Whispering Death said:
To understand the founding fathers you have to understand the 'American enlightenment mindset' that these men engaged in. All our freedoms and laws come from what they considered "natural law" or trying to get back to a 'pure' state of natural humanity, uncluttered by such things as monarchy or ORGANIZED RELIGION. Take note, organized religion is something they considered to be a negative on humankind. Many where professed deists and most that belonged to an official church where deists in philosophy.
I kind of heard of this before. I think by far its NOT true that most of them were deistist in nature. There were some who were,
most of them were not. If they were, the actions of most of them went against deistism, which makes it hard to say that they were, when their actions speak otherwise.
Thomas Paine, in his discourse on "The Study of God," forcefully asserts that it is "the error of schools" to teach sciences without "reference to the Being who is author of them: for all the principles of science are of Divine origin."
Nor does George Washington. He was an open promoter of Christianity. For example, in his speech on May 12, 1779, he claimed that what children needed to learn "above all" was the "religion of Jesus Christ,"
Madison's writings are replete with declarations of his faith in God and in Christ. In fact, for proof of this, one only need read his letter to Attorney General Bradford wherein Madison laments that public officials are not bold enough about their Christian faith in public and that public officials should be "fervent advocates in the cause of Christ."
...And while Madison did allude to a "wall of separation,"
...According to Madison, the purpose of that "wall" was only to prevent Congress from passing a national law to establish a national religion.
Alexander Hamilton was certainly no deist. For example, Hamilton began work with the Rev. James Bayard to form the Christian Constitutional Society to help spread over the world the two things which Hamilton said made America great: (1) Christianity, and (2) a Constitution formed under Christianity
Any portrayal of any handful of Founders as deists is inaccurate. (If this group had really wanted some irreligious Founders, they should have chosen Henry Dearborne, Charles Lee, or Ethan Allen).
The desit philosophy on religion omited all miracles, the bible as edited by Thomas Jefferson is the bible with all that crap about healing the sick, making men out of clay, noah and his arc, etc. etc. etc.
The reader, as do many others, claimed that Jefferson omitted all miraculous events of Jesus from his "Bible." Rarely do those who make this claim let Jefferson speak for himself. Jefferson own words explain that his intent for that book was not for it to be a "Bible," but rather for it to be a primer for the Indians on the teachings of Christ (which is why Jefferson titled that work, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth"). What Jefferson did was to take the "red letter" portions of the New Testament and publish these teachings in order to introduce the Indians to Christian morality.
http://www.wallbuilders.com/resources/search/detail.php?ResourceID=29
I think that saying that most of the founding fathers were deists is a myth being propagated by atheist to to give them something to stand on when it comes to constitutional debate. There certainly was an element of deists phylosophy, but to say its broad as it was is stretching the truth by alot.
Its clear that by those word and actions Most of the founding father meant this country to be Christian, although they did not want a state run church. They had a clear grasp of the foundation of Western Civilization.
Modern examples of why running your country based on religion is a very poor idea is the entire middle east.
I agree with you here that we should not have a state enforced or run religion. This is also what the founding fathers envisioned. I would be totaly against a state enforced religion. I don't think any of us who advocate this want a state run or enforced religion. No way.
However what some people are trying to do is the opposite extreme, which in my oppinion is just as bad, and will lead to the decline and or fall of Western Civilization.
The reason we want to not run our gov't by the bible is because you need to put another zero on that number to find that 2,000+ years ago a little nation called Israel tried that and it ended up with them surviving for the ruling span of 2 kings before breaking out in civil war and getting crushed by a series of invaders from the asyrians to the syrians to the babylonians to the persians to the macedonians to the romans.
I don't know if you know the reason why all those bad things happened to them,... what you are advocating is the reason why it happened. They disregared the Biblical laws which were handed to them, and ingored them and or made up their own laws to suit them (which seemed probably to them good in the short-term, but they paid for it later).