Re: Does the govt have the right.....
QC said:
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Also, your statement, "Some of the founding fathers were Christian, but many were Deists or Unitarians, and many more had a merely passing connection to a Christian denomination." is false based on my research and seems absurd based on simple knowledge of the time. Here are the numbers I have found: A total of 204 guys comprised this group,...
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I also strongly believe that there is no basis for the establishment of a state religion, I am only commenting on the role of the combined Judeo-Christian Bibles in the shaping of our collective, American values.
I also have a couple of questions. Why is it important that you dig for The Treaty of Tripoli to dispute this? Yes, there is an official document that says that the US is not "in any sense founded on the Christian religion". What is it that you intend to prove? That those who wrote all of our principle documents, brainwashed themselves into not believing everything they believed in before they picked up a pen? Seriously, definitely not rhetorical.
re: the church affiliations of the founding fathers percentage by denomination - 175 out of 204 leaves 29 (14.2%) with no known affiliation (not concluding there were 29 agnostics/athiests but allow for the probability of some); and, I'd bet there were a whole bunch of Christmas- and Easter-only churchgoers among the 175 - but don't ask for an authoritative cite, that's just an impression based on a lot of reading over the years. You may be aware that not being affiliated with a church could have disastrous social and economic consequences in those days.
I provided a list of values clearly not based on Judeo-Christian teachings - here's a couple more: all men are created equal; life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as unalienable rights; right to bear arms. That last one isn't a Christian doctrine - I'm less familiar with Judaism.
But I'll give you a couple that clearly are: importance of nuclear family, and male dominated society. And I think, separation of church and state (I'm using that phrase literally - the church is not the government and vice-versa) was taught by Christ, a reversal of Jewish tradition.
Ethics, morality, rule of law...all Judeo-Christian values sure, but also values of many other religions, and plenty of non-religious people. Belief in a Creator - common to every religion ever devised, maybe even cultures where no religion ever was devised.
to answer your questions: I mentioned the Treaty of Tripoli to support my assertion.
What do I intend to prove? That I can dispute the statement, "the original values of the US are based on Judeo-Christian values".
Believe it or not, I'm
very nearly saying that the authors of our principle documents "brainwashed themselves into not believing everything they believed in before they picked up a pen". Figuratively speaking of course. They didn't drop their previously held beliefs; rather, purposefully avoided the inclusion of any concepts, or "values" if you will, solely on the basis of religion.
This is why I state that any commonality (at least, the original link) between American values and Judeo-Christian literature is coincidental. One isn't "based on" the other.
Jefferson, Madison, Adams, et al were prolific writers and as you noted, weren't shy about criticising religion. But the Adams quote about the "indissoluble bond" is the killer, I hadn't seen that one before. Interestingly, I believe it was Adams who signed the Treaty of Tripoli, but that doesn't carry a lot of weight.
Bottom line, it's pretty much an academic excersize, hope you don't feel like I wasted your time. For what it's worth, I concede.
For the record, my perspective is (this is repeated from another thread, pardon the redundancy), church and state should be separate, but it should be more like a fence of separation instead of a wall, like a nice hurricane fence, that doesn't interfere with the view, or conversation.
