[netmilsmom]

What exactly do you believe is the foundation of your belief that our founding fathers believed in a separation of church and state? Please give references.

[Ignatius J Reilly]

netmilsmom, you're righ it doesn't, as ravingnutter pointed out the constitution guarantees freedom of religion not freedom from religion. Sorry I should have been more careful with my words. What I was saying is that I do believe gov't has no business promoting any religion. I also think that it is absurd to try to change a traditional ceremony because some freak has his panties in a bunch over the use of the word god. I say to him - get a freakin life

[BackInBlack]

"What exactly do you believe is the foundation of your belief that our founding fathers believed in a separation of church and state? Please give references."

This question wasn't posed to me, but I thought it was interesting. To my knowledge, there was actually disagreement among the Founding Fathers on this. Jefferson, a Deist but not a believer in Christ, released his own version of the New Testament without all the miracles. Ben Franklin wanted to say a prayer at the Constitutional Convention, but his motion was permanently tabled. George Washington said in the Treaty of Tripoli that the Constitution "is in no way based on the Christian religion." But the vast majority of the Founding Fathers were Christian, and probably never expected the wall of separation between church and state to be as extreme as it is today.

As for me, I'm with the Supreme Court conservatives like Clarence Thomas who say the government is supposed to be religion-neutral, not religion-hostile. If it's going to give funds to a Christian social service organization, for example, it shouldn't withhold funds from an equally effective Buddhist organization. But to say that government should reject support for anything remotely involving religion is effectively to promote government-sponsored atheism. Surely that's not in the Constitution.