Obama's America 2016

[sanantone]

A comment you said earlier was that everything changes with the times, and I would say no not everything. However, it is helpful when looking at the past to examine the context in order to try and find clues to understand something better. One example of things that don’t change with time are principles, such as life and liberty.

That's not exactly what I said. I said everything changes within the context of the times. When you judge someone's actions in the past, you have to consider whether that action was generally acceptable during that time.

Well I looked one of the sites you mentioned that I didn’t before, and for a Christian you sure are reading something that is obviously strongly biased against Christianity. How do you expect to get a perfect fact from it?

I'm not afraid of hearing other points of view. Unlike most of the participants in this thread, I give credit where credit is due even if the person's beliefs do not align with my own. I'm a Christian, but I'm not a very religious person. I am a spiritual person who does not believe in or participate in the man-made doctrines/rituals of many Christian denominations.

- Just trying to point out that a lot of bias does discredit a source. Also, interestingly you say, you were not talking about separation of church and state, however the title of one of your links is History of the Separation of Church and State.

The quotes in the article were relevant to my point.

However, I did read a few of the quotes of James Madison and John Adams and a few things stood out to me. Madison talked about “ecclesiastical or (church) establishments”. He mentioned this more than once, and I think he was referring to church as an institution of rules and rituals more than he was talking about personal religion itself.

People are still confusing religion with the belief in God. They are not one and the same. One can be religious without believing in a god and vice versa.

He was talking more about a certain characteristic of religion the outward symbols/acts rather than the whole thing. John Adams interestingly mentioned the Catholic church. Most Christians today will tell you that Catholocism is a different religion, because it believes in praying to humans like Mary as well as God. John Adams asks how can a free country coexist with the Catholic church? The Roman Catholic church had a history of power-hungry popes that ruled nations and kings. Obviously this connection between church and state would not be compatible with liberty. Also at the time of the enlightenment (1700’s), religion and church had taken a back seat particularly in Europe to things like science and philosophy. People became so empowered with their own thoughts they decided to reject God. This enlightenment thinking carried over to government also. This gives a backdrop of what thoughts and ideas the Founding Fathers were surrounded with. Having said all this, yes, I will concede the point that not ALL the founders were necessarily Christians.

You sound as if you have a bias against Catholics. Catholicism is a denomination of Christianity, but it is not a different religion. I don't think most Christians view it as a different religion. You would have to come up with some data to substantiate that claim because I can't find any. Anyway, Great Britain had already broken away from the Roman Catholic Church, so the religious "tyranny" that Americans lived under did not come from Catholics.

However America’s laws are based on Biblical concepts. For instance, the Ten Commandments with the commands against, stealing, killing and lying are all things that we have laws against today, except lying is often called fraud. This is a simple example but it serves to illustrate that America had a founding based on Christian principles therefore it was a Christian nation, regardless of the fact that not everyone was a Christian.

Those laws are pretty universal and predate Christianity and Judaism.

I think OtherSyde had made the comment that society can define or legislate morality without religion. I contest that though, because our government is based on people having rights. Where do these rights come from? Or, what’s the point of having rights if you don’t have right or wrong? In other words there is an objective standard and it is established in the laws of God, as my example of the ten commandments shows.

There are a few majority Buddhist nations that have no problem with this. Although, some Buddhists do believe in God, many don't and it's not a central tenet of the religion. They operate under democracies and their people have rights. Now majority Muslim countries on the other hand...

I wouldn’t necessarily say that slavery is outdated more than I would say it was just wrong, but the Constitution doesn’t condone slavery it just didn’t fix it. It was something in the culture that no one was willing or at the time particularly wanted to address. However, one of the signers of the Declaration, Benjamin Rush was an early opponent of slavery.

Their views on slavery are outdated. If the Constitution were written today, no one would even consider making slavery legal except for maybe Arkansas Representative Jon Hubbard.

The Constitution doesn’t address women’s rights because at the time it wasn’t an issue. Women preferred being at home primarily taking care of their kids, home, garden etc. or going to social clubs rather than getting up early every morning to go slave away at an office. When the enlightenment and industrial revolutions hit that’s when new fields of discovery opened up in the world and both men and women and youth, for example in the 1920’s became discontented with their positions in life. Even before women’s right to vote in the early 1900’s you have a societal shift that industrialism brings to take the men from their agricultural work and business to the cities and away from working at home. This shift in culture encouraged the issue of women’s rights.

Basically, what you're saying is that their views are outdated. Attitudes towards women have changed. The belief that only white, male landowners should vote is outdated.

Thomas Paine’s quote about men being wicked when they have religion was to make the point that because religion’s aim is for the betterment of mankind, without it we would surely be in a worse state. So it is not an insult to religion rather just the opposite. However I guess Paine could have been sarcastic but I highly doubt that and would need more information.

Even if he weren't being sarcastic, the opinion that people are still wicked with religion means that religion doesn't do a very good job at policing morality.