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To: mugs99
A state cannot enact a state religion. That is a violation of separation of church and state.

Please provide the clause in the Constitution got rid of official state religious. After you fail to find it, check out the years that the original 13 disestablished on their own.

I'm combining this from two of your posts to make your statement clearer.In colonial times your religion was the religion of the colony you lived in. That was the law in those days. It was not enforced in some of the backwoods counties, but is was enforced law in most of the colonies.

People had to contribute tax dollars to maintain their state churches. People had to be members of good standing with the official state churches to be made freemen there. However, people did not have to worship in churches of the religion of the official church & there were churches of other denominations within most of the colonies.

Only about half of the Pilgrims were members of the church of the other half of the Pilgrims. None of them were Puritans. Puritans founded Salem & Scituate. Here you have two different religions within the same colony & neither of them were exactly in "backwoods counties". The colonists had a fit about the Royal Governor putting an Anglican church in Boston because if was offensive, not because it was "illegal".

During the Constitutional Convention of 1787 Ben Franklin suggested they start the convention with prayer. His suggestion was rejected and the convention was held without prayer.

Members of the convention were different religions, so the rejection of Franklin's suggestion makes some sense. It had nothing to do with any kind of rejection of Christianity.

Those founders not only rejected prayer, they demanded separation of church and state.

They rejected creating a national religion. That is hardly a demand for the separation of church & state.

All of the above are facts of American History that can be found in the Encyclopedia Britannica or any book on American history.

There are facts & there are interpretations of what those facts mean. If you don't believe my interpretation, keep sifting through the Constitution to find that clause which forced all of the states to disestablish.

Now, I ask you this: If the founders were Christians who wanted a Christian America, why did they reject prayer at the convention?

No prayer would have been appropriate for everyone there. In those days, most prayers weren't the watered down versions of prayer that are common today. Most of these people were heavily schooled in the doctrine of their faiths. Saying some kind of universal Christian prayer would have been akin to a Roman Catholic taking communion at a Baptist church, sure to offend everyone.

Why did the enact Separation of Church and State?

They didn't.

Why does the Constitution not mention Jesus, or God.

Religion was left to the states.

Why does the Declaration of Independence refer to the Deist "Nature's God" instead of the Christian Jesus God?

It was a good way to poke a finger in the eye of the monarch.

I understand the Constitution and the words of the Deists who wrote it.

Could you splain why Paine, clearly a deist quoted extensively from the Old Testament in "Common Sense"?

67 posted on 06/03/2005 12:03:36 PM PDT by GoLightly
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To: GoLightly
Could you splain why Paine, clearly a deist quoted extensively from the Old Testament in "Common Sense"?

If you would bother to read Paine you would understand why. May I suggest "Reason". If Deism had prophets, Paine would be to Deists as Jesus is to Christians. You say I do not understand Christianity, but you do not understand Deism.

"Except in the first article in the Christian creed, that of believing in God, there is not an article in it but fills the mind with doubt as to the truth of it, the instant man begins to think. Now every article in a creed that is necessary to the happiness and salvation of man, ought to be as evident to the reason and comprehension of man as the first article is, for God has not given us reason for the purpose of confounding us, but that we should use it for our own happiness and His glory"...Thomas Paine

According to Rev. Ashbel Green, a Presbyterian minister who was a close personal friend and advisor to President George Washington, "while Washington was very deferential to religion and its ceremonies, like nearly all the founders of the Republic, he was not a Christian, but a Deist."

I'll believe the words of the man who was there at the time, thank you.
...
68 posted on 06/03/2005 12:48:00 PM PDT by mugs99
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