"Rev Dr" Lenny Flank
Posts: 2560
Joined: Feb. 2005
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| Quote (skeptic @ April 07 2007,18:56) | | The Constitution absolutely places a barrier between the state and religion, in the interest of protecting RELIGION, not the state. Go back and read what I said, and Lenny, read what you just wrote. If the Founders had intended a seperation of church from state then they would have written it that way rather then the way they did, which was a seperation of state from the church. |
Well, let's ask the people who wrote it, shall we . . .?
When the Constitutional Convention met in 1787, the topic of religion, and its relation to the government, weighed heavily in the minds of the delegates. The bloody carnage of recent European history, including the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War, and the English Civil War, were all directly the result of governmental support for and action on behalf of religions, and the Founding Fathers were determined that the new United States would not fall victim to the same mistakes. As Madison told the Constitutional Convention, “Religion itself may become a motive to persecution and oppression.” Citing the English Test Laws (which required all public officials to be Anglicans), future Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, argued, “The business of civil government is to protect the citizen in his rights. . . Civil government has no business to meddle with the private opinions of the people . . . A test law (is) the offspring of error and the spirit of persecution. Legislatures have no right to set up an inquisition and examine into the private opinions of men.”
And, although the Founding Fathers were all religious men (at least six different Protestant sects were represented at the Constitutional Convention; many of the delegates were Deists, two were Roman Catholics), they also recognized that putting religious power into the hands of the government would inevitably lead to religious repression and intolerance, and that religion itself would best flourish if allowed to operate freely without governmental intrusion. James Madison argued: “The civil Government, though bereft of everything like an associated hierarchy, possesses the requisite stability, and performs its functions with complete success, whilst the number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people, have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the State.”
Madison added, “The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well-meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical Religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity.”
Thomas Jefferson agreed, arguing, “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the power of its public functionaries, were it possible that any of these should consider a conquest over the conscience of men either attainable or applicable to any desirable purpose”. Much of the US Constitution was explicitly modeled on the classical Roman Republic, which was remarkably tolerant of all the varying religions of its conquered subjects, and never made any effort to force anyone to give up any native religion.
The delegates’ goal of keeping the Federal Government independent of religion was the topic of very little actual debate at the Convention. The matter of religion was only mentioned twice in the Constitution. The first reference, in Article Six, specifies that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” This was a direct rejection of the European practice (taken up by the Puritan colonies) of requiring public officials to swear loyalty to one religion or another, and to exclude any others from office. The second reference to religion is more obscure—it occurs in the Oath of Office required of the President: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The option to either “swear” or “affirm” the oath of office is a direct result of the delegates’ desire to avoid government siding for or against any religion. Several colonial churches, including the Quakers, considered it un-Christian to “swear” oaths, and the Constitution therefore protected the right of these dissidents, as well as non-religious people, to instead “affirm” the Oath of Office in a religiously neutral or non-religious form.
When the Constitution was finished and presented for ratification, it did not contain the listing of individual rights and liberties that we now refer to as the Bill of Rights. The Framers had not thought it necessary to specifically list these, but the omission sparked a storm of criticism, including that of religious figures who were alarmed that no specific freedom of religious thought had been enumerated. Influential Baptist minister John Leland objected that the Constitution didn’t specifically guarantee freedom of religion, pointing out that “if a Majority of Congress with the President favour one System more than another, they may oblige all others to pay to the support of their System as much as they please.”
When the state legislature of Virginia ratified the US Constitution, it did so with the understanding that the new Congress would pass a bill of rights, based on twenty recommendations proposed by the Virginia delegates. One of these was that “no particular religious sect or society ought to be favored or established by Law in preference to others.” This proposal was based on a law written by Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson was absent for the entire Constitutional Convention—he was in France serving as Ambassador), that had been passed in Virginia in 1777, stating “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry . . . WE, the General Assembly of Virginia, do enact that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
As a result of the Virginia stipulation and other criticism, the First Congress passed ten amendments to the new constitution, the Bill of Rights. And the first of these amendments took up the topic of the relationship of government to religion. Several different versions were introduced, but they were distilled down to “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”, and this was the wording that was codified into the First Amendment. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791.
When the new Constitution was presented to the state legislatures for ratification, it came under immediate attack by religious groups and political figures, on the grounds that it did not support religion and did not officially establish the US as a Christian nation. The “no religious test” provision in Article 6 was the object of severe criticism. A critic in New Hampshire argued that the lack of a religious test would allow “a papist, a Mohomatan, a deist, yea an atheist at the helm of government”. In North Carolina, one delegate complained that “pagans, deists and Mahometans might obtain offices among us”, while another delegate was terrified that “Jews and pagans of every kind” could take office. In Massachusetts, another critic declared that he hoped Christians would be voted into office, but “by the Constitution, a papist, or even an infidel was as eligible as they”. In the south, the slavery issue was raised; a writer in Charleston, South Carolina, pointed out that without any religious test for office, anti-slavery sects such as the Quakers “will have weight, in proportion to their numbers, in the great scale of the continental government”. A Virginia writer declared, “The Constitution is deistical in principle, and in all probability the composers had no thought of God in all their consultations.”
One of the most widely read attacks on the new Constitution was a satirical pamphlet by “Aristocrotis”, titled The Government of Nature Delineated, or an Exact Picture of the New Federal Constitution. In it, the writer argued that the Constitution was a godless document, written by a handful of apostates, with the express goal of stamping out religion:
There has been but few nations in the world where the people possessed the privilege of electing their rulers; of prefixing a bill of rights to their constitutions, enjoyed a free press. or trial by jury; but there was never a nation in the world whose government was not circumscribed by religion. . . . What the world could not accomplish from the commencement of time till now, they easily performed in a few moments, by declaring, that ‘no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust; under the united states.
Other opponents attacked the Constitution in the same vein, charging that it was “atheistic”. In New Hampshire, a delegate to the Ratifying Convention argued that under the Constitution, “Congress might deprive the people of the use of the Holy Scriptures”. In Massachusetts, another writer declared that “without the presence of Christian piety and morals, the best Republican Constitution can never save us from slavery and ruin”. Other Anti-Federalists warned ominously that the godless Constitution would cause God to turn his back on the US, “because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he hath also rejected thee”.
Members of several state ratifying conventions moved to change the Constitution by adding a religious test to it; all these efforts were voted down. Other states tried to add amendments banning only government establishment of a “particularly religious sect or society . . . in preference to others”. This was rejected on the grounds that it would still allow an unacceptable General Assessment type of government support for “nondenominational” or “nonsectarian” religion. The Constitution, with its explicit rejection of all governmental support for religion, was ratified in 1788, and the First Amendment banning establishment of religion was passed three years later.
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Editor, Red and Black Publishers
www.RedandBlackPublishers.com
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(Not very feminine I guess.) I mean, I just can't make the "it's all wholesome" argument, because I'm not interested in being a good girl - never was. (Although in person I'm pretty boring and for the most part a good girl.) So maybe I'm not the person to answer this question. However, I do believe, yes, that one can build a society on atheism, Ghost, because most of them are the bourgeois type. (And I believe in making the world a better place for other people's children, so of course I have some solid bourgeois values.)
) it with my posts. 
And after I rewrote that piece, also leaving out all the blather about atheists being the new French Resistance and all that, my friend the original author said, "I was disappointed that you took that out." Well, tough beans. "Crush it under our heel." Gaaa! I can resist peer pressure. The real difference is between those who see the world simplistically and those who don't. It's the simplistic thinkers who are dangerous.
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