Founding Fathers and Religion...

Partly a rhetorical question, but a serious question too (since I am just learning these things myself), to the religious members on these boards. If the establishment clause to the US Constitution is of such minimal importance, why is it the opening words, to very first amendment, to a document we call the Bill of Rights?

OK, maybe I have got at least some of you thinking. Second question. If our founding fathers were so gungho about religion, esp. in public policy, why did they say so many things we today would call antireligious? Here, you can read some of them yourselves: 35 Founding Father Quotes Conservative Christians Will Hate

I do have to make an important distinction here. Our founding fathers certainly were not antireligion. I know I am not. As I said before, I think religion can have a very positive effect in people's lives. They were anti-ORGANIZED and established religion.

I know I am too. I believe in God, and still consider myself a relative Catholic. But I don't believe I am justified in imposing my beliefs (which are constantly evolving anyways) on others.

And remember, my questions are not just rhetorical. I really want people to justify their beliefs. After all, I could be wrong...

 

Not sure they were anti organized religion, just critical. They cared about it being seperated from secular state issues/government which is a subtilely different thing than being anti organized religion

 

Religion is rigid; the Constitution is fluid. Unlike religion, the Constitution can be amended to always stay current with the times. I think the Founding Fathers were smart enough to understand this, hence why secularized government and religious institutions are kept separate.

Doesn't mean they had anything against religion in the personal lives of Americans though.

 

Their is a simple answer. Since all religions believe that their is only one god (I know that he has a few helpers in the case of Muslim belief). It stands to reason that the only differences in religions is how us mere earthlings worship the almighty. Many people won't agree with my hypothesis, since it would destroy their reasoning for religious wars. Perhaps these people think that the roman catholic god and protestant gods are busy throwing bibles at each other, while Allah is building a few bombs. I suppose that it could give a whole new concept on thunder storms though.

 

The founding fathers modeled the Bill of Rights after the 10 Commandments. Being that there were 10 steadfast rules of law that protected the individual from governmental oppression.

They did not do it this way because the Founders themselves were religious, they did it because a majority of their fellow citizens were Christian. And they wanted to model their new nation for individual prosperity, and what better way to do it by assimilating the Bill of Rights and constitution after the holy word of God?

The founding fathers were not Christian, nor were they very religious, they were Deists. Yet they realized that politics is downstream from culture. If you influence the culture, the policies will be affected the way you shape the culture.

 

Wrong.

The founders had nothing to do with it, it was all the handywork of James Madison. And he didn't propose 10 additions to the constitution he proposed 12; only 10 were ratified by the states. They had nothing to do with the 10 commandments but were instead modeled after the Virginia Declaration Of Rights, the English Bill Of Rights and the Magna Carta.

 

The founding fathers were religious, the Indians have their own.

 

The idea of the 10 commandments being a moral code is laughable considering all they ignore. But they do seem OK with no rights for women and children being molested so perhaps they work for the current Republican party.

 

I thought the founding fathers were all into the illuminati stuff and templar knights

 

Wrong. Religion can be interpreted (it always IS, in fact) and so shaped, moulded, transformed. As can the law. The law can be interpreted, circumvented, perverted. As can religion.

The second amendment still maintains that an armed militia is necessary in 2017.

 

Religion can be misinterpreted.

And an armed militia is always necessary. But that's not what this thread is about.

 

The founding fathers were a mixed

Many of the Founding Fathers were heavily influenced by Deism that disregarded some or all of the features commonly regarded as orthodox Christian. These would include Thomas Paine ( not a Christian in any sense), and Ethan Allen. James Madison, James Monroe and Ben Franklin, nominally Episcopalians, and Thomas Jefferson, were also Deists, though admirers of Jesus, and Washington was a Christian Deist, heavily influenced by Enlightenment rationalism. Adams was a conservative unitarian. The Deist influence can be seen in their preferred terminology for the Divine:"Nature's God", Providence, and the Creator. Samuel Adams and John Jay were Christian Calvinists, and Patrick Henry was an evangelical Christian who passed out bibles door-to-door. One signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrolton, was a Roam Catholic. In other words, a mixed bag, but liberal by today's standards. Overlapping this was the membership of some founding fathers in Freemasonry--not a religion but dedicated to some Enlightenment ideals. Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, at least nine appear to have been Freemasons, including John Hancock, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Paine. George Washington was a famous Freemason. As for the Templar and Illuminati connection, that is the stuff of legend surrounding the secret Freemason society.

 

Not all were Christian. (See above). As anyone with more than five brain cells would know, women, African-Americans and ethnic minorities didn't participate in signing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention because folks back then were even more racist and sexist than they are today. For the times, though, all of the founding fathers were relatively rational, high minded people, unlike certain white nationalist pond scum who pollute the country today with their racist delusions, tweets and posts. Special thanks to Polish allies Casimir Pulaski, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, and the other fourteen Polish officers who helped. None were Nazis or FSB. Good for them! None were Polish nationalists, since that didn't exist at the time. Black Robers helped out from the pulpit before and during the Revolution. Observant Jews who also helped include Mordecai Sheftali the highest-ranking Jewish officer who provided money for the American cause ; Haym Salomon, financier, broker and immigrant from Poland helped create America’s first semi-central bank and advised Alexander Hamilton on the building of America’s financial system. Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas, who organized prayers for the Americans in the revolution; Jonas Phillips. who served in the Militia and became America’s first religious-liberty activist.; and Jacob Mordecai, a Philadelphia rifleman who supplied the Continental Army as a clerk to Washington’s Jewish quartermaster. Of course Crispus Atticus, the first patriot who was killed in the revolutionary war, was African-American. Templar involvement is fantasy.

 

Most blacks were slaves and Jews made up fewer than 1% of the population, so your point about "very few " of them being"in the scenario" is stupid and pointless. The founding fathers were patriots, not white nationalists. Nationalism is " a sentiment based on common cultural characteristics that binds a population and often produces a policy of national independence or separatism." nationalism Nationalism and patriotism are often confused, but the former is a mass movement based on cultural or ethnic consciousness (love of nationality), and the latter is based on love of country. (Martha and Richard Cottam, Nationalism and Politics. The system that the founding fathers introduced was not nationalist but one "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal". No widespread sentiment of nationalism can be identified among the Poles until the 1830 November uprising, or at the earliest, the Second Partition of 1792. Pulaski and Kosciuszko were patriots fighting to protect the Polish-Lituanian Commonwealth from Russian domination. Only a fanatic would ascribe Polish nationalism to the major factors influencing the founding fathers of the United States. "Very few" Poles were "in the scenario". And those are the facts, regardless of pseudo-scientific racist revisionism by ignorant nutjobs. BTW, are you Polish? Nazi ideology regarded Poles as "subhuman", fit only to serve the master race.

 

Evidence for any of tgis?

 

Mac, meet Baldnbare. I was kinda hoping you two would cross paths.

 

What have I stumbled upon?

 

We would've found some other means. The slave trade was entirely unnecessary from the get go.

 

I suspect he might have been sarcastic. I agree with you that the slave trade was entirely unnecessary, but it was important to the development of the exploitative southern plantation culture, which was unnecessary.

 

Oh Jesus...