(no subject)

[eirias]

From Andrew Sullivan:

"...it is nevertheless true to say, from all that I have read, that the following seven critical early American leaders were Deists and denied the divinity of Jesus: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, and Thomas Paine. In fact, can you imagine what a senior Republican would say today about the following statement: 'The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion'? That's from the Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli, Article XI, passed by the Senate under John Adams' presidency. No one saying that could be nominated in today's explicitly Christianist GOP. In fact, many of the statements of the Founding Fathers sound more like Christopher Hitchens than George W. Bush - and would be characterized as bigotry by much of the Republican right. It's important to realize that today's Christianists are not representative of the constitutional order and philosophy of this country's founding; and are, in fact, one of the deeper threats to the maintenance of the freedom bequeathed to Americans as a birthright."

Comments

[kirin]

A-yup. I've been saying/thinking pretty much exactly that paragraph for years now. (Well, not to claim I'd be exactly as elegant as Andrew Sullivan, but the gist of it.) It's the fine print on the back of the same clue-by-four that has "Separation of Church and State, you Morons!" in big letters on the front.

[elwe.livejournal.com]

"it is nevertheless true to say, from all that I have read, that the following seven critical early American leaders were Deists and denied the divinity of Jesus: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, and Thomas Paine"

Quite true. Yet another reason Alexander Hamilton was the coolest of the Founders and Framers. :-)

I'm quite the fan of separating Church and State --- for the sake of the Church. :-)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've never understood why more religious people in this country don't feel that way. It's clear to me, and it's been clear to a lot of people, that politics is about (a) compromise and (b) making money, and neither of those things meshes very well with my idea of Christianity. Maybe there are other religions it would mesh with, but none of them have nearly the power of the Christian Coalition in this country.

Or maybe the set of religious people who "get it" overlaps considerably with the set of people who realize that a certain level of chattering indiscriminately about the depth of one's faith to the public at large is approximately as rude as announcing, to everyone who'll listen, how much money you just spent on a house, and hence heathens like me just don't hear much about it. (I guess my bias, having been raised Catholic, is obvious: it's what a person does that counts, and what she says about what she does can only detract from it. I think Catholics are wrong about a lot of things but I'm pretty sure they're right about that.)