That hardly matters when it’s the US army committing the act. Haven’t you ever heard of Wounded Knee, or any other incident in the “Indian Wars”? The whites weren’t always the “bad guys”, and hardly any reasonably educated person other than your strawman leftists could possibly believe that. Objectivity is not an example of anti-white racism.
magellan01 began our discussion by saying he was against the Texas policy also. That’s not a point of dispute.
The optimal solution would be to nuke the board from orbit. Barring that, is there a possibility for local action. When I moved to California I was quite concerned about issues like this, being incurably Eastern, and I got myself appointed to the site council for the high school and then the district textbook review committee. (Not very hard, just took not saying no.) I got to look at the recommended biology books, and found that first the faculty review committee consisted of excellent biology teachers, and second, that the books they recommended had an accurate, if too short, discussion of evolution. One had a two page interview with Richard Dawkins. if my fears had been justified, I could have raised a stink.
Working at the state level is fine, but I think those who care could do more at the local level. Even if you lose, you can sensitize people to the existence of religious dogmatism on school boards.