They were concerned about keeping all government out of religion. Except, that the Satan worshipers in New England did not consider the duty to support the gospel to be a matter of conscience.
No government has any legitimate authority to advise the people regarding their religion. God alone is Lord of the conscience.
I fight for James Madison's vision of religious liberty because it was right the day the day Christ rose from the dead and it is right in 2006. The less government has to do with relgion the more true religion there will be.
You keep making the logical fallacy that if A leads to B, then B leads to A. You can't always assume the converse. Yes, they were concerned with keeping federal government out of religion. But the converse was not always true: they often weren't concerned with keeping religion out of government.
Again, I agree with the founding fathers' concept of a Christian Nation and the very practical way they implemented it. (Of course, you could not do that any more in our contry.) But at the time, it worked very well. People who came to the country knew that it was dominated by and founded on Biblical/Christian principles. If you didn't like it, well, you picked another country to go to. You could migrate to India, for example, where Hinduism ruled or any number of countries in the middle east where Islam ruled. You had your choice after all...
You don't need to fight. You already won. Humanist thinking now dominates our legal and political culture. This is your day to stand on the mountain and look down proudly at what you've built...
Why not? Just remove "In God We Trust" from the nation's coins and "under God" from the pledge; and restore the Separation of Church and State to the way it was during the Early Days of Republic; when God was never made the object of human law; and Congress refused to pass joint resolutions (as it refused to do on two occasions in 1790's) requesting the President to issue religious recommandations.
Sorry but the same guys cited <u>the Creator</u> as the source of our unalienable rights in the Declaration...
Think about that: that excludes all the atheists and the Hindus who believe in a reincarnating universe, etc. They were very direct and pointed out in this charter of our country that it was founded on the concept of a Creator. Could you do that currently? Of course not...
One of those unalienable rights was the right of the people to be "as free as the air they breathe" from government influence on thier religion.