ABC News Airs Segment About North Carolina Atheist Billboard

I didn’t watch the ABC news segment yet, but this is good news to have something that was presented fairly.

But the biggest point is one you made: it got people talking. My big thing in life is to make people think. Not just accept what’s told to them. It’s what makes us humans human.

I never like it when people blame something on “political correctness.” It just seems like they have no real arguments for their position so they have to resort to what has become little more than name calling.

More like “One nation under God, divisible, with liberty and justice for Christians”

Alternatively “for some”

Hopefully, it will one day read, “One species under earth’s atmosphere, Indivisible?.

Jd,

Jefferson and maybe Franklin might have called themselves deists, although even that is debatable, (there is solid evidence that these gentlemen were Christians), but there is no question that the remaining signers of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were Christians with affiliations to various denominations. Like it or not the founding fathers were Christians. They also believed in religious tolerance, even the right not to believe. But they were no doubt Christians.

I have no doubt the founding fathers were Christians of one sort or another.
However, the constitution they wrote shows they went through pains to keep the government from being a religious government, and hence, claiming our laws are based on the Bible or any religion is simply false.
They even explicitly stated this in the Treaty of Tripoli. When people claim that religion is supposed to have some sort of elevated status in our laws, they are just doing what all religions do and make up a story that they like and then declare it to be fact.

We are a nation that is built on Christian principles

Which Christian principles??? I’ve been honestly asking this questions for years and no one has given me an answer. I’ve come to the conclusion there are no Christian principles since there are no principles that Christians promote that aren’t also promoted by other religions and secular belief systems.

Oh here we go again. How many times do we have to be through the “founding fathers/Christian Nation” argument?

Here’s the thing: let’s say the people who make that argument were 100% correct; let’s say every last one of the founders were devout Christians, true believers. They still wrote a Constitution and erected a government that insists upon religious pluralism and secular government. They didn’t have to do it that way. But they did. Them there are Enlightenment principles more than Christian ones.

(And let’s not forget that the Enlightenment Christianity of most of the founders really bears little doctrinal resemblance to the Christianity practiced by most Americans today. Apples and oranges. Jefferson, for example, was a “Christian” in the same way that Galileo was a “Catholic.”)

Bob,

Also, there is no word game playing involved in not extending legal protections to the terrorists with regards to the Geneva conventions. There really is a category of illegal enemy combatants and that’s exactly what the terrorists are.

If you guys weren’t so busy playing these stupid angles to oppose these things then maybe the valid points against the war would have gotten through the smoke screen. You cried wolf so much that no one cares anymore.

The fact of the matter is that plan old federal criminal laws were broken by the Bush administration with regards to torture. They got away with it in part because of people like you blowing smoke in other directions.

BTW, no Republican will serve time for violating that federal torture statute because plenty of Democrats like Nancy Pelosi are involved as accessories, [democrats do serve under the President as appointees, civil servants, and members of the military and CIA].

Robert,

You mean the same Thomas Jefferson who made his own version of the Bible that cut out all the miracles? The same Jefferson who pointed out that atheists could be moral individuals and that therefore religion was not necessary to morality? The same Thomas Jefferson who wrote that the New Testament was an untrustworthy mix of later authors and sloppy editing by “inferior minds”? The same Thomas Jefferson who compared the story of the virgin birth to the myth of Athena erupting from the brow of Zeus? This man was a Christian? Ok….

Frankling by his own account simply didn’t bother thinking much about religious questions but his views moved back and forth. He sometimes praised Christianity but also consider it to be deeply corrupted. He rarely attended church. His comments about religion were not as strident as Jefferson’s but they often had a similar nature.

And the notion that those were the only two of the Founders who had such views is simply ludicrous. For example, Hamilton also had very negative views of much of religion.

lol silly christians… It is sad though that whenever I try to recite the pledge in my head the words under god are stuck in my head, because at school when we said the pledge I just didn’t say those parts outloud..

Anyone else think its funny they said that where this is going on is “deep” in the bible belt.. I’m from Kentucky and I’m pretty sure their crazy Christian hillbillies don’t have anything on ours… (there’s a reason I transfered back to my big city hometown 😀 )

@Brian:

Thanks for playing. My opposition to torture is based on one thing: IT’S ILLEGAL under federal law (and according to international treaty). Just like warrantless wiretapping.

No smoke, no mirrors. Just the facts.

Neither the media nor the majority of our elected representatives have the moral fiber or intellectual rigor to call that out. You don’t look for moral clarity when you know you’re doing the right thing; you look for moral clarity when you know you’re about to do something wrong.

Word games.

I watched that report, which wasn’t too bad. The thing is, Diane Sawyer promised us a poll, but I couldn’t find one on the website. There are 827 comments on that website, including this one: “Francis Bellamy (1855-1931), American Baptist minister; author of the original Pledge of Allegiance (1892). His socialist convictions cost him his Boston pastorate in 1891.Scott Bellamy, great-grandson: “You’d think he would not have had bad feelings about having ‘under God’ [added by Congress in 1954] in the Pledge. But he was not even happy about them adding `to the United States of America” (which Francis called a “clumsy redundancy … a mangling of the original”).Great-granddaughter Sally Wright: “As a regular churchgoer who has voted both Democratic and Republican, I believe that my great-grandfather got it right. A Pledge of Allegiance that does not include God invites the participation of more Americans.”

Interesting.

As others have said, it doesn’t even matter if the founding fathers were Christian (I’m not buying it but it’s irrelevant), they wrote a constitution that was anything but.

Indeed, they did so quite deliberately specifically because of the horrible prejudice, persecution and even executions that happened in the colonies that were faith based, especially Massachusetts and Virginia and even Maryland which was supposed to be a haven for Catholics. Amazing that, even if you were christian, if you weren’t the “right sort” of christian they’d persecute you even over here – not just in Europe. But evangelicals don’t seem to learn this in school.

Really like Aaron and Andy’s responses above. They outline the fact it doesn’t matter which founding fathers were Christians or not. Secular government was the idea all along and should still be the focus.

Does it matter if some or all of the founders were Deists? They came from a JudeoChristian culture and background, which colored their thinking implicitly alongside Englightenment values. And guess what. Even if the founders were Deist, atheist, Spinozist, materialist, pantheist, agnostic, or changed their minds between the various possibilities of human belief, 99.9 % of the people in the young nation were Christian. You know what I think? If we had come from a Muslim or a Hindu background our young nation would have been veeery different.

Though these people may seem a bit naive, they are clinging for dear life to their identity and I think they have a bit of a point.