Far too much emphasis is placed on what "the founding fathers" intended. So even if they intentionally mixed religion and government, I'd still believe that religion should be yeeted out of government because our government should be written to serve people living today and not elevate religion to special status.
The emphasis seems to come from the special status that the founding fathers are elevated to by a certain segment of the population that almost seems to fetishize them, usually without any awareness of history. Someone I know was trying to tell me how evil the current federal government is by comparison and I'm thinking, "dude you have two adopted black daughters who would have been more likely to have been regularly raped by their fucking owners at that point than to have had anything resembling human rights and you're telling me things are worse today?!"
Pretty sure while many were devout… many were also only Christian in the sense, that, it was less annoying to just go along with it than tell their mom.
That's hilarious and I never considered that
Was trying to be mostly humorous about it, but there's good reason to think that a lot of the founding fathers were, if not athiest, then not-ardent-Christians. Some absolutely were devout christians. some were probably atheists. But it's bad politics- even today- to not be at least some form of christian.
that said originally, the amendment separating church and state was not inteded to protect the government from the church. it was intended to protect the church from the state. (I.E. many states had codified denominations with "others" being made... illegal.)
I don't know about that. No one attended Thomas Paine's funeral and he's still the only one without a monument.
James Madison, father of the Constitution:
"Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."
Misquote or was he that bad at commas?
Found it.
Looks like Madison enjoyed using commas, relevant quote from the original letter reads "...new example, will succeed, as every..."
Spelling and punctuation didn't really get standardized into their modern form until the 19 th century.
Idk, I got that from a transcription of a letter. All but one of the commas look appropriate to me, and even that one looks appropriate if it's thought of as a spoken declaration.
I'm interested though, I'll try to find out
well one of them also rewrote it to be 90% shorter and have no Magic in it
Jefferson literally took scissors to the Bible and cut out all the miracles and other nonsense to make it palatable.
In order to have freedom of religion, we need the government to not be beholden to one.
See, most people don't really get what they were trying to escape from when they founded the United States. I'm not even American, and I know this shit.
England, like many other empires and nations of the era, were religious to their core. The patriarchal/matriarchal foundation of the country predisposed that all is subjects, aka citizens, be aligned with the Royals for their religion. Hence, the church of England.
When the royalty played a bit of musical chairs after someone died, the incoming ruler could easily change the faith of the church of England; which they often did.
So the public was left in this state of hopping from one foot to the other, going from Catholic to Protestant to whatever, everytime the crown changed heads.
They intentionally left out any religion from the Constitution to avoid such idiotic policies. If you were Catholic, sweet, enjoy America. If you were Protestant, cool, enjoy America. Some other kind of Christian? Neato, welcome, enjoy America. I don't know that their thinking included such wild concepts as... IDK, Muslim, Buddhist, or Islam, but they didn't exclude it so what the hell, welcome to America.
They didn't want a central authority dictating their entire life. What they believe, how they conduct their life, what job to have, etc. Not a church. Not a king/queen. Nobody. That's the entire point of not having religion in the Constitution. The country will not obligate the citizens to believe in any specific thing.
All this idiotic rhetoric about America being a "Christian country" would make all the people who have their names at the bottom of the constitution, throw up in anger. The entire rhetoric of literally anyone saying that other people don't belong because their beliefs are different than "Christian", would make the founding fathers disgusted.
They realized that judging and convicting people of crimes because they had slightly different sky daddies, is stupid. Yet, there are WAY TOO MANY people who think that people who believe differently to them, are not fit to be an American. Anyone thinking that, is being un-American.
sure they did. What's more there was a guide they were given that had an overview of multiple types of government including the ancient Hebrew system.
And seeing this they decided to go forward not backwards. This sign is very damning when you think about it. It is one thing to not follow the Bible, it is another thing to not follow it after you have studied it.
