[LiberalBuster]

>>America was founded by Christian Puritans

And intolerant ones at that. It's interesting to note that many who fled religious-based persecution in England, ended up practicing their own religious persecution once they established their own colony/beachhead in the New World. Rhode Island (via Roger Williams) was perhaps the first colony/region to extend *real* religous freedom to people who did not necessarily acknowledge/practice the religion of the colony.

[discostu]

That's because the "fled religious persecution" line about the colonists is 100% BS. They were looking to establish single religion zones. A bunch of the colonists first went to Holand (which at the time had religious freedom), but Holland wouldn't put up with them (for them religious freedom meant across the board religious freedom, no zoning). So they came over here and made their colonies. To say the nation was founded by Puritans is also ignoring places like the Colony of Virginia (which was Catholic) and a few other. Our founding fathers didn't have a problem with that as long as it didn't extend past state boundaries (no federal church, state or local level do what you want, Virginia for a long time funneled tax dollars from non-Catholics to the Catholic Church, Catholics got a cut in their taxes for this). Then in the middle of the 20th century certain idiots started screwing with the definition of the words in the Constitution and Bill of Rights and it's all been downhill from there.

As for the terrible rise of neo-paganism, some of my best friends are pagans, no big deal. Instead of decrying all this supposed evil these people need to be asking themselves why people are fleeing Christianity in droves.

[mdmathis6]

Re: the "intolerant Puritans" They didn't stay intolerant for-ever. My goodness we talk of them as though they formed Taliban like legislative structures that have since locked our country from its founding in an Islamic like embrace. The actual witch trials in Salem only lasted six months, at the end of which, their consciences were so pricked by the deaths(and the violation of the commandment"Thou shalt not bear false witness") that it broke the power of the extreme legalism of the Puritan faith and opened the way for real love and Holy spirit power. These churches, their off shoots and other denominations that arrived throughout the early 1700's to our shores would act in concert(especially the Great Awakening in 1756) to produce the moral character needed for the colonies to break away from Britain. It produced the 80 to 90 percent literacy rate(barely 50 percent now) that deToqueville discovered in the 1840's. Let's lay-off the Puritans, their history is a little more complex than Hawthorn's mean spirited writings (incidentally he had more than a personal axe to grind against religion himself). For a more balanced view of the religious life in early America please peruse Peter Marshall's "The Light and the Glory" where he presents both the warts and beauty of the bay colonies and their histories from the 1600's through the early 1700's.