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To: Jamey who wrote (22036)	11/30/2004 2:04:03 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 81112

Santiago, Re: I've been waiting for you to back up your conclusions with other faithless proponents from the Founding Fathers but it seems you have none. Your reading skills are zilch. Go back and re-read the post I sent you and try again to comprehend what is on the screen. You are either not comprehending what I sent, or you are a scurrilous liar. Either case, I can see why you're a Christian and not a rocket scientist. Re: This is the truth of the matter... You have zero credibility when you fail to provide a URL so that your source for your outlandish claim can be examined for fact and bias.

To: Jamey who wrote (22036)	11/30/2004 6:41:59 AM
From: sea_urchin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81112

James > Now go stuff that in your atheist pipe and smoke it. I gave up smoking 30 years ago but, as an maybe-atheist, I feel I'm still entitled to have a go. Yes, it is it true that most of the original settlers in America were Christians, and very religious ones too, but nonetheless the reason they came to America was to escape persecution -- and, indeed, from other Christians. By no stretch of the imagination was Christianity at that time a benign religion. It was a system of serious, dogmatic rules and the enforcement of those rules -- something like the Taliban. There was no such thing as "gentle Jesus, meek and mild" and "live and let live" and "turn the other cheek" etc. loc.gov >>Many of the British North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of America were settled in the seventeenth century by men and women, who, in the face of European persecution, refused to compromise passionately held religious convictions and fled Europe. The New England colonies, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were conceived and established "as plantations of religion." Some settlers who arrived in these areas came for secular motives--"to catch fish" as one New Englander put it--but the great majority left Europe to worship God in the way they believed to be correct. They enthusiastically supported the efforts of their leaders to create "a city on a hill" or a "holy experiment," whose success would prove that God's plan for his churches could be successfully realized in the American wilderness. Even colonies like Virginia, which were planned as commercial ventures, were led by entrepreneurs who considered themselves "militant Protestants" and who worked diligently to promote the prosperity of the church. The religious persecution that drove settlers from Europe to the British North American colonies sprang from the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens. Nonconformists could expect no mercy and might be executed as heretics. The dominance of the concept, denounced by Roger Williams as "inforced uniformity of religion," meant majority religious groups who controlled political power punished dissenters in their midst. In some areas Catholics persecuted Protestants, in others Protestants persecuted Catholics, and in still others Catholics and Protestants persecuted wayward coreligionists. Although England renounced religious persecution in 1689, it persisted on the European continent. Religious persecution, as observers in every century have commented, is often bloody and implacable and is remembered and resented for generations. << So, as you see, although they were Christians, they were non-conformists, and therein is the clue -- and the apparent contradiction -- and the reason why the American Constitution specified separation of Church and State. Religion was expected to be a private matter and apart from the secular concerns of the State -- not because the people were not intended to be religious, but to prevent the state enforcing a tyranny of religious conformity (or quasi-religious conformity) on the people. What I mean by quasi-religious conformity is what we see now -- the enforcement of religious values ie the dictates of a particular version of the bible or a genre of Christianity by means of the institution of government. Indeed, the recent election turned solely on the religious values of fundamentalist Christians who see in Bush a political force that will enforce their religious values, and particularly Zionistic ones. This is precisely what the Founding Fathers did not want -- indeed they left Europe to avoid exactly that.