Posted on 09/18/2009 9:22:24 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
“Thomas More, Thomas More, riding through the glen,
Thomas More, Thomas More, with his band of men, ...”
The quotes are quite independent- they are not the script of a play the Founding Fathers took part in- they are from private letters and other documents, written with conviction and intent.
I would suggest reading books like “On Two Wings” which copiously cite original letters, minutes of meetings and contemporarnious sources about the founders and framers beliefs. No honest reading would place any significant percentage outside practicing Christian belief.
Randian Objectivism as a Rationalist construct-ideology has more in common with the French Enlightenment than with the American Enlightement. I find its followers espousing positions that plain Burkeian conservatives have held for fifteen decades before Rand started selling books and started selling seminar seats.
Great article......humanize animals—animalize humans. The left has done a pretty good job witnessing what’s going on in California with the ‘Delta smelt’. What was Nietzsche doing in that line up?
— John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814
Evidence of anti-Catholicism? Yes. Pretty typical, when you consider that colonial and early post-colonial America were overwhelmingly Protestant, and the day and age still lent itself to a good deal of open conflict between sectarians.
Evidence of anti-Christianity per se? No.
John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814
Again, a statement address Catholicism, and incidentally, a sentiment which any Baptist in early America would have shared.
John Adams, “this awful blashpemy” that he refers to is the myth of the Incarnation of Christ, from Ira D Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion
At best an evidence of his Deism, not the type of atheism expounded by Ayn Rand.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Major John Cartwright, June 5, 1824.
Has nothing to do with Christianity at all, except to note the antiquity of the ancient Anglo-Saxon legal system. Not sure why you think this one is relevant at all.
Benjamin Franklin
It's commonly accepted that Franklin was a Deist, which again, does not substantiate your apparent belief that he was a Randian-style atheist.
The Reverend Doctor Bird Wilson
Dr. Wilson is simply incorrect in his assertions. If Washington was "no professor of religion", then why was he baptised by immersion at the hands of his Baptist chaplain, John Gano - a baptism that Washington ASKED FOR? Likewise, John Quincy Adams, who had been President but a short time prior to this "sermon", was also noted for his Christian beliefs.
Sorry, but your arguments simply either don't stand, or else are irrelevant because they don't support the argument you seem to be trying to make. And besides, if you want to play the dueling quotes game, then how about these:
"The general principles upon which the Fathers achieved independence were the general principals of Christianity… I will avow that I believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God." (John Adams)
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." (John Adams)
"God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever." (Thomas Jefferson, incidentally suggesting he might have been a bit more theistic than a true Deist)
"I have examined all religions, as well as my narrow sphere, my straightened means, and my busy life, would allow; and the result is that the Bible is the best Book in the world. It contains more philosophy than all the libraries I have seen." (Thomas Jefferson)
" Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure...are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments." (Charles Carroll)
"God governs in the affairs of man. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured in the Sacred Writings that except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this. I also believe that, without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel." (Benjamin Franklin, quoting the Bible even)
" have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am a sinner. I look to Him for mercy; pray for me." (Alexander Hamilton)
"Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.” (John Jay) "What students would learn in American schools above all is the religion of Jesus Christ." (George Washington)
"Let divines and philosophers, statesmen and patriots, unite their endeavors to renovate the age by impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls, inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity....and leading them in the study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system." (Samuel Adams)
"A watchful eye must be kept on ourselves lest, while we are building ideal monuments of renown and bliss here, we neglect to have our names enrolled in the Annals of Heaven." (James Madison)
"“I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them…we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government; that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by means of the Bible; for this Divine Book, above all others, constitutes the soul of republicanism.” “By withholding the knowledge of [the Scriptures] from children, we deprive ourselves of the best means of awakening moral sensibility in their minds." (Benjamin Rush)
"“If moral precepts alone could have reformed mankind, the mission of the Son of God into our world would have been unnecessary.” (Benjamin Rush)
"Public utility pleads most forcibly for the general distribution of the Holy Scriptures. The doctrine they preach, the obligations they impose, the punishment they threaten, the rewards they promise, the stamp and image of divinity they bear, which produces a conviction of their truths, can alone secure to society, order and peace, and to our courts of justice and constitutions of government, purity, stability and usefulness. In vain, without the Bible, we increase penal laws and draw entrenchments around our institutions. Bibles are strong entrenchments. Where they abound, men cannot pursue wicked courses, and at the same time enjoy quiet conscience." (James McHenry)
Clearly, these men were not Randian atheists. The notion that the Founders were all a bunch of atheists is fantasy, and nothing more. Granted, I don't believe them all to have been Christians. I do not think that Jefferson, Franklin, or Madison were. I think Washington, Henry, Jay, and several of the "minor" ones were. Regardless, they all were animated by the sense and understanding that the Christian religion was the best foundation for civil society. Whether by conviction, or simply out of pragmatism, these men sought the promotion of Christian principles.
On a man who evidently brings a full-fledged anti-Christian, even an anti-religious bias to the table?
Well, if this is the way you think you ought to conduct your own "intellectual business," then we must part company.
The way I read it, this passage reflects little more than Dunlap's ad hominum attack on Sir Matthew Hale. I don't see any substantive argument on the part of any substantive issue at work here. Dunlap is so busy trying to destroy his opponent that the issues that evidently divide them aren't even mentioned, let alone seriously engaged.
If you are at all interested in the truth of reality, it seems to me you have to look beyond or below the superficial appearance of things. A "fact" on the periphery cannot shed by itself any light on the substance of that in which it is involved as a peripheral item.
Think of an iceberg: What appears above the surface cannot suffice to explain the phenomenon of the iceberg. To know the complete "system" of the iceberg, you must penetrate below mere appearance, to the depths below.
That's a whole lot of work, right there. Evidently, Dunlap thought he could spare himself the pains simply by destroying his opponent.
We see this sort of thing all the time nowadays, in our own public discourse....
No, you missed the point of that excerpt- that such arguments are not “new”, and that it echoes the same opinion John Adams, Jefferson, among others, held:
“... the Common Law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced or knew that such a character existed.”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Major John Cartwright, June 5, 1824 (see Positive Atheism’s Historical section)
“Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the Common Law.”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814, responding to the claim that Christianity was part of the Common Law of England, as the United States Constitution defaults to the Common Law regarding matters that it does not address.
George Washington, the first president of the United States, never declared himself a Christian according to contemporary reports or in any of his voluminous correspondence. Washington Championed the cause of freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion. When John Murray (a Universalist who denied the existence of Hell) was invited to become an army chaplain, the other chaplains petitioned Washington for his dismissal. Instead, Washington gave him the appointment. On his deathbed, Washington uttered no words of a religious nature and did not call for a clergyman to be in attendance.
-- George Washington and Religion by Paul F. Boller Jr., pp. 16, 87, 88, 108, 113, 121, 127 (1963, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, TX)
John Adams, the country's second president, was drawn to the study of law but faced pressure from his father to become a clergyman. He wrote that he found among the lawyers 'noble and gallant achievements" but among the clergy, the "pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces". Late in life he wrote: "Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!"
It was during Adam's administration that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states in Article XI that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion."
-- The Character of John Adams by Peter Shaw, pp. 17 (1976, North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC) Quoting a letter by JA to Charles Cushing Oct 19, 1756, and John Adams, A Biography in his Own Words, edited by James Peabody, p. 403 (1973, Newsweek, New York NY) Quoting letter by JA to Jefferson April 19, 1817, and in reference to the treaty, Thomas Jefferson, Passionate Pilgrim by Alf Mapp Jr., pp. 311 (1991, Madison Books, Lanham, MD) quoting letter by TJ to Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, June, 1814.
Thomas Jefferson, third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, said: "I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian." He referred to the Revelation of St. John as "the ravings of a maniac" and wrote:
"The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained."
-- Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate History by Fawn M. Brodie, p. 453 (1974, W.W) Norton and Co. Inc. New York, NY) Quoting a letter by TJ to Alexander Smyth Jan 17, 1825, and Thomas Jefferson, Passionate Pilgrim by Alf Mapp Jr., pp. 246 (1991, Madison Books, Lanham, MD) quoting letter by TJ to John Adams, July 5, 1814.
James Madison, fourth president and Father of the Constitution, was not religious in any conventional sense.
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."
-- The Madisons by Virginia Moore, P. 43 (1979, McGraw-Hill Co. New York, NY) quoting a letter by JM to William Bradford April 1, 1774, and James Madison, A Biography in his Own Words, edited by Joseph Gardner, p. 93, (1974, Newsweek, New York, NY) Quoting Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments by JM, June 1785.
...
Ethan Allen, whose capture of Fort Ticonderoga while commanding the Green Mountain Boys helped inspire Congress and the country to pursue the War of Independence, said, "That Jesus Christ was not God is evidence from his own words." In the same book, Allen noted that he was generally "denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious that I am no Christian." When Allen married Fanny Buchanan, he stopped his own wedding ceremony when the judge asked him if he promised "to live with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to the laws of God." Allen refused to answer until the judge agreed that the "God" referred to was the "God of Nature", and the laws those "written in the "Great Book of Nature."
-- Religion of the American Enlightenment by G. Adolph Koch, p. 40 (1968, Thomas Crowell Co., New York, NY.) quoting preface and p. 352 of Reason, the Only Oracle of Man and A Sense of History compiled by American Heritage Press Inc., p. 103 (1985, American Heritage Press, Inc., New York, NY.)
Well of course they should, dear OldSpice, and that by Constitutional principle!
But the practical fact of the matter is that jet fighters and nuclear weapons, etc., are beyond the financial means and competence of everybody except the State itself. The State will ALWAYS have an advantage in this regard. And we civilians pay for/fund their privilege in this regard.
So you can wave this red flag all day long if you want to. It has no practical bearing on actual reality. It is a pure abstraction, "all sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Notwithstanding, as it turns out, no citizen nowadays can pass muster with what the Second Amendment requires of us. For, post Miller at least, what the Second Amendment requires is that citizen-held firearms must be "military-style firearms" in order to be protected by the Second Amendment.
You may recall this was the test that Miller failed to satisfy when the Supreme Court heard his case back in 1939. The Court (ironically it seems from today's perspective) found him "guilty" because it held his sawed-off shotgun was not a "military-style firearm."
I gather the Court had never before heard of the gattling gun, et al.
Notwithstanding, in United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court held that WRT private arms in citizen hands, the firearms the Second Amendment protects are preeminently those which are directly comparable to whatever state-of-the-art armaments are in use by the duly-constituted official military forces of the day.
To put this into perspective, Switzerland has long constitutionally required all able-bodied [male] citizens to own, maintain, and know how to operate military-style firearms as a basic duty of citizenship. Upshot: Nobody invades Switzerland. The Swiss citizenry is the "constitutional militia," not any other formal, government-sanctioned military body. (I do believe that Switzerland does not maintain a standing army.)
I could say it was illuminating, just to be polite.
But it really wasn't.
For you evidently uncritically prefer the testimony of "experts" (in context or out of context) rather than actually having to perform your own personal analysis/critique of the ideas they advance.
I can love a Thomas Jefferson — but only up to a point. Whatever he said in public, or ultimately thought of himself, he is no god to me.
Could such a statement make any sense to you at all?
People who fly and maintian airfraft and missiles...or tanks for that matter...have to have food, fuel, parts, and they have to sleep, etc. as do their familes.
If their entire logistics chain is threatened and impeded by a population armed with 40 million hunting rifles...pretty soon the mechanism that supports those implements grinds to a halt.
Logisitics feeds those large systems and requires a lot of effort...a lot more than an individual rifleman and their weapon.
BTW, betty, please take a look at these two links and let me know what you think:
MY ADVISE TO THE FARMERS IN THE SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY
INDEPENDENT AMERICAN MOVEMENT FOR CONSTITUTIONAL RESTORATION
The atheist is living on "borrowed time," on the legacy of his ancestors, of whose insights and experiences over millennia he has no personal interest or sense of duty to understand, let alone defend, renew, or communicate to others.
That is, when it comes to the renewal of a good society from generation to generation he accepts no personal responsibility at all, which responsibility he in fact utterly repudiates from the get-go. In many cases, atheists believe they cannot advance their own causes unless and until the entire human past (religious, historical, and cultural) has been utterly laid waste, erased from human memory.
He is already a dead man walking — and trying to take down as many others of his own kind with him as he possibly can, to join him in a commonly shared eternal misery for all.
The atheist is a parasite, drawing its life from a culture that its entire being is devoted to draining the life out of. It is a case of protracted suicide, in slow motion. It destroys not only the atheist in the end, but any society in which the atheist voice/mind achieves cultural dominance.
Nonsense.
It took the thorough cleansing by the Secular Reformation and the Age of Reason, for religion to be civilised. Before that, men and women were being burnt at the stake, stretched, whipped and decapitated over nonsensical religious dogma.
Which just goes to show that there is no consolidation of governmental power than can possibly happen in a vacuum.
For there is no vacuum to begin with: The American citizenry is armed, and that by God-given right, as further guaranteed by our Constitution.
Though we do not possess fighter jets or nuclear arms does not mean we are helpless. A lot of "effective" little people running around in concerted, or even individual activity can undermine the power of great States. The testimony of history attests to this fact of reality.
But isn't this the very gamble that Obama is taking? That people understand themselves to be generally helpless, vis-a-vis the power of the State? That we are are born needy for what only the State can provide? Isn't this the central premise of the Obama ideology?
Okay. Let's test the truth of that premise, say I.
Obama does not own the truth of reality. Rather, he seems to be its greatest enemy right about now. Certainly, he is working towards reducing the United States of America into a completely ineffectual body in the world, and one so ineffectual that it can no longer defend its own, that is, American strategic interests.
Which boils down to the preservation, the sheer survival of American values and principles: Can they survive the reign of Obama?
We live in an age when the enemies of the United States of America are just as likely to be domestic as foreign. Indeed, the cancer seems to be lodged in the very bosom of the body politic. If it succeeds, even such tinhorn dictators as Chavez, or Ahmadinajad could wipe us out with ease, with impunity.
American is strong because of her ideas, her universal values. If we lose those, America dies.
But Americans will not let that happen without a fight, if need be. Let the world hear this from the lips of a quite average American citizen.
Anyhoot, stay tuned, people. We live in fascinating times. Follow the public arguments. And keep your firearms in well-maintained, operable condition; and know how to use them effectively.
It's always best to prepare for the worst-case scenario, even while hoping and praying that this "worst" will never come.
Religion is prior to civilization. That is, civilization is the by-product of religion, not its cause.
To want religion to be "civilized" is to demand that religion cease to be religious.
Religion is not a promoter of any particular governmental form at all. It promotes a system of moral law. Governments do very well to espouse this moral law as the foundation of their system of justice. And when they don't we see the effects well enough.
History tells the tale. Go look. Go where sovereign nations repudiated God's law, and took up a law formulated by human genius instead.
It is the fate of such regimes to bleed and die. Again, check history in this regard.
In short, please do your homework, OldSpice!
Which may be difficult for you, in the case that your atheism makes you blind to aspects of reality that are vitally alive to other human persons. Like me.
Dear KC, you raise such a critical point here.
Consider that in the 18th century, there were two great socio/political revolutions on this earth. One happened in America, and the other a decade later in France.
No two revolutions could be more dissimilar!!!
Boiling both down to their fundamental premises, it seems to me the great difference between the American and the French revolutions was that the American Revolution saw itself as a project under God, and kept God; while the French one was avid to destroy Him, to obliterate Him from public consciousness altogether.
Thus the American Revolution — though tragic and costly in terms of lost life and treasure — was by far less bloody than the French one....
Furthermore, the American Revolution "lasted" with the people. We built the American republican system around its core ideas. By contrast, the French one paved the way for the tyrant Napoleon.
If anyone would like to explore these issues in further contemporary detail, I cannot recommend highly enough the classical work by Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.
So I say to my "atheist" friends: Read that. Make your own judgment. Then maybe we can chat again along more fruitful lines than has been the case so far....
Thank you ever so much, dear KC, for your outstanding essay/post!
“The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.”
-Galt’s Speech, Atlas Shrugged
“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).”
-“Collectivized ‘Rights,” The Virtue of Selfishness
““Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.”
-“Man’s Rights,” The Virtue of Selfishness
I guess that explains the Dark Ages, the Inquisition and the two bloodiest wars the human race has ever indulged itself in, all in the same place.
Without France, there probably wouldn't have been an America. Most likely wouldn't, actually.
You are viewing history in narrow slices. No one has seen the long-term. Christianity has itself changed, mutated, spliced and spawned into various new religions- much like every other man-made systems of superstition.
Hmm, interesting revision.
I mean, the popes from the old days weren't merely indulging in encouraging prostitution and other sins by way of monetary payments for "atonement", and empire-building by allotting regions of the planet to one or the other subjugated states. [Sarcasm!]
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