Begin Rant
There are many who seem to believe that the deistic rationalists who founded the United States (Washington, Jefferson, &c) founded the nation on Christian principals. That a group of people so hostile to the clergy in their writings, so devoted to the superiority of "natural philosophy" to religion, could be believed to be have based a nation on religion is a testament to the power of willful ignorance. Some people claim that English common law, begun in roughly 500AD based on Roman Law somehow injects Christianity into our legal system. To directly arguing against such nonsense gives it too much respect, so instead I'll cite the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by George Washington on 11/4/1796 and published to no controversy in the Philadelphia Gazette on 6/17/1797:
As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.We're not based on Christianity, we're based on the rule of law and principal that "tyranny of the masses" shall not prevail over the rights of individuals. If the words of George Washington, Adams, Jefferson, et. al. aren't enough to convince you, then you're a moron -- please proceed to the nearest bridge and perform a swan dive.
End Rant
9 comments:
Jim, you are incorrect. The Constitution was not founded upon Christian Principles, and the debates surrounding it equally not... but the charters and laws of the colonies, and hereafter States, most assuredly were, and remained so pointedly as a public pre-rebuke of any potential descent into libertinism (an unfortunate side effect common to revolutions of our sort).
btw, glad to see your back upa nd running... haven't had a chance to cordially argue with you lately...
Oh, quick clarification... recall in thsi period, the government of the US != the government of any particular state. The pre-civil-war notion of the States held.
There is, also, a danger in using said quote... it was sort of forced at hostage-point. There is a LOT of context surrounding said treaty of 1797... (this being, iirc, and I guess I'll have to wikipedia it, before it was betrayed on either Jefferson or Adams' watch, and we sent gunboats and Marines to blow the hell out of them and stop enslaving our sailors.)
Russ.. I don't think Jim is 'wrong'.. I think you're arguing a point that he never made. What the states chose to do is irrelevant because the Constitution's framers allowed the states to choose individually.
I can't attest to the quote being under duress or not but I have in my own prior readings found a LOT of quotes like this from numerous Founding Fathers, explicitly stating that the country was not intended to be Christian.
Moreover, war is 'USA vs' .. Not 'StateX vs'.. The Constitution forebade states from engaging in treaty or warfare with other nations explicitly for this purpose. The ideology of a particular state could not rope the entire nation into a conflict. Egypt may piss off all the Mormons in Utah, but that doesn't give them the right to start a war over it.
Chris: bingo
Russ: never claimed the State governments weren't Christian. Heck, in South Carolina you can still be evicted for shacking up. That's a freedom left for the States to decide.
Vis-a-vis the quote as treaty, absolutely. What's important in context, here, is that it was utterly uncontroversial with the nation's founders.
FYI:
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise." & "During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution." - Madison
"Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!" - John Adams
"The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained." - Jefferson
More:
“Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the Christians so that their religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society.” - Washington .. Notice.. 'THEIR' not 'OUR'. Washington also never took Communion nor did he ask for a priest on his deathbed
“There are in this country, as in all others, a certain proportion of restless and turbulent spirits - poor, unoccupied, ambitious - who must always have something to quarrel about with their neighbors. These people are the authors of religious revivals.” - John Q Adams
“The Infinite Father expects or requires no worship or praise from us.” - Franklin
“Some volumes against Deism fell into my hands. They were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle’s Lecture. It happened that they produced on me an effect precisely the reverse of what was intended by the writers; for the arguments of the Deists, which were cited in order to be refuted, appealed to me much more forcibly than the refutation itself. In a word, I soon became a thorough Deist.” - Franklin
“The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most destructive to the peace of man since man began to exist. Among the most detestable villains in history, you could not find one worse than Moses, who gave an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers and then rape the daughters. One of the most horrible atrocities found in the literature of any nation. I would not dishonor my Creator's name by attaching it to this filthy book.” - Thomas Paine
On that score, agreed with both of you.
A cleverer man than me said that it wasn't Christian principles, but masonic principles upon which the nation was founded.
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