sgtdmski

BTW, in his remarks he states that the Constitution makes us a Christian nation. In otherwords Constitutionally we are a Christian nation. Since the ultimate arbitrator to what the Constitution says are the nine members of the Supreme Court perhaps we should see what they say????

In HOLY TRINITY CHURCH v. U.S. (143 U.S. 457, 12 S.Ct. 511, 36 L.Ed. 226)

The Supreme Court in its decision written for the majority states:

and later

So it would seem that what Candidate McCain said was not only grammatically correct but Constitutionally correct as well.

dmk

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Conservatism, I repeat is not an ideology. It does not breed fanatics....But if you want men who seek, reasonably and prudently, to reconcile the best in wisdom of our ancestors with the change which is essential to a vigorous civil social existence, then you will do well to turn to conservative principles
-Russell Kirk-

tristanrobin

I have no doubt that attitudes as expressed above is exactly the reason people take great offense at such comments.

The implication. that if you don't have a religion based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, being you are not decent, respectable or humane.

A very un-Christ-like attitude, and far more in keeping with the attitudes of the Pharisees that Jesus tossed out of the temples on their collective ears.

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"know this is EXACTLY why people think you shouldnt have equal rights" 2/11/08 Grace

knot_e_lady

Quartz Hill School of Theology

Many well-meaning Christians argue that the United States was founded by Christian men on Christian principles. Although well-intentioned, such sentiment is unfounded. The men who lead the United States in its revolution against England, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and put together the Constitution were not Christians by any stretch of the imagination.
Why do some Christians imagine these men are Christians? Besides a desperate desire that it should be so, in a selective examination of their writings, one can discover positive statements about God and/or Christianity. However, merely believing in God does not make a person a Christian. The Bible says that "the fool says in his heart, there is no God." Our founding fathers were not fools. But the Bible also says "You say you believe in God. Good. The demons also believe and tremble."
Merely believing in God is insufficient evidence for demonstrating either Christian principles or that a person is a Christian.
Perhaps, to start, it might be beneficial to remind ourselves of what a Christian might be: it is a person who has acknowledged his or her sinfulness, responded in faith to the person of Jesus Christ as the only one who can redeem him, and by so doing been given the Holy Spirit.
The early church summarized the Christian message in six points:

1. Jesus came from God.
2. You killed him.
3. He rose again on the third day.
4. He sent the Holy Spirit
5. Repent and be baptized.
6. He's coming back.

An individual who would not acknowledge this much of the Christian message could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called a Christian. The founding fathers of this country did not acknowledge this message. In fact, they denied it.
Founders of the American Revolution
Thomas Jefferson created his own version of the gospels; he was uncomfortable with any reference to miracles, so with two copies of the New Testament, he cut and pasted them together, excising all references to miracles, from turning water to wine, to the resurrection.

There has certainly never been a shortage of boldness in the history of biblical scholarship during the past two centuries, but for sheer audacity Thomas Jefferson's two redactions of the Gospels stand out even in that company. It is still a bit overwhelming to contemplate the sangfroid exhibited by the third president of the United States as, razor in hand, he sat editing the Gospels during February 1804, on (as he himself says) "2. or 3. nights only at Washington, after getting thro' the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day." He was apparently quite sure that he could tell what was genuine and what was not in the transmitted text of the New Testament...(Thomas Jefferson. The Jefferson Bible; Jefferson and his Contemporaries, an afterward by Jaroslav Pelikan, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, p. 149. Click to go to a copy of The Jefferson Bible).

In his Notes on Virginia, Jefferson wrote:

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury to my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. (Dumas Malon, Jefferson The President: First Term 1801-1805. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1970, p. 191)

Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer whose manifestoes encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided materially in winning the War of Independence. But he was a Deist:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. (Richard Emery Roberts, ed. "Excerpts from The Age of Reason". Selected Writings of Thomas Paine. New York: Everbody's Vacation Publishing Co., 1945, p. 362)

Regarding the New Testament, he wrote that:

I hold [it] to be fabulous and have shown [it] to be false...(Roberts, p. 375)

About the afterlife, he wrote:

I do not believe because a man and a woman make a child that it imposes on the Creator the unavoidable obligation of keeping the being so made in eternal existance hereafter. It is in His power to do so, or not to do so, and it is not in my power to decide which He will do. (Roberts, p. 375)

John Adams, the second U.S. President rejected the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and became a Unitarian. It was during Adams' presidency that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli, which states in Article XI that:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion - as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, - and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arrising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. (Charles I. Bevans, ed. Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America 1776-1949. Vol. 11: Philippines-United Arab Republic. Washington D.C.: Department of State Publications, 1974, p. 1072).

This treaty with the Islamic state of Tripoli had been written and concluded by Joel Barlow during Washington's Administration. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty on June 7, 1797; President Adams signed it on June 10, 1797 and it was first published in the Session Laws of the Fifth Congress, first session in 1797. Quite clearly, then, at this very early stage of the American Republic, the U.S. government did not consider the United States a Christian nation.
Benjamin Franklin, the delegate to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention. He has frequently been used as a source for positive "God" talk. It is often noted that Franklin made a motion at the Constitutional convention that they should bring in a clergyman to pray for their deliberations:

In this situation of this Assembly, groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when present to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings?....I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth - that God governs in the affairs of men. (Catherine Drinker Bowen. Miracle at Phaladelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787. New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1966, pp. 125-126)

It is rarely noted that Franklin presented his motion after "four or five weeks" of deliberation, during which they had never once opened in prayer. More significantly, it is never mentioned that Franklin's motion was voted down! Fine Christians, these founding fathers. Furthermore, the context is usually ignored, too. He made the motion during an especially trying week of serious disagreement, when the convention was in danger of breaking up. Cathrine Drinker Bowen comments:

Yet whether the Doctor had spoken from policy or from faith, his suggestion had been salutary, calling an assembly of doubting minds to a realization that destiny herself sat as guest and witness in this room. Franklin had made solemn reminder that a republic of thirteen united states - venture novel and daring - could not be achieved without mutual sacrifice and a summoning up of men's best, most difficult and most creative efforts. (Bowen, p. 127)

About March 1, 1790, he wrote the following in a letter to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, who had asked him his views on religion. His answer would indicate that he remained a Deist, not a Christian, to the end:

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and I think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble...." (Carl Van Doren. Benjamin Franklin. New York: The Viking Press, 1938, p. 777.)

He died just over a month later on April 17.

knot_e_lady

Little-Known U.S. Document Proclaims America's Government is Secular - The Early America Review, Summer 1997

A few Christian fundamentalists attempt to convince us to return to the Christianity of early America, yet according to the historian, Robert T. Handy, "No more than 10 percent-- probably less-- of Americans in 1800 were members of congregations."
The Founding Fathers, also, rarely practiced Christian orthodoxy. Although they supported the free exercise of any religion, they understood the dangers of religion. Most of them believed in deism and attended Freemasonry lodges. According to John J. Robinson, "Freemasonry had been a powerful force for religious freedom." Freemasons took seriously the principle that men should worship according to their own conscious. Masonry welcomed anyone from any religion or non-religion, as long as they believed in a Supreme Being. Washington, Franklin, Hancock, Hamilton, Lafayette, and many others accepted Freemasonry.

The Constitution reflects our founders views of a secular government, protecting the freedom of any belief or unbelief. The historian, Robert Middlekauff, observed, "the idea that the Constitution expressed a moral view seems absurd. There were no genuine evangelicals in the Convention, and there were no heated declarations of Christian piety."

The most convincing evidence that our government did not ground itself upon Christianity comes from the very document that defines it-- the United States Constitution.
If indeed our Framers had aimed to found a Christian republic, it would seem highly unlikely that they would have forgotten to leave out their Christian intentions in the Supreme law of the land. In fact, nowhere in the Constitution do we have a single mention of Christianity, God, Jesus, or any Supreme Being. There occurs only two references to religion and they both use exclusionary wording. The 1st Amendment's says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. . ." and in Article VI, Section 3, ". . . no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
Thomas Jefferson interpreted the 1st Amendment in his famous letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in January 1, 1802:
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
Some Religious activists try to extricate the concept of separation between church and State by claiming that those words do not occur in the Constitution. Indeed they do not, but neither does it exactly say "freedom of religion," yet the First Amendment implies both.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Autobiography, in reference to the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom:
"Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting "Jesus Christ," so that it would read "A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination

fxashun

In my opinion, I don't think the founding fathers opened the bible and used it as a guideline, but as with today, I doubt that they totally ignored any religious principles while they were discussing the country's framework.
Most, and I mean that with a big "most", people don't work like that.

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Fluffmeister

Aren't these two rather contradictory? The Crusaders were incredibly brutal, massacring Christians, Muslims and Jews alike ("God will take care of his own", replied de Montfort when asked how he could distinguish between infidels and believers).

The idea that the word "Christian" means "not brutal" is ludicrous. There have been plenty of non-brutal non-Christians (the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi or the Buddhist monks leading the crusade against the regime in Burma spring to mind), and plenty of brutal Christians (the Borgia Popes, de Montfort and those involved in the Spanish Inquisition, for example).

garysher

The Treaty of Tripoli appears to have been some kind of diplomatic sop.

Considering what John Adams wrote in 1817:

"We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."

and



"... a true American Patriot must be a religious man ... He who neglects his duty to his maker, may well be expected to be deficient and insincere in his duty towards the public"

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anti

suddenly a nation founded by deist's government is derived from the teachings of Christ? Also, since when did decent, respectable, and humane mean Christian? There are decent, respectable, and humane Muslims living in our country as well. Even if the majority of our population is Christian, that does not make us a Christian nation, calling the U.S. a Christian nation downplays members of other faiths and atheists that live here.

garysher

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sgtdmski

Hey folks argue all you want, the simple fact is that I provided a definition, and considering the word is an adjective and that the majority of Americans claim to be Christians the statement is true. I seem to notice how you conveniently overlook the Supreme Court ruling. Once again you rely so much on it to defend abortion, the SCOTUS tells us what is constitutional, well it would seem even to the Court we are a Christian nation. Since they determine the law of the land, it is the law of the land. Like or not. You can't have it both ways.

dmk

__________________
Conservatism, I repeat is not an ideology. It does not breed fanatics....But if you want men who seek, reasonably and prudently, to reconcile the best in wisdom of our ancestors with the change which is essential to a vigorous civil social existence, then you will do well to turn to conservative principles
-Russell Kirk-