Our government is based upon Christian principles in the sense that it is a Western nation, and Western culture is imbued with Christian principles, or, more specifically, Western Christian principles.
But that's common among the entire West. Sweden still has a polity guided by Christian principles, even though most Swedes abandoned religion generations ago (they self-deprecatingly call it 'atheistic piety').
We're blind to it because it's the cultural background. We assume our Western way of thinking is just common to the human condition, as opposed to being our own cultural perspective, one upon which the fingerprints of Christianity are smeared all over.
When one says the nation was founded upon Christianity or Christian principles, one must be clear about whether one is talking about colonization, or about the establishment of the government of the independent United States of America.
In the former case, religious faith was indeed the foundation of several of the colonies. With regard to the Cons utional government, its overriding influence was the Enlightenment. While some of the Founding Fathers mixed their rational humanism together with their orthodox Christian faith, others were nominal churchgoers at best, who subscribed to Deism, which denied the existence of a personal God (i.e., one who got involved in the lives of individuals) in favor of a detached Creator. The language used in reference to God in all these early do ents is straight from the Enlightenment. We assume it is coterminous with orthodox Protestant Christianity because... well, we want to... and also today we're more accustomed to humanists denying the existence of God outright, rather than just making him a nebulous, non-specific deity.
There is a tie with the early colonists, however, in the context of religious freedom. The early colonists came to America in order to practice their faith apart from the overbearing arm of the state Church of England. The Episcopal Church wanted to be the state church in the United States just as the Church of England was back in Britain. Many of the Founding Fathers remembered the plight of the early colonists and fought the Episcopals, bringing about the principles of religious freedom according to personal conscience we enjoy today.
It would be kind of silly to suppose that only the United States figured out the true Biblical principles of government, a good 1700-plus years after Jesus began His Church, and after millions upon millions already had lived and died in the faith... or do we perhaps believe in "continuing revelation," too?
Ah, but to God a day is like a thousand years. Oh, and he never sleeps.Yes, because a supernatural ultimate creator deity has nothing better do with his time than to interfere in human affairs.
Imagine how much you could get done in a day if it lasted a thousand years. You could probably even get the baseboards vacuumed.
I thought about it, and then I went back and checked the Bible. And you're right! "Blessed are the prosperous... blessed are the victorious... blessed are the free..." It's right there after 2 Hezekiah.
It's funny... between about the fourth and sixteenth centuries, Christians were convinced that the correct Biblical form of government required a Christian Holy Roman Emperor. If only they'd read their Bibles, we could have had American-style democracy since late antiquity!
I hope I'm worshiping the right God..
Odds are that you are not. When you consider the mul ude of religions in the history of the world and the number of different denominations within those religions (Christianity alone has how many denominations?), the odds are extremely low that you are in the right one. Oh well, maybe is not as bad as they make it out to be.
Jesus likened it to a burning pit of garbage. Other places it is made out to be like a lake of fire.
There has always been a lot of uncertainty and difference of opinion in Christianity on what happens to people who aren't Christians, but who never actually got the chance to reject Christianity outright because they never really heard about it. In America, we're pretty certain that pretty much everybody goes to because we think in very black & white, yes-or-no, A-therefore-B-therefore-C linear terms, and plus we're kind of Calvinist, and Calvinists believe in something called double predestination, in which a loving, merciful, gracious God creates some people specifically for the purpose of damning them to eternal torment in , because he finds that enjoyable and gratifying.
In the much more barbaric Middle Ages, theologians grappled with this, suggesting that those beholden of "invincible ignorance" regarding Christianity had an indeterminate fate. In the East, they deal with it apophatically, speculating that while one can know where the Church is, one cannot know where the Church isn't.
This piece is by Christopher Hitchens, so some of you may dismiss it from the get go, but it is an interesting read.
Holy Nonsense
Mitt Romney's windy, worthless speech.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Thursday, Dec. 6, 2007, at 5:40 PM ET
Almost the only clever thing about Gov. Mitt Romney's long-denied and long-delayed but obviously long-prepared "response" was its location at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, which allowed him to pose (prematurely, I'd say) in front of a presidential seal as well as a thicket of American flags. Composed chiefly of boilerplate, the windy speech raised the vexed question of the candidate's religious affiliation—and thus broke the taboo on mentioning it—without setting to rest any of the difficulties that make it legitimate to raise the issue in the first place.
Actually, and in fairness, one should say "any but one" of those difficulties. Romney did avow, early on and in round terms, that "no authorities of my church" could ever exert any influence on his decision-making as chief executive. This may get him in trouble with some Mormons, and it does invite the question of why he adheres to a sect whose "prophet" is a supreme commander, but it is the most he could have been asked to say, as well as the least. Actually, the more he goes in one direction, the more he may find it is Mormons who are developing reservations about him. There is already grumbling in the ranks about his statement that the Bible is the revealed word of God, an absurd belief that Mormons do not truly profess, because they feel it is lacking an even more absurd later revelation to Joseph Smith. There are also those who think that Romney's disowning of past Mormon polygamy is too opportunistic, since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does still offer the consolation prize of multiple wives in heaven (just like the sick dream of Mohamed Atta).
Trying to raise himself above this swamp of nonsense—the existence of which is his responsibility, not mine—the governor mainly treated us to evasion and a rather shifty attempt to change the subject and rewrite the historical record. It may be true that Romney "saw my father march with Martin Luther King" (though the candidate himself, who was of age to do so at the time, doesn't claim to have joined in), but that doesn't answer the question about official Mormon racism, which lasted 10 full years after Dr. King had been murdered, or of what Mitt Romney did or said about this at the time.
Romney does not understand the difference between deism and theism, nor does he know the first thing about the founding of the United States. Jefferson's Declaration may invoke a "Creator," but, as he went on to show in the battle over the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, he and most of his peers did not believe in a god who intervened in human affairs or in a god who had sent a son for a human sacrifice. These easily ascertainable facts are reflected in the way that the U.S. Cons ution does not make any mention of a superintendent deity and in the way that the delegates to the Cons utional Convention declined an offer (possibly sarcastic), even from Benjamin Franklin, that they resort to prayer to compose their differences. Romney may throw a big chest and say that God should be "on our currency, in our pledge," and of course on our public land in this magic holiday season, but James Madison did not think that there should be chaplains opening the proceedings of Congress or even appointed as ministers in the U.S. armed forces. Trying to dodge around this, and to support his assertion that the founders were religious in the Christian sense, Romney drones on about a barely relevant moment of emotion in 1774 and comes up with the glib slogan that "freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." Any fool can think of an example where freedom exists without religion—and even more easily of an instance where religion exists without (or in negation of) freedom.
This does not mean that freedom of religion is not as important as freedom from it, yet Romney makes himself absurd by saying that Mormons may not be asked about the tenets of their faith, lest this infringe the cons utional ban on a religious test for public office. Here is another failure of understanding on his part. He is not being told: Answer this question in the wrong way, and you become ineligible. He is being told: Your family is prominent in a notorious church that proselytizes its views in a famously aggressive manner. Are you only now deciding to make a secret of your beliefs? And if so, why? Would he expect a Scientologist to be able to avoid questions about L. Ron Hubbard? Does the governor of Massachusetts who publicly tried for mob applause by demanding that we "double Guantanamo" (whatever that meant) add that the detainees must not be asked what branch of Islam they favor? If an atheist was running against him, would Romney make nothing of the fact? His stupid unease on this point is shown by his demagogic attack on the straw man "religion of secularism," when, actually, his main and most cynical critic is a moon-faced true believer and anti-Darwin pulpit-puncher from Arkansas who doesn't seem to know the difference between being born again and born yesterday.
According to the admittedly very contradictory scriptures of the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth warned his disciples and followers that they should expect to be ridiculed and mocked for their faith. After all, how likely was it that God had decided to reveal himself to only a few illiterate peasants in a barbarous backwater? Those who elected to believe this stuff were quite rightly told to expect a hard time, and the expression "fool for God" or "fool for Christ" has been with us ever since. That concept has some dignity and nobility. Entirely lacking in dignity or nobility (or average integrity) is the well-heeled son of a gold-plated church who wants to assume the pained look of martyrdom only when he is asked if he actually believes what he says. A long time ago, Romney took the decision to be a fool for Joseph Smith, a convicted fraud and serial prac ioner of statutory rape who at times made war on the United States and whose cult has been made to amend itself several times in order to be considered American at all. We do not require pious lectures on the American founding from such a man, and we are still waiting for some straight answers from him.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
The only time I play favorites is when the Cowboys are playing.
It makes sense. The Cowboys are America's team and America is God's favorite country; therefore, the Cowboys must be God's favorite team.
The Cowboys were going to make Texas Stadium a dome, until God asked them to leave a hole in the roof so he could watch.
If Jesus could do it all over again, he would have come to Philadelphia in the 1780's instead of Jerusalem in the first century.
But, had he done that, the 1780's would have been the first century rather than the 1780's.
wow, agree or disagree, Hitchens can write.
I concur.
"message that religion matters"
Religion may matter to individuals, but Religion has no part in the secular form of government of the extremely diverse, pluralistic, law-based US, and stating that doesn't make me, or the FFs, atheist.
Speaking of assholes, Hitchens ripped Willard's sanctimonious, fuzzy bull a new asshole.
What does Hitchens' supposed atheism have to do with his critique of Willard?
Cleveland Rocks!
I still say Mitt made his point quite eloquently. But that is just me and I'm no atheist.
Mormonism...in cartoon form!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy0d1HbItOo
I like the South Park take -- South Park
Willard speech was essentially grovelling to the other, fringe American "Christian" sects, esp the "Christian" supremecists who control the Repug party. Willard knows these other "Christians" are necessary for him to win.
But as Catholic Kennedy's speech was a plea to be accepted as American in pluralistic America, the point Willard's speech is a plea to the Christian supremacists to be accepted as a Christian. With the sub-text that non-Christians, secular/atheistic/agnostic Americans are inferior people, and aren't really includedd a Americans. ie, Willard is grovelling to the excluding fringe, extreme "Christian" supremacists.
With equal eloquence, I retort, go yourself, Whott
Well after today, you might say: Mr. Peabody hit the
nail rite square on the head. What a finish to a
frustrating game. Those Cowboys know how to finish.
I despise pompous individuals regardless of their religion. However, I do agree that there is a certain smugness among the holy trinity (Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris) of the atheist movement. Part of this may stem from the fact that they are not just atheists, but anti-theists.
Right, because believers just want to be left alone to practice their religion in private, but those damn atheists are always out there trying to convert them.
Yeah, I think many people share the belief that being religious gives one the right to be an asshole.
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