Washington, Hamilton, Madison: "Religion is okay, but keep it at arm's length from the government."
Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams: "Religion is pretty not-okay, keep it at arm's length from the government."
Jay: "No Catholics"
Thomas Paine: "Fuck all 'yall, I'm going to France where I don't have to put up with any of this bullshit."
To adapt an old Soviet joke...
Three men are sitting in prison awaiting Madame Guillotine. One says to the other, "I'm sentenced for supporting Thomas Paine. What about you?"
"I'm sentenced for opposing Thomas Paine." They both turn to the third man and ask what he's going to be executed for.
Thomas Paine sighs.
Nothing makes atheists faster than reading the bible
In my experience, if you read it cover to cover, it either makes you an atheist or makes you super religious. Not too many people go into it as a basic "I go to church on Sundays" Christian and come out of it the same.
It's pretty good at making Satanists too.
Not just completely excluded, explicitly excluded.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
1st ammendment of the US constitution
The separation of church and state was not only to keep your religion out of politics, but also to keep politics out of your religion.
And today's christian fundamentalists usually have not read the Bible, or, heaven forbid, understood the key messages, but want it to force on other people against their will. Which tells a lot of how little those fundamentalists have understood the Bible.
They don't read the Bible, they just do whatever their pastor tells them.
Exactly. And the pastor would never try to teach about the more ... problematic ... parts of the Bible: Incest, robbery, murder, rape, and all of it in the name of God. Heck, confront them with a real text from the book, and they assume you are showing them a faked version intended to mock them or make their believe sound bad.
I was a fundamentalist. (Raised in it.)
I actually read the bible and studied it. No longer a Christian.
Funny how that works.
Thompson Chain Reference KJV represent.
It's not just the Bible. But also the literal religious wars and genocides that Europe dealt with for hundreds of years. Those wars went to 1710. So they were very fresh in the minds of political thinkers.
Old~~ Ben Frank~~. Jefferson rewrote the Bible with all the magic stripped out. It's called the Jefferson Bible.
The Church of Christ is much more culty and insular than other denominations. I almost lost some friends to them, but they managed to escape.
I’m a member, there is a vast spectrum of Churches of Christ. Many of the more conservative ones are extremely difficult to work with.
Just a tiny push-back here: The political philosophy of the founding of America did depend on the 18th Enlightenment, but it also has roots in the 17th century Protestantism of the English Civil War.
Specifically ideals like "Equality before the State", separation of Church and State, and universal (male) suffrage, have a direct through-line to anti-monarchist, anti-Catholic, radical Puritanism.
I'm no David Barton, but America didn't fall out of a coconut tree.
But even (and especially) those religious founders influenced by the puritans saw the wisdom of the separation of church and state. They remembered when the religious English and Scottish states persecuted them.
On the shoulders of giants. Everything builds from the past, successes and failures. The colonies might have continued to endure their hardships even longer if it wasn't for one more giant's writings, Thomas Paine.
