Here are a few more of the highlights of the path blazed by Christians that take a bit of the luster off the myth of America as a "Christian nation." Most of them probably weren't in your textbook. -Fort Caroline Massacre (1565): The first real contact between Europeans in what would become America took place in Florida, near modern Jacksonville, where hundreds of French Huguenots, the real first "Pilgrims," were massacred by the Spanish who founded St. Augustine for this purpose. The Spanish Admiral who led this search and destroy mission hung some of the survivors with a sign above them reading, "I do this not as to Frenchmen but as to Lutherans," by which he meant "Protestants" or actually "heretics." (This story is told in America's Hidden History.) -Mayflower Compact (November 1620): Usually cited as the kickoff point for the "Christian nation," the Mayflower Compact did indeed recognize the religious underpinnings of the new colony. It also recognized the sovereignty of the King. And by the way: Sorry, "Goodie" Palin. You don't get a vote. -The Mystic Massacre: During the Pequot War of 1637, hundreds of women, children, and mostly old men were killed or burned to death in a Puritan attack on a Pequot Indian village. Governor William Bradford would later write that "horrible was the stincke and [scent] thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them...." -The Boston Martyrs: On October 27, 1659, two Quakers, Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson, were executed in Boston, the Puritans' "shining city upon a hill," under a 1658 law banning the Society of Friends as a "cursed sect." In June 1660, Mary Dyer was executed and a fourth "Friend" was hung in 1661. Religious dissenters Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson had also been banished from the Bay Colony for their opposition to the Puritan "theocracy." And Catholic priests were banned in Boston, where for many years November 5 (Guy Fawke's Day in England) was celebrated as "Pope Day" on which rowdy, brawling, and usually drunken mobs wheeled an effigy of the Pope around Boston and ended the day by setting the carts and effigies on fire. -Baptists arrested in Virginia: Between 1768 and 1778, Baptists were persecuted and arrested in Virginia, where the Anglican Church was the official church supported by public funds. (In New England, the Congregational Church enjoyed that support.) The sight of Baptist preachers being arrested troubled a young James Madison who would later spearhead passage in 1786 of the landmark Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1779. (The law is one of only three accomplishments Jefferson instructed to be put in his epitaph.) -Ben Franklin's Prayer Request: At a deadlocked Constitutional Convention in 1787, Ben Franklin -- as many religious conservatives and advocates of public prayer like to note -- suggested beginning the day's deliberations with a prayer. Alexander Hamilton worried that if people heard that, they would think the delegates were desperate. Another delegate pointed out that there were no funds to pay a chaplain. There the discussion ended as Franklin notes, most thought prayers "unnecessary." (By the way, Jesus, though no Constitutional scholar, took a dim view of public prayer. Saying that only "hypocrites" pray in public, Jesus advised, "Pray to the Father in secret." [Matthew 6: 5-7]) Contrary to Sarah Palin's statement -- "Go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant" -- the U.S. Constitution does not mention God, the Bible, or the Ten Commandments. -Burning of the Ursuline Convent (1833): A combination of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment led a mob of self-described "Sons of the Tea Party" to torch a convent school in Charlestown, Massachusetts, not far from the recently dedicated Bunker Hill Monument. -Philadelphia's Bible Riots: Over the course of a few weeks in May and July of 1844, dozens of people were killed, hundreds of houses burned, and churches destroyed in the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic "Bible Riots." I recount this event and the Ursuline Convent burning in my new book A Nation Rising. -"Church and Slave State": Abolitionism had its roots in Christianity. But so did American slavery, which cited biblical justifications for the "peculiar institution." In the 19th century, this divide led to splits within three Protestant denominations that divided North and South: the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians. (In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention apologized for its racist past and support of slavery, 140 years after the split.) Of course, this is a mere handful of the landmarks in this so-called "Christian Nation." We haven't even gotten to the Mormons and the violence that confronted them in the early 19th century. And of course, it would be quite easy to list a great many nobler moments in American Christianity. But the point is that calling America a "Christian nation" is simply another myth -- history as "bedtime story" or wishful thinking. History and Christianity deserve the truth -- which after all, the Bible tells us, "will set you free."
My pleasure. Here is Ron at an after-church outing with a fine example of the M-14 which can be found in millions of households in the USA, most of them acquired in the last year, 'cause "Nothing says Hate like .308": <object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/eGX9TgI0gXk&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eGX9TgI0gXk&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object> Some of you libtards will probably wet your pants watching this.
The irony.... liberals do not even grasp the idea of a limited Federal Government anymore they do not realize why the bill of rights was voted in during the Constitutional Convention. They do not understand the the majority of states already had very strong ties to Christian Churches at the time of the Constitutional Convention and that the States were afraid the Feds were going to pick a state religion. Hence they required the bill of rights. Liberals do not realize the bill of Rights was written to make sure the Federal Government did not seize state power. They do not know three quarters of the states had ties to state Churches, paid for Christian education in schools, and or required that its state officials be Christians or believers in God to hold office. The list goes on and on about how Christian the States were and they set up the Constitution to protect themselves from the feds.
Uhuh, Judeo-Christian principles, the same that led people from the old country to march down to Jerusalem, take it from the arabs and hold it for over 200 years. Those kind of armed principles. And that is what islam has in store for it here in North America.
no --- judeo christian principles that led the founders to set up the united states where people were allowed to worship and live as they pleased until the federal government and courts got too secular, liberal and big.
Perhaps the Texas Board of Education is right in that we arent educating our children the correct way. However, I would say we arent educating them in all the facts and circumstances that are available to us. Thomas Paine, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson all believed that the Christian Church was threatened by enlightened thinking and the concept of Plurality of Worlds. The Plurality of Worlds was the name given to the believe in life on other planets. Thomas Paine said it best.........a belief in the Plurality of Worlds and Christianity are diammetrically opposed to each other. Many of our Founding Fathers were NOT CHRISTIANS and in fact, they opposed all religions. They believed in a Creator but not in religions. The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles? -- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 20, 1815 As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? -- John Adams, letter to FA Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816 "The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected [Washington; Adams; Jefferson; Madison; Monroe; Adams; Jackson] not a one had professed a belief in Christianity.... "Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism." -- The Reverend Doctor Bird Wilson, an Episcopal minister in Albany, New York, in a sermon preached in October, 1831 c
The Christian Nation Myth Farrell Till Whenever the Supreme Court makes a decision that in any way restricts the intrusion of religion into the affairs of government, a flood of editorials, articles, and letters protesting the ruling is sure to appear in the newspapers. Many protesters decry these decisions on the grounds that they conflict with the wishes and intents of the "founding fathers." Such a view of American history is completely contrary to known facts. The primary leaders of the so-called founding fathers of our nation were not Bible-believing Christians; they were deists. Deism was a philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution. Its major tenets included belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems and belief in a supreme deity who created the universe to operate solely by natural laws. The supreme God of the Deists removed himself entirely from the universe after creating it. They believed that he assumed no control over it, exerted no influence on natural phenomena, and gave no supernatural revelation to man. A necessary consequence of these beliefs was a rejection of many doctrines central to the Christian religion. Deists did not believe in the virgin birth, divinity, or resurrection of Jesus, the efficacy of prayer, the miracles of the Bible, or even the divine inspiration of the Bible. These beliefs were forcefully articulated by Thomas Paine in Age of Reason, a book that so outraged his contemporaries that he died rejected and despised by the nation that had once revered him as "the father of the American Revolution." To this day, many mistakenly consider him an atheist, even though he was an out spoken defender of the Deistic view of God. Other important founding fathers who espoused Deism were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, James Madison, and James Monroe. Fundamentalist Christians are currently working overtime to convince the American public that the founding fathers intended to establish this country on "biblical principles," but history simply does not support their view. The men mentioned above and others who were instrumental in the founding of our nation were in no sense Bible-believing Christians. Thomas Jefferson, in fact, was fiercely anti-cleric. In a letter to Horatio Spafford in 1814, Jefferson said, "In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes" (George Seldes, The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey Citadel Press, 1983, p. 371). http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/farrell_till/myth.html
we have debated this many times before. First of all deism back then is unlike deism today. Next Thomas Jefferson in one of his inaugural speeches defined the Creator as the God of Abraham Issac and Jacob. Next the establishment clause as part of the the bill of rights became part of the constitution because many of the states already had ties to Christianity and they did not wish to have a National denomination. At the time of the constitutional convention a majority of the states had established religion like tests for people holding office. The office holders had to swear an oath in which they proclaimed a belief in God at a minimum. All this was cited by me on elitetrader in the past. Look it up. The US supreme court declared the U.S. is a Christian nation and went through a long restatement of the reasons why. The case has never been over ruled. Up until the 1950s state govts funded Christianity in government paid for institutions like schools. Since the 50s the supreme court started taking religion out of public institutions. I think it would be fair to say that because of activists courts we are no longer a Christian nation. In fact if you were to argue we may now be a secular nation - I would not argue with you. But it is ignorant of our history to state that Evangelicals are attempting to turn the U.S. from a secular nation into a theocratic one. Evangelicals are only trying to stem the tide of an aggressive organized campaign to denude this nation of its Christian roots.