You explained your point very well. Thank You.
A belief in God does not make one a follower of Christianity. From what I gathered in my reading, many people in that time believed in a creator - - and seriously hoped that there was a final judgement by that creator.
Of course, tyrants wish nothing of the sort.
> You explained your point very well. Thank You.
> A belief in God does not make one a follower of Christianity. From what I gathered in my reading, many people in that time believed in a creator - - and seriously hoped that there was a final judgement by that creator.
> Of course, tyrants wish nothing of the sort.
Some ‘background’ ;-)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2503611/posts?page=253#253
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2503611/posts?page=189#189
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2503611/posts?page=213#213
Not like this subject hasn’t arisen before :-)
And you’re implication that tyrants may face a ‘final judgment’ goes further into the ‘immaterial things’ than Jefferson would be comfortable with.
Another thing that comes up in the conversation about an ‘overseeing Providence’ is the idea that the US form of gov’t was ‘guided by an invisible hand’ - I believe Washington used those words (he must have read Adam Smith :-) However, the idea of something coming about from the Creator, could be in the form of a deistic view of ‘design’ that ‘all was set in motion at creation’ and that the results of that was being felt in the 18th century without there being a direct and present ‘guiding hand’ of God playing out his hand. [some Christians, admirably, imo, use this - ‘design’ - to explain evolution - ‘that’s the way God planned it originally - next question’. lol... It’s a good argument.]
And I’ll grant that some founders and many of the citizens at the time felt that this was a Christian God’s direct intervention, but it is wrong for people and Glenn Beck to discount the religious but non Christian view - esp. when there are direct quotes regarding this - or to read ‘Christian’ into the word ‘Creator’ or ‘Nature’s God’, when coming right out of the Age of Reason, those words meant something entirely different at that time.
I believe that the D of I was a ‘political’ document (and I’ve said this before, here) where it was in a sense, a ‘work of art,’ where people could read into it, from their own viewpoint of what was meant by “Nature’s God”, “Creator”, “self-evident truths” and “Nature’s Laws”. And because that aspect of it could be ‘subjective’ doesn’t mean that there are not real objective truths in the document. There are.... ‘individual rights’ being one of those and the one thing that for the first time in history (it wasn’t democracy - that had been done before ;-) that the rights of the individual was held sovereign rather the needs of the church or the state. And when we attempt to restore those truths, to overemphasize any religious aspect, imo, takes away from the more important and liberating aspect of the sovereignty of the individual.