Posted on 09/18/2009 9:22:24 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
You are right on many points, but not that one.
Jefferson wrote that phrase, and Jefferson was a Deist.
In fact, during the debate over the Declaration, it was moved to insert "Our Lord, Jesus Christ" after "Creator".
It was defeated. So while certainly some Founders were Christian, quite obviously they all weren't, or that amendment would have passed.
I'm not sure our FRiend could appreciate the relevance of inalienable rights. As I recall OldSpice is not American but British - is that right, OldSpice?
At the root, a right which is inalienable, endowed by our Creator, is not a right the government can take away. It was our legal and moral standing for declaring independence from England.
Should a future government attempt to take away those inalienable rights, the citizens of America would have the same legal and moral standing as they did with the Declaration of Independence to hit the "reset" button.
And as many here will testify, that is the underlying reason for the 2nd Amendment - the right to keep and bear arms.
You are missing my point. Which is: Even Deists embrace the idea of the Creator God, Who endues all created things with an inviolable, inalienable nature (which the State is forbidden to transgress).
Jefferson that marvelous "American sphynx" was almost certainly a Deist. The same is alleged of Franklin. So what??? Both embraced the Creator God which at the very least we can say is an Old Testament concept.
The fact is all the Framers were wholly enculturated into the Judeo-Christian tradition. This despite they were all highly educated men, mainly classically trained, and children of the Enlightenment. Many Christian denominations (except it seems Catholic) were represented in their ranks.
But they did not want in any way to establish a theocracy: No State preference should ever be given to any particular religious denomination, including their own. The language "Our Lord, Jesus Christ" as a modifier of "the Creator" would have offended against the very principle of freedom of religion that they were trying to establish, by seeming to favor one particular type of religious belief over all others.
But to say that the government should not favor any particular religion is not the same as saying that the government should be hostile to religion. Particularly in the case where frankly religious ideas stand at the very foundation of our system of individual liberty under equal laws and justice.
Ping for later.
Deism was a politically-correct form of Atheism, for the time.
See the quotes I posted.
It certainly wasn’t Christianity, with the very divinity of Christ being denied.
Let's do a review... and go back to 1834:
"But you are told that our ancestors brought with them the Common Law of England, and that Christianity is a part of the Common Law. There are in the books some sayings of the English Judges that Christianity is a part of the Common Law, and one of the most distinguished among those, who have held this doctrine, is the celebrated Sir Matthew Hale. But this Judge is one of those Judges, who have condemned persons for witchcraft, and the ermine of his judicial robes was stained with the blood of the innocent victims of superstition. Sir Matthew Hale would be as good authority to sustain a prosecution for witchcraft, as to sustain the present prosecution against the defendant, by establishing that Christianity is a part of the Common Law of England. Indeed Sir Matthew Hale was the great authority in Massachusetts to sustain the prosecutions for witchcraft which disgraced our early history. What is the Common Law of England ? It is called the customs of immemorial antiquity handed down by tradition, among the English people. Now during the period of the existence of the Common Law, England has had all kinds of religion ? Has the Common Law embraced all those kinds of religion ? Are they parts of the Common Law ? Yet one must be as well as another, or else none of those various kinds of religion are parts of the system. The Common Law is older than Christianity. In the earliest times of British history, the British religion was the dark superstitions of the Druids, the Priests of Mona's isle, who worshipped in the deepest recesses of the woods, and offered up the horrid sacrifice of human victims to the objects of their idolatry. Is this religion a part of the Common Law? When the Romans came they brought with them the Gods of Rome, and Caesar, who found London a great place, and as Shakespeare tells us in Richard the Third, built the Tower, bore with him the God of War and the other Gods of his Country. Did the religion of ancient Rome become a part of the Common Law of England ? When the Saxons invaded Britain, they brought with them their Gods of War, Woden and Thor ? Did the Saxon religion become a part of the Common Law ? Yet two days in the week in England and the United States, Wednesday and Thursday bear the names of their Deities, and have perpetuated the memory of these " fabled Gods " even to the present day. It was not till the reign of Claudius, the successor of Tiberius in whose reign Jesus Christ was crucified, that Christianity was introduced into England, by means of the conversion of a noble Jady, by a missionary from Rome. Up to that period surely, Christianity was no part of the Common Law of England. The religion of England has been often changed, and the dates of the changes, are well known, and some of them are recent affairs. But the Common Law is of immemorial antiquity, and as old as the native Britons, say the English law books, and therefore these various kinds of religion, introduced within legal memory, and can be no part of this system of immemorial antiquity. England, after the introduction of Christianity, embraced the Catholic religion."
The Old Testament mythology has its god as an over-dramatic individual, DIRECTLY interfering in human affairs.
Deism is the polar opposite of such a concept- in that its main ideology is that there is no such interference- a mere stepping stone to formal Atheism.
Ping to #27 and #28.
I disagree that voting down that provision in any way indicated the religious preference of those that voted. As a Christian I would have voted it down as well, and for exactly the reasons Thomas Jefferson provides - that this should be a nation of religious freedom.
One of the distinctions the article misses is the difference between the general period of the enlightenment (which helped spawn classical liberal thought in the old Whigs) and that step child imitation, the French Enlightenment.
Gertrude Himmelfarb does a good job of distinquishing between the three enlightement traditions pointing out the English-Scotish enlightenment which held religion essential to the fostering of moral men was so successful at creating real liberty and prosperous civil society that two other traditions sprange from it with end-goals to improve it but still achieve its benefits.
The first was empirical and took place in America using empirical elements of what worked in the American setting. The second imitation failed as the French, followed by others later, rejected empirical tests and substituted rationalism and metaphysical concepts all stated out with rigid logical constructs.
Hayek agrees in The Constitution of Liberty and spells out that distinction clearly in chapter four.
We can’t seperate all the history while claiming to reference it as this author does.
The Founding Father’s could not have shared Ayn Rand’s because Ayn Rand did not exist before them for them to agree with her. They were not atheists as you are implying.
She may have shared some of their views, but I doubt you could find anyone on the planet who didn’t share the same view as someone else on the planet at some point or other. It proves nothing.
And you can *yawn* all you want, but your posting history contains plenty of evidence that you’d be more suited for posting at DU.
"If we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say, as some do, that no such thing exists. We have the same evidence of the fact as of most of those we act on, to wit: their own affirmations, and their reasonings in support of them. I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in Protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D'Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than love of God."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814, using the term atheist to mean one who lacks a god belief, not one who is without morals, as was a common use of the term in Jefferson's day
"God is an essence that we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world."
-- 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
....and its a shame that the majority of FReepers still don’t recognize the coming NWO of which Agenda 21 is just a small part.
Oh, dearest sister in Christ, I couldn't agree with you more on this question!
Thus you quite correctly note:
And as many here will testify, that is the underlying reason for the 2nd Amendment - the right to keep and bear arms.Amen to that! There's nothing like logic to "connect the dots"....
Meanwhile, we have the spectacle of Cass Sunstein, Obama's regulatory czar or whatever, who not only argues that animals have the "natural" (???) right to sue human beings in court, but that the interpretation of the Framer's meaning of the Second Amendment increasingly in vogue nowadays is increasingly anhistorical the farther out in time we go.
Sunstein's argument goes that the original understanding of the RKBA is inseparable from the idea of a "state" militia. It has nothing to do with such inconsequential things as, say, the individual right of self-defense or protection of property. Only the "common defense" under State oversight and regulation was envisioned by the Framers.
Thus according to Sunstein, it was the "common defense" (under State regulation, etc.) that the Framers had in mind when they were crafting the language of the Second Amendment. Where this "bogus" notion of personal self-defense came from i.e., that the Second Amendment protects the individual rights of life, liberty, and property against all comers individual or corporate was the hallucination of right-wing-conspiracy-freak groups of fairly recent vintage.
It is these people who are distorting the pristine meaning of the Framers' intentions! And it is simply criminal that such people are slandering the Bill of Rights in that way!!! Thus cynically misleading their own fellow citizens! Shame on them! (So when can we start arresting them?)
Are you as sick as I am, of the total inversion of reality that these idiots are trying to perpetrate on the American people right now?
Sigh....
People, stand in Truth or you WILL be blown away by the tumultuous winds that are coming....
Thank you ever so much for writing, dearest sister in Christ!
Sharing an idea needn’t imply chronological order.
Two people who have never met each other, could share the same ideas.
Example: The concept of the yearly calendar, that was shared by disparate, ancient cultures around the world.
...
I’m sure you are deeply uncomfortable with those quotes by the Founding Fathers that I’ve posted above.
If the 2nd Amendment was truly honoured in spirit, civilians should be able to own, maintain and use jet fighters and nuclear weapons.
The problem is those quotes are not representative, nor have you considered them in context. You can prove a lot of bizarre things by quote mining. It is nonsense to try to portray the Founders as a whole as anti-Christian, yet here you are trying to do it. Consider a more balanced evaluation of their worldview instead of anachronistically trying to force them into an alien mold.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.