Quote:
Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan
Since no-one in this thread really asked that question, we may be getting slightly off-track. But my point was that I WOULD answer no to that question. The framers were enlightenment humanists. They founded the nation based on enlightenment humanism--and because they were either implicitly or (in many cases) explicitly not even Christians, to claim that somehow religious principles of any kind were in the backs of their minds is absurd.
This is the true irony: as it's written, the U.S. is one of the oldest countries in the world that is founded on purely secular principles. Yet you wouldn't know it sometimes, the way a few people on the Christian right talk about their ideology as though it were somehow justified by a strict reading of the constitution.
What's weirder is that as hard as those Christians (they're by no means ALL Christians--or even good Christians, IMO) work to claim the framers as scions of Christian principles, they are unwilling to claim the famous and brilliant American thinkers who really WERE Christians: Emerson and Thoreau. Add to that William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and a number of others and there are plenty of Christians to choose from. Why doesn't Pat Robertson (as a for instance) associate himself with Emerson? Why does he try to claim people like Franklin and Jefferson, both of whom found religion pretty irrelevant to their lives?
It's a puzzle. But one thing is for sure. The U.S. was not founded on "Christian principles," however you care to define the term. It was not even--and this is important--founded by Christians at all.
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Wow, where to begin!
We're not off track at all. You stated that you can't believe how many Americans believe that America was founded on Christian principles. I'm not arguing your history at all, I know it well. The problem is that when people make the statement that America was founded on Christian principles they may not mean what you think they do. If I'm asked that question, and you totally missed this I guess, I would answer yes. Not because the founders were Christians, they weren't. Not because morality was born the same day as Christianity, it wasn't. Simply because the vision set forth by the founders adheres, whether by design or not, to basic principles of morality that are held in high regard by Christianity and any number of other faiths. The term Christian principles can be interpreted in a number of different ways and the important interpretation in this discussion is the one for each specific person that you referred to as believing the country was founded on Christian principles. Your interpretation is irrelevant! Do you understand my point?
As for Pat Robertson, who cares? The guy is a fruit. The answer to your question is simple....Robertson can influence politics by falsely claiming 'Christian brotherhood' with Frankling and Jefferson. Yeah a lot of evangelicals follow him and his ilk, but I guarantee that number is far less than most of the people on this forum want to believe. I look at some of the things posted here about the makeup of America and it makes me laugh. So far off base. Yes, there is an element. No, we are not teaching creationism in school even if some loon proposes it and gets a vote on it in the state school board. I'm in the middle of it, I would know!
Your last paragraph, well....I don't know what to tell you. If someone says they believe the US was founded on Christian principles they aren't necessarily wrong...whether you like it or not. If they say it was founded by Christians, that's another story. Finally, the fact that the founders were not Christians did not prohibit them from forming a nation based on principles that most Christians hold as their own.