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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (98648)	5/20/2003 12:03:15 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 281500

All well and good, Michael. But why throw those points into a discussion of the separation of church and state. I can argue that these are meaningless religious rituals and, then, point you to the arguments that the basic religion of the US is a secular religion of citizenship which gets invoked with the religious language. So it's about nationalism rather than the very vague religious beliefs of many of the founders, something quite different from the religious right these days.

To: greenspirit who wrote (98648)	5/20/2003 2:26:50 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<<It's chic and popular in many quarters today to believe American society was built on a secularist belief system, but to do so, is to deny the very history of our Republic.>> Someone asked Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s why God wasn't in the Constitution. He said, "We forgot about him." It is certainly true that many people in the late 18th century read the Bible, but it is also certainly true that the people who are today referred to as the "founders" for the most part read and learned a great deal more from Roman, Greek and British history than from the Bible. Jefferson didn't mention anyone from the Bible when he named his three greatest men (Bacon, Newton, Locke), and the phrase "all men are created equal" was vilified as nonsense or ignored as irrelevant by numerous Americans (including the Supreme Court in 1896, and of course defenders of slavery) throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (not by me, I should add, but nevermind that).