Quote:
Originally Posted by Displaced Flames fan
Define Christian principles though IFF.
If we are talking about ethics and morality than it was.
If we are talking about religion then it wasn't.
Lots of terms in this thread being thrown around rather loosely and without qualification.
Be careful. Pollsters aren't.
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Well, Christian principles would at least mean that the framers were, or were primarily "Christians," right? They weren't. Franklin was virtually an atheist, having (by the time he helped Jefferson pen the DOI) long since stopped attending church and having also written in his autobiography a criticism that GW Bush would do well to observe: that churches are more interested in making good "christians" than good "citizens" (he said "presbyterians," but the point is the same). Thomas Jefferson was a deist, which is about as humanist as you get. Ditto John Adams. The list goes on, down to enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Paine, and even your Crevecoeurs and de Tocquevilles, etc. etc. These guys just weren't Christians--and to say that they were is just bad history.
Where I think one should "be careful" is in claiming a hard and fast linkage between "Christianity" and "ethics and morality." They aren't the same thing--and one does not come from the other. Were ethics and morality key parts of the polity that Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, etc. created? Sure--but it was an ethics and morality predicated on the rights and liberties of the individual, including the individual's freedom from religious tyrrany and the promise that the state would not be involved in religious practice at all. Was it a "Christian" ethics and morality?
Heck no.