I like to keep religion and politics completely separated, but the Republicans won’t play along. Using public funds to pay for religious schools is a bad idea but the only reason these conservatives have any problem with it is because there is no legal way to exclude Islamic schools from the program. Maybe they should have thought of that before they went ahead and passed the bill.
What’s more irritating to me is the constraint refrain from conservative Republicans that our Founding Fathers were Christians and wanted to set up a Christian country. If you accept that Christianity involves believing in the Holy Trinity, then Andrew Jackson was our first Christian president, and he only adopted the religion after he served two terms in office. And it wasn’t just our presidents who rejected Christ’s divinity. Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, etc., were all anti-trinitarians.
The country was founded by well-read men of the Enlightenment. Learn it and love it.
The top guys were, but the country was highly Christian. Though they were weird sects of Christian probably considered heretics or crazed radicals by the mainstream of Europe.
I’m not saying the US is a “Christian Nation” that’s stupid, but Christianity played a significant role.
Well, sorry, but Joe the Horse Mechanic didn’t create the ideological and philosophical underpinnings of our country. Among those who provided the brainpower, only John Jay was what you would properly call a Christian, and he wanted to exclude Catholics from holding public office.
Back then, you pretty much had to belong to a church to hold any public office. The true test was whether or not you took communion. The Episcopalian minister in Philadelphia asked Washington to stop attending Sunday services because he set a bad example when he got up and walked out instead of taking communion. The Adamses were unitarians. Thomas Jefferson rewrote the Bible by taking out all the miracles. Madison was a Deist. Monroe seems to have had no religion at all. Jackson became a Presbyterian after he left office.
Martin Van Buren attended some Dutch reformed services but is not known to have ever joined a church or been particularly religious. W.H. Harrison died without having joined a church. John Tyler wash’t religious.
I think James Polk would qualify as a Christian, but he wasn’t baptized until he was on his deathbed. Zaxh Taylor never took communion. Millard Fillmore was a Unitarian. Franklin Pierce didn’t take communion or get baptized until after he left office.
James Buchanan was a Presbyterian. He’s probably the first president to be openly religious/trinitarian while in office.
Abraham Lincoln was a Deist/Athiest.
I think you have to go all the way to our 23rd president, Benjamin Harrison, to find someone who was without a doubt a full-on communicant of a standard trinitarian Christian church during his presidency.
What if we taught this stuff in our schools?
Our public schools and teachers would be demonized.
Oh wait…
Demonstrations of religious piety and churchgoing as a test for office is a fairly modern development, right? Largely as a reaction to communism?
Or is its origins earlier in the twentieth century? I’m pretty sure it only became relevant after communism and the rise of Catholics like Al Smith and Kennedy.
Well, sorry, but Joe the Horse Mechanic didn’t create the ideological and philosophical underpinnings of our country.
Now we get to the interesting part: to what extent are those top-down “ideological and philosophical” constructs actually the underpinnings of our nation, vs. overlays grafted onto a pre-existing popular culture?
I’m going to boldly go out on a limb and say “Somewhat!”
I see that one of the least stupid Republicans is back in the news.
Huntsman is indeed one of the least stupid Republicans, but didn’t he pander disgracefully to the Teatards during his 15 minutes of running for President?
No you’re wrong Jesus himself was present at the constitutional convention. He strongly objected to the language enshrining the federal government’s absolute right to tax, penalize, fine, and in general raise funds for it’s own operation under any term that you please. He said that just hurts job creators and kills liberty.
Afterwards, Christ went on to use his ability to control markets and foresee the future to make a fortune in derivatives trading. He then leveraged his money to lobby for a change in the legal code so that, having everlasting life and the ability to be everywhere at once, he became the very first corporation.
Study this. It will be on the test.
The fact is, the evangelical Christian viewpoint that is mainstream today would be considered a radical fringe viewpoint at the time of the founding fathers. So the Christian’s effort to tie their crazy fundamentalist viewpoints with the political leaders of the 18th century is just a lunatic’s errand. But that would make it kind of fitting in the context of today’s political environment.
Animals, bow down to gods. Human Beings, do not.
Animals don’t bow down to gods.
When have you ever seen an animal bow down to a god?
Religion seems to be a uniquely human phenomenon.