The story is much more enlightening, and frankly, more educational than this meme projects. Yes, it's correct, at least on a surface level, but there's also the reason they decided to create a secular state. Namely, even though they were all, broadly speaking, Christians or Christian-inspired deists, they also recognised that Christianity came in hundreds of different flavours, not all of which are agreeable. They recognised that a religious state would have to pick a side in all of the hundreds of different spats that Christians have gone through over the most minute details of their dogma. Furthermore, they also realised that a state is most fragile when it is just founded, and thus, to survive, the state would have to have as much support as possible. Pretty much everyone was at least begrudgingly satisfied with a secular state.
You see, if they had created a religious country, they could not guarantee that it would stay loyal to whatever interpretation they had settled on. Future governments could, if they were able to, could easily "reinterpret" the state dogma to whatever they wanted. They understood that if the Government had the power to meddle in religious affairs, it was only a matter of time before someone whose religion was not agreeable to take over and start doing things that you don't like, justifying it with their religion.
Namely, even though they were all, broadly speaking, Christians
The majority of the founders were deists.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Founding-Fathers-Deism-and-Christianity-1272214
Although orthodox Christians participated at every stage of the new republic, Deism influenced a majority of the Founders. The movement opposed barriers to moral improvement and to social justice. It stood for rational inquiry, for skepticism about dogma and mystery, and for religious toleration. Many of its adherents advocated universal education, freedom of the press, and separation of church and state. If the nation owes much to the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is also indebted to Deism, a movement of reason and equality that influenced the Founding Fathers to embrace liberal political ideals remarkable for their time.
it was only a matter of time before someone whose religion was not agreeable to take over and start doing things that you don’t like
Not just a disagreeable religion, but any religion.
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/establishment-clause-separation-of-church-and-state/
Both Jefferson and fellow Virginian James Madison felt that state support for a particular religion or for any religion was improper. They argued that compelling citizens to support through taxation a faith they did not follow violated their natural right to religious liberty. The two were aided in their fight for disestablishment by the Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and other “dissenting” faiths of Anglican Virginia.
The christo-fascist MAGA movement is not consistent with the origins of our nation and the Constitution despite originalists claims to the contrary. We are not a christian nation, but a secular nation. All religions, including Christianity, were deemed dangerous to mix with the government.
I'm sure you didn't mean anything by it in your argument, but these misconceptions are what the MAGA movement will use to push christian nationalism on all of us and to exclude people based on their faith or lack of faith.
In the context of the Government subscribing to a particular religion, I use the word "religion", but I guess I really mean "religious belief", i.e. a belief about religion, in the broadest sense. I would consider deism to be a religious belief under that definition.
So to reiterate my point, if you, the designer of a system of government, allow the state to hold and enforce a religious belief of any kind, eventually a government will take power which holds a different religious belief, and use the state"s ability to deal with religious matters to enforce their different belief upon the people. And this will inevitably happen. So the best protection you can design against this is to withhold this power from the state by explicitly declaring it to be secular.
they also recognized that Christianity came in hundreds of different flavours
They can say and make up anything they want. -IDC because there's hard enough evidence in the root of their religion which is The Bible which also points to the problems of Genocide and Barbaric Racial Slavery as being a Judeo-Christian endeavor (among many other sick activities). No need to break them up into camps of good and evil; throw the book at them because they all point to it as a root and Jesus: "think not that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets", "It is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs", "do not go unto the gentiles".
Over 250 years ago, when the country was founded, the founders knew better than to believe the hucksterism of religion.
It’s very frustrating that most people, even today, cannot get past the hucksterism of religion.
No, the founders were mostly
Christiansreligious too. They just knew better than to trustChristiandogmatic spats not to endanger the stability of their infant country.Edit to correct my mistake about them being Christian and to clarify: I'm not claiming the US is Christian in origin. It explicitly isn't, but not because the founding fathers "didn't believe". Deism is still the believe in some supernatural force, even if it presents itself as a more rational form, and not all of them even were deists. They just believed it would be better to separate their individual religious convictions from the mutual political ambition.
No, they weren’t. Many of the founding fathers practiced deism, and were barely even religious at all. Only some of the founding fathers were Christians, and not a majority of them.
Thomas Jefferson even has his own “version”of the Bible where any mention of supernaturality has been removed.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-founding-fathers-religious-wisdom/
These dumbasses. Can they read the first fucking sentence? They quote it all the time, maybe try reading it. It says
"We the people...."
Not
"We the people and invisible dieties...."
Nobody is coming down from on high to save us. It's only us to solve every problem.
They like to point out the religious language in the Declaration of Independence as if it's a legal document, which it is not.
They did however include 30 years of protected slave trade as an unamendable right.
So they still have that in common.
This wasn't beneficial at the time, and isn't to this day. Name one time when pointing out hypocrisy has changed a single mind.
Hypocrisy? Instructions on how to properly conduct slave trade are detailed in Leviticus.
I read a lot of Goosebumps and Stephen King when I was a kid. You don't see me trying to start a government by gluing masks on people and feeding blood to cars. Some people appear capable of reading things without acting upon it and punishing their constituents.
Jefferson wrote/cut/paste his own Bible removing the magic-y stuff attributed to Jesus.
I read the Constitution in my Bible, so obviously the founding fathers intended this country to be Christian, modeled after the godly mega churches.
How are you supposed to even run a state using the Bible? The old testament has some specific brutal and irrelevant rules. Then new testament tells you not to do that anymore. Then in its place the New Testament says VIRTUALLY NOTHING about how to run a state. Seriously.
All Jesus' teaching are appeals to personal conscience. He's NEVER talking to Christians about how to rule other people. Except, you know, where he explicitly says not to do that
"You know that the rulers of the [unbelievers] lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. NOT SO WITH YOU. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be a servant". Mat 20:25-26
About the only thing you can get from the New Testament is Paul saying that god appoints governments and that they bear the sword to punish the wrongdoer.
That's it.
Anything about property rights? Bodily right? Tort? Balance of powers? Structure of executive, legislative. ANYTHING??!
The founding fathers didn't base the constitution on the Bible because you can't in any way that makes the slightest bit of sense.
"Do not resist the evil people do" (Mat 5:39)... "Do not refuse the one who wants to take from you.. Give him the shirt off your back also" (Mat 5:40). Codify that. Good luck!
If it's not supposed to be the church then why is the prevailing ideology around here "store brand catholic social theory"?
Because it is not what it is supposed to be.
