It was only by quoting me in excerpts out of context that what you quoted from me loses its clarity.
I see you omitted the parts where you were completely obliterated in you assertions, such as "separation of Church-State" being a 20th century creation. So please dn't speak to me of quoting you in excerpts.
I omitted a lengthy bit of filler material on your part, that bypasses my point with interpretations and rulings decades later. The 1962 U.S. Supreme Court ruling removing prayer from schools could be listed by you also, but it does not,
in the slightest represent the intent of those who signed the Constitution and Declaration.
It was a completely arbitrary ruling, with no prior precedent, and with no intent to rule based on what our founders actually intended.
My concern is not with 200 years of rulings, but with the beliefs and intent of the original framers of our government.
Again:
Their original intent was for the Bible to be a part of education and government, and the ONLY restriction on that was to not allow one denomination of Christianity (such as Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism, as I already said above) to be imposed on all citizens as an obligatory state religion. The rest of what you post, while law that may apply to specifics of other cases, is just diversionary fluff on your part here.
The "separation of church and state" simply is that no sect of Christianity will be imposed on the entire people of the United States, as the Anglican Church was in England, and as the Roman Catholic church was in Italy and other large sections of Europe.
But God is referred to four times in the Declaration of Independence.
And the Constitution is not simply dated, but also inscribed "in the year of our Lord..."
That's your "proof"??!!! Falling back on a once-common manner of dating important papers as unrevealing of religious intent as the use of B.C. and A.D. is today.
Again, what about the Constitution ITSELF? Nothing. You'd place more weight on the dating on the top of the document than on it's content.
As for The Declaration, I already pointed out that the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence and many state Constitutions at the time had references to Go inside them and religious restrictions and tests.
Again, I already said that the private writings of Washington, Jefferson, Morris, etc., that I've quoted several times elsewhere, make clear their belief in Christianity and its essential role in Americvan government and education, and that its absence in Greek and Roman attempts at Democracy is what doomed those states to failure. That in the absence of Christian principles, American democracy would be doomed to failure as well.
When the Constitutional Convention opened in 1787, with George Washington as its president, legally entrenched privileges for Protestant Christianity were the rule. The Massachusetts Constitution extended equal protection of the law, and the right to hold office, only to Protestant Christians (restrictions that infuriated Adams, the state's favorite son). New York granted political equality to Jews but not to Roman Catholics. Maryland, the home state of the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, gave full civic rights to Protestants and Catholics but not to Jews, freethinkers, and deists. In Delaware, officeholders had to attest to their belief in the Holy Trinity. Those were the good old days.
Thanks to the strong influence of Jefferson and Madison, Virginia stood alone among the states in guaranteeing complete civic equality and religious freedom to all citizens. In 1786, Virginians rejected a proposal by Patrick Henry to provide public financing for the teaching of Christianity in schools and instead passed an Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which ruled out tax support for religious instruction and religious tests for public office. Significantly, the new law was supported by a coalition of evangelicals, who—as a minority in a state dominated by Episcopalians—feared government interference with religion, and freethinking Enlightenment rationalists, who feared religious interference with government.
The influence of Virginia's law, enacted less than a year before the writing of the federal Constitution, cannot be overstated. The delegates in Philadelphia could have looked for guidance to a crazy quilt of conflicting state laws, rooted in religious prejudice and incestuous Old World church-state entanglements. Instead they chose the Virginia model, which, as Jefferson proudly stated in his autobiography, "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination."
I think that's what gets your goat. That it extends protection to EVERYONE by not favoring just one religion.
It doesn't bother me in any way.
So what?
The Framers allowed for all religions to be tolerated, but they intended for Christian principles to be the guiding moral influence.
The education bill (unclear in what you quoted, without source) was possibly rejected because it was feared one sect of Christian ideas could be imposed through that particular state-funded program. Or that it was redundant and a waste of tax dollars, in such an already strongly Christian and literate community.
Religious reactionaries of the 18th century, by contrast, were honest in their attacks on the secularism of the new Constitution. One North Carolina minister observed with forthright disgust, during his state's ratification debate, that the abolition of religious tests for officeholders amounted to nothing less than
"an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us." The Reverend John M. Mason, a fire-breathing New York minister, declared the absence of God in the Constitution "an omission which no pretext whatever can palliate" and warned that Americans would "have every reason to tremble, lest the Governor of the universe, who will not be treated with indignity by a people more than by individuals, overturn from its foundation the fabric we have been rearing, and crush us to atoms in the wreck."
Your source seems more focused on proving the bigotry and anti-semitism of the founders, rather than the intent of the founders. Even in the way it described those quoted.
These were founders who had left a Europe that had state-imposed religions, and there was heated debate, I'm sure, on how to safeguard religious freedom in the U.S., from falling under the same state-imposed sectarian hegemony.
The marvel of America's founders, even though nearly all of the new nation's citizens were not only Christian but Protestant, was that they possessed the foresight to avoid establishing a Christian or religious government and instead chose to create the first secular government in the world. That the new Constitution failed to acknowledge God's power and instead ceded governmental authority to "We the People…in order to form a more perfect Union" was a break not only with historically distant European precedents but with recent American precedents, most notably the 1781 Articles of Confederation, which did pay homage to "the Great Governor of the World," and the Declaration of Independence, with its majestic statement that "all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." It is worth noting here that the Declaration was a bold and impassioned proclamation of liberty, while the Constitution was a blueprint for a real government, with all the caution about practical consequences (such as divisive squabbles about the precise nature of divine authority over earthly affairs) required of any blueprint.
Again, if the framers wanted a total secular break in the Constitution, they would not have included the phrase
"In the year of our Lord..."
They would have simply written the date.
Clearly, they wished to include some degree of Christian reverence, as is evident in their other personal histories and writings.
Further, the clear role intended of the Bible and Christian principles in American democracy is clear in the writings of virtually all our founding fathers.
John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, to name only a few, were prolific writers who contradicted themselves (and one another) frequently. They certainly believed in some form of God or Providence, as Enlightenment rationalists preferred to call the deity, but that is all we can conclude with reasonable certainty. Jefferson's political opponents in the early 1800s were as mistaken to call him an atheist as you are are to claim him as a committed Christian. (For one thing, Jefferson emphatically rejected the idea that Jesus was divine and instead regarded him as a great but wholly human teacher of morality.) Adams' critics and admirers, then and now, have been equally misguided in their attempts to portray him as a man of orthodox faith.
There are a lot of liberal revisionists out there who allege all these guys were Deists, etc., or otherwise try to historically water down their clear beliefs.
What did distinguish the most important revolutionary leaders was a particularly adaptable combination of political and religious beliefs that included strong hostility toward all ecclesiastical hierarchies. The Enlightenment conviction that if God existed, he expected humans to rely on their own reason to conduct earthly affairs; and the assignment of faith to the sphere of private conscience rather than public duty. These convictions carried the day when the former revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution.
That they believed in the Bible itself, and not the external church doctrine of any denomination.
That makes them neither Deist nor non-Christian.
As I said before, Christianity was intended to be taught in schools, and God was frequently referenced in our courts and government up until the 1960s. Even the Supreme Court, Senate and Congress still open in prayer, as do our Presidential inaugurations, and chaplains are provided in all branches of the U.S. military as well.
You seem to feel "separation of church and state" means the total separation of Christianity from any branch of government or education. Clearly Jefferson did not see it that way, and none of the other founding fathers even use that phrase.
Jefferson did no major writings on the subject, and his only use of the "wall of separation between church and state" phrase is in an obscure 1802 letter Jefferson wrote in response to an inquiry by the Danbury Baptists.
Jefferson simply meant that religious leaders should not control U.S. government. Not that all mention of the Bible or Christianity, or even prayer, should be banned from our schools and government, as has been increasingly occurring over the last 40-plus years. I already addressed this point. You asserted that Separation of church-state was a 20th Century invention and now after being proven wrong you're backpedaling and minimizing Jefferson's thoughts on the subject.
As I said, my concern is not with arbitrary court writings interpreting, and often discarding, the Framers' original intent regarding the role of Christianity in American government.
My concern is with what the original framers themselves intended, as evidenced in their own actions and writings.
I fail to see that you've made a convincing case for exclusion of Christianity from government. I'm at this point utterly lost in just what it is you
are trying to prove.
The founders themselves had varying ideas about how much distance to place between their own beliefs and their public roles. Washington saw nothing wrong with issuing presidential proclamations of thanks- giving to God; Jefferson considered such proclamations unconstitutional. Justice Scalia predictably cites Washington's thanksgiving proclamations in support of Ten Commandments displays and dismisses Jefferson's position. In an amusing 1814 letter to his friend Thomas Cooper, Jefferson noted that even Connecticut—which had still not dropped religious restrictions in its state constitution—declared that "the laws of God shall be the laws of their land, except where their own contradict them."
There's nothing to disagree with here. There was some controversy among the founders. They all seem Christian, and again seem to just debate to what level Christianity should be included in government institutions, law, education, etc.
The only question is to what degree it should be included or limited.
Any of their debate is a far cry from not even being able to pray in school or bring a bible, or to even display the 10 Commandments in a state courthouse.
Again, what is your point?
What you suggest simply insures that Christians will be marginalized and isolated from having any representation or political voice in establishing the morals and government of the United States.
That is absolutely not what our founders intended:
You seem to place Christianity, which is the majority religion in this country as somehow being the minority religion and in peril of being marginalized by the atheist majority. Odd for someone who rails against the claims of victimhood from REAL minorities.
There can be no question that, despite Christians being the majority in this country (about 33% of churchgoers, but over 90% of Americans polled describe themselves as "Christian", although clearly not all of them are Bible readers) that despite this, there is a clear and stated intent by any number of radical groups to marginalize and silence Christians from having a voice in our government.
It's not paranoia when these groups state that as their intent, and with elite liberal judges on their side, leverage court rulings that are in complete opposition to the beliefs and values of a majority of Americans.
