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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (41112)	6/20/1999 10:30:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I am afraid my bibles (about 15) are filled with personal notes in several languages. They are all full of questionable tendentious translations. I love my KJV, NASB, Williams and Beck parallel. It beats me how every one of the words of the bible could be true. I am not a Christian in any way shape or form. No need for Madison to be, although he was a student of John Witherspoon who was.

To: PROLIFE who wrote (41112)	6/20/1999 12:36:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Dear Dan, It doesn't pain me that many, if not most, of the Founding Fathers were not only nominally Christian, but devout. My cursory search through the Internet demonstrated to me that the matter is a subject of hot debate, and it is unlikely that I could resolve it to my own satisfaction without reading, not just excerpts of each gentleman's writings, but enough to understand the context. But I believe it is clear that our government was never intended to promote Christianity. I don't know if you have an agenda. The argument which was going on at the time you entered it, was whether or not Congress should mandate that the Ten Commandments be posted in public schools. In point of fact, my older son will be attending Catholic school next year, where the Ten Commandments are no doubt posted, and where he will receive religious education every day. So, I am certainly not opposed to religious education. But I believe that government is temporal and worldly, and that it is dangerous and wrong for the government to attempt to inculcate spiritual values. Spiritual education is the sphere of the family and the Church. Pick up your newspaper today and read about people who were murdered by governments because they were Muslims, or Christians. This is the worst thing that happens when governments promote religion, but it is not the only bad thing. Christ did not become part of the government. I believe in imitating Christ.

To: PROLIFE who wrote (41112)	6/20/1999 4:46:00 PM
From: Grainne	Respond to of 108807

It is true that some of the Founding Fathers were Christians. It is also true, as someone here noted, that fewer than 10% of early Americans attended services regularly, and that there was a large number of Deists and free spirits (Benjamin Franklin in particular) who got things going here. One thing that is definitely true is that the colonials were very heavy drinkers, starting at breakfast and sort of buzzing through their day. For that matter, a whole lot of brides were pregnant when they got married, perhaps as the result of that quaint Colonial custom of bundling under quilts together right in the middle of the family after-dinner conversation and needlework. The Ten Commandments are great as ideals, but certainly once you scrape the surface of a culture, no one is really living totally by them, Christian or non-Christian. What I am most curious about, though, is that group who sometimes proclaimed to be Deists or said lengthy things that were quite anti-Christian, but whom you seem to struggle to include in the Christian camp. Why does it matter so much to you? Do you really need people on your side who are clearly ambivalent and often negative about Christianity, just because they were important people of their times? Do you seek most of your wisdom from politicians? I'm asking because that is what these men were. Why do you need to idolize them? Because Christians grow up with the model of idolizing powerful figures and giving their own power away? What is particularly nice about wiccans is that power is individual and internal. I think this is healthy. I think one thing some of us are saying here is that posting the Ten Commandments in public schools is not only something we believe the Founding Fathers would have been totally opposed to, but that doing so would not change behavior very much. Almost all of the school shooters have been Christians; the one who wasn't had been repeatedly taunted and teased by the Christian prayer group at school. Human behavior is very complicated. Children who grow up immoral or violent tend to be unattached to their parents, unbonded in a significant way, even when both parents live at home and are described as "ideal" parents, as the ones in Littleton were. They are children who are picked on and who feel isolated at school. The underlying problems they bring to adolescence are exaggerated by the physical and emotional turmoil of hormones, life seems cheap sometimes in this society because of the pervasive violence in the media and in life itself, and now what used to be solved with fist fights and growing out of adolescence becomes lethal because assault weapons are readily available. You could post the Ten Commandments until you are blue in the face, or even better, tattoo them into children's forearms so they can accentuate the "What Would Jesus Do" bracelets a lot of the Christian teenagers wear, and you would absolutely still have school massacres and the other problems we are seeing, because the issues are very much more complicated than you make them. And if the Ten Commandments are so very powerful, why cannot they easily be absorbed at home, and in the churches. Perhaps you could play them on tape/CD players over and over at bedtime, the way my daughter and I listen to Celtic wiccan music to soothe ourselves into the world of dreams. The implication whenever the self-righteous Christians from Ask God storm this thread is that there is something inherently morally superior to being a Christian, and yet they never bring any documentation with them proving that. The atheists and agnostics and tolerant Christians and other free thinkers here are certainly at least as good parents as the conservative Christians are by any reasonable measure, and on top of that, they teach their children to think and act ethically, instead of drumming or brainwashing a particular belief system into them, motivated by fear and reward. So why on earth would we want your belief system posted in our public schools, when there is no indication whatsoever that it would be helpful, and violates our right to freedom of (or from) religion all at the same time? Is it the same reason it is important for you to convince us that Deists were good Christians, so that Christianity can dominate us? Every time it has there has been death in its wake, a clear indication that societies work best when people have freedom of belief, and that is why I for one will continue to argue against you.