[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. . . . Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Source: John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Charles Francis Adams, editor (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1854), Vol. IX, p. 229, October 11, 1798.)
In reviewing the various quotes from the Founders captured thereon, I note that most of the citations mention Jesus Christ specifically. Offhand, maybe three did not. [By my count, Henry Knox, John Hancock, and John Jay.]
It appears that the great revolutionary General Henry Knox might have been a monotheist. It was he who brought the great guns of Fort Ticonderoga to Boston, hauling by ox-drawn sled 60 tons of cannons and other armaments across some 300 miles of ice-covered rivers and snow-draped Berkshire Mountains to the Boston siege camps. As a consequence, the British were forced to withdraw from Boston into safer precincts in Halifax....
But I'd be inclined to say that this amazing military technocrat an artillery officer by inclination and native genius of that art, as well as a brilliant, savvy military commander who got the job done, and brought his troops safely home under the most adverse conditions if a monotheist, perhaps was so on Occam's Razor grounds, just as one supposes Sir Isaac Newton was likewise persuaded.
Does this make Henry Knox or Isaac Newton a "heretic?"
Guess that goes according to how one defines "heretic"....
Thank you ever so much for posting this valuable link, dear boatbums!
HAPPY NEW YEAR to all my dear friends here gathered!
Nobody denies that our Founders were all Christians of one stripe or another.
But for many, and virtually all of the "top tier" Founders, their Christianity was influenced more-or-less by Enlightenment Age deism, Unitarianism and Freemasonry.
This puts them into the same category as yours truly, BroJoeK, and along with around 50 million "restorationist" Christians today makes us all, in Kevmo's words, "God Damned Heretics".
Seems to me Kevmo's is a totally unacceptable point of view, and you, boatbums, should have the courage to stand up and condemn it.
But you don't, do you?