Even in the European mind that was what constituted the establishment of a state religion – government supporting the clergy of a particular religious persuasion. I’ve never advocated that our federal government do the same, it’s simply unconstitutional.

And a careful reading of founding opinion reveals that was also their understanding of not wanting the federal government establishing an official Christian denomination, though that option was certain left open to the States themselves. But not a single founder ever raised the alarm of Christians influencing politics or laws at the local, state or federal level. Atheists do it all the time today, why not Christians?

The mainstream founders also never stated that we must be wary of Christian faith/religion having full sway in either the public debate or in the hearts and minds of legislators who make law. Neither did they say Christians should be restricted in how much influence they can have on the body politick. Nor did they advocate the Christian religion be disenfranchised or censored in the public domain as has unconstitutionally happened in America today.

The fact still remains that it was largely Christian men schooled in general Christian principles who framed the U.S. Constitution. As much as you seem loathed to admit this transparent fact of history, your stubborn refusal to accept this reality is most curious indeed. Unreasoned fears of what might happen if Americans recognize again that it was Christians which shaped and founded this constitutional republic, doesn’t give anyone the right to revise history as you and others have.

Crickets still chirping.

“If the men who wrote [the Constitution] wanted the United States to be a Christian nation why does the Constition only mention religion twice…and then only in exclusionary terms?

Why? It would have been so simple…

Crickets are still chirping.

I also provided an answer to the classic historical misrepresentation by seculars of the Treaty of Tripoli on the Specter Bill thread. You really need to tighten up your logic. I wish you weren’t so wedded to very sophisticated secular dogmatism which keeps you from seeing the forest because of the trees.

Again, quotes don’t really tell the whole story but you seem to be stuck on the idea so here are a few:

Thomas Jefferson

“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding…”

—Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

“Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.”

—-Letter to William Short, April 13, 1820

Does this sound like a Christian to you…denying the divinity of Jesus? Hardly! But that’s understandable since virtually every educated person in Europe at the time was a deist and many of our forefathers were educated there.

Jesus only appeared to have value to Jefferson as a moral teacher. He even made his own “ Bible”, where he deleted all the absurd supernatural claims (like walking on water and being born to a virgin) to isolate the moral teachings of Jesus. Not exactly the actions of a devout Christian.

You also mentioned John Adams. Here are a few quotes from him on the subject of religion and more importantly on the nature of our great nation:

“As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?

—Letter to FA Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816

Indeed, Mr. Jefferson, what could be invented to debase the ancient Christianism which Greeks, Romans, Hebrews and Christian factions, above all the Catholics, have not fraudulently imposed upon the public? Miracles after miracles have rolled down in torrents.

—Letter to Thomas Jefferson, December 3, 1813

Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.

—Letter to his son, John Quincy Adams, November 13, 1816

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved — the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!

—Letter to Thomas Jefferson, date unknown

God is an essence that we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.

—John Adams, (this awful blashpemy” that he refers to is the myth of the Incarnation of Christ).

And of course there is the time Mr. Adams and a unanimous senate declared in the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, a mere 9 years after the Constition was written:

“…the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.”

If you really want “original source material” on whether the framers intended this to be a “Christian nation” you should try reading the Constition itself.

When you’re done, answer me this: if the men who wrote it wanted the United States to be a Christian nation why does the Constition only mention religion twice…and then only in exclusionary terms?

Their intention was absolutely clear, Hank; they wanted a secular government. Period. The religious men among them wanted to protect religion from government and the freethinkers wanted to protect government from religion. Don’t you see the wisdom of that? Everybody wins.

Why do you find it necessary to rewrite our Constitution and try to imbue it with religion? As you’ve pointed out, many of our framers were religious to some degree or another but they understood the necessity of separating church and state. Why don’t you?

The framers were wise men. Give them some credit.

Until you provide original source documentation for your argument as I have for mine as coming from the mouths of the mainstream founders themselves, I’m the only one with quotes in this dog fight. Your poodle doesn’t hunt, dude!

Surely if our Founding Fathers were such Deists, the historical record would be rife with clear quotations to that effect. Instead, all we have is modern connect-the-phantom-dots “scholarship”. And you’re confident in that? Might that not be like the blind leading the blind … you know, echo-chamber syndrome?

I suppose you’ll start embracing the global-warming-is-man-made argument simply because it passes “peer review”. Hmmmmmm?

But if you search Jane Fonda, you will come up with a site and pictures of her, aiding and abetting the enemy.

I guess pictures do lie,according to Ms. Fonda.

Re: 135: …when God gave man the ability to speak, along with that gift came the right to speak.

As elucidated in which book of the Bible? Surely such a fundamental human right would have been specifically expounded in the Word of God. Which passage, please?

No…even if your god was real it would be obvious from the Bible that free expression is a concept of men who lived many centuries later. God never bothers to mention it.

I’m pretty sure Biblical nuance is the invention of men too.

Similarly, God giving life to man means we have the right to life does it not.

Hm… I see what you’re saying but I don’t know if I’d call it a “right”. Assuming it was a “gift”…do gifts come with rights attached? Not implicitly.

Also, given his many genocidal actions against innocent people (mostly in the pre-Christian Jewish part of the Bible) I think it’s difficult to support that the Biblical God considers life a “right”. It seems more like a bequest: the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. He also permits men to slaughter indiscriminately, with no repercussion…I’d cite chapter and verse but I’ve already done that here many times so I assume you know the passages to which I refer.

Do we really need an engraved invitation to understand the nuances of Scripture?

There’s a really huge problem with “Biblical nuance”. Think about it: the people God supposedly intended the Bible for lived in an age of pre-literacy. Literacy (and with it the ability to comprehend literary nuance) was very, very rare. Only the priests and scholars could do it and they still never agreed on much.

Omniscient as he is supposed to be, God surely knew that men would slaughter many thousands of innocents over the centuries through erroneous interpretation of his “word”. And yet he threw it on out there in its present form: a hodge-podge clutter of primitive tradition, conflicting accounts and outright absurdities, presumably with full knowledge of the horrific, bloody consequences.

Sounds more like malice than nuance.

RE: #134: And of course founder and first Supreme Court Justice John Jay was merely deluding himself…

and:

I very concisely remarked that if there is no God there could be no moral obligations, and I did not see how society could subsist without them. [Your quote from John Jay]

Yes, he was deluding himself. I always get a kick out of people who say that without Biblical morality there would be no morality at all…as if Biblical morality is anything but primitive and bloodthirsty in the first place. Men are moral in spite of many passages in the Bible, not because of them. Other passages enshrine morality that exists independent of the Bible (for instance in other cultures which have never heard of it).

I usually ask people who say this: so if you stopped believing in God, you’d rape children and eat babies?

What about you, Hank? Would you do these things? I think not. And the next question always seems to give them pause: why not?

No, it’s never them who would go around committing evils in the absence of God, they say. It’s always someone else. Hm…food for thought, huh?

…and so LITTLE IF ANY CREDIT should go to Christianity’s pervasive influence upon the Founders…

That’s a straw man. I didn’t say that Christianity had no influence upon the Founders: it clearly did. I said that Alexander Hamilton’s views were deistic at the time of our nation’s founding…and you’ve admitted this much. There were other men with Christian backgrounds who embraced a deistic worldview during the same era, including Jefferson. This doesn’t mean they ran around calling themselves “deists”…as I mentioned above, deism didn’t really have a church of it’s own. It was a merely conceptual leap many men were taking at the time.

And again, you’re missing one very key element which lies at the heart of the matter: if they had meant for this to be a nation founded on Christianity THEY WOULD HAVE MENTIONED IT IN THE CONSTITUTION. But they didn’t…not even once. It would have been very easy to do so…a single sentence could have made this a Christian nation. But they chose not to.

Read the Iraqi Constitution if you want to see how the constitution for a nation founded on religion is supposed to read.

No, it’s very, very clear that they intended this to be a secular nation peopled by folks who were free to worship as they chose. They only mention religion once and that is to permanently separate it from the sphere government. They’d had quite enough of government religion with the Church of England.

My original source documents? Don’t be silly. Are you claiming that certainty only comes from direct experience? I hope not, unless you yourself read ancient Greek and Aramaic.

I’ve already told you, I have enough confidence in the overall neutrality of scholarship to at least take their work into account and weigh the probabilities for myself. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time I take a road trip.

Nothing you’ve presented has convinced me that historical academia has a hyper-secular agenda to stifle Christianity but every word you write convinces me that you have an agenda of your own, whether you comprehend it or not.

You are a defender of the faith, Hank…and I have no problem with that. But it influences everything you say and that’s plain for everyone to see…everyone who’s paying attention, anyway.

Of course some would simply say its propaganda without producing any original historical sources to prove otherwise.

My opinion of peer review: Except for hard science evaluation like reviewing claims about room temperature fusion or some such, “peer review” is often little more than a sophisticated echo chamber of like-minded people. When it comes to historical evaluation, peer review is used far too often in maintaining the secular orthodoxy.

WHERE’S THE ORIGINAL SOURCE DOCUMENTS EXTOLLING THE CLASSIC PRINCIPLES OF DEISM DURING THE AMERICAN FOUNDING PERIOD? (crickets still chirping)

Similarly, God giving life to man means we have the right to life does it not. That no man can take that right except God and His ministering rulers. Do we really need an engraved invitation to understand the nuances of Scripture? Quit straining at gnats and swallowing camels, Godfrey.

You really do need to read Sir William Blackstone. You’ll begin to understand Biblical nuance.