Excerpt #19 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
The men and women who founded our republic in the late 18th century were generally religious people.
But, mindful of the oppression they had seen in Europe over matters of church and state, they wrote the following words into the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
That terse, two-pronged principle — government can’t promote a specific religion and can’t stop people from worshipping the way they want to — leaves lots of gray areas.
Nevertheless, it was a powerful expression of religious evolution.
It marked a breaking away from forced faith to choice.
It was a radical step in the face of an entire church.
It served as the catalyst for the evolution of religious thought that continues today.
Despite that, many believe this “faith of our fathers” was not based on an evolving of ideas but rather what is now used as the guiding principle.
They argue that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation when in fact our founders liberated a people from religious dogma.
Today, the continuing evolution of religion, which our founders would approve, includes allowance for people to choose against any and all religions.
To dispute the claim that this nation was founded as a Christian nation, Barbara Walker, author of The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, points out that the Founding Fathers particularly insisted on the separation of church and state.
George Washington himself wrote, “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
She goes on to say that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Jefferson Bible because he found the standard texts so distasteful.
Jefferson wrote: “The Christian god is a being of terrific character — cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust…
We discover (in the Bible) a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication…
On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another,
for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.”
NOTHING CAUSES MORE SUFFERING THAN THE ARROGANCE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.
The United States was not intended to be a Christian nation.
Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and most of the founding fathers were skeptics or Deists; they specifically intended a secular government with an “unbreachable wall” between church and state; they even wrote into the treaty with the Moslem nation of Tripoli a clear statement that, unlike European countries, the “United States is not, in any sense, a Christian nation.” (So clearly understood was the principle of separation of church and state in those days that the treaty passed Congress without any debate on that clause, and President John Adams signed it at once, without any fear that it might jeopardize his political future.) Robert A. Wilson, Sex and Drugs, 1973
“Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, He must approve the homage of Reason rather than that of blindfolded Fear.” – Thomas Jefferson