"Les Cargill" <lcargill@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:487091b2$0$7814$2318a52a@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Stuff concerning the universality of freedom generally has
> more to do with Jefferson or Locke, and it's simple enough
> to replace "self-evident" with "God-given" - the speakers
> of those phrases mean the same thing.
That's absurd.
Many of the founders were deists. A deist believes in a supernatural
intelligence, but that its activities were confined to setting up the laws
that govern the universe in the first place. The deist god never
intervenes
thereafter and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs.
In the book, "The God Delusion", author Richard Dawkins gives a number of
examples of anti-religious statements from a number of prominent founding
fathers of the US.
As for Thomas Jefferson's views on supernatural beings: "To talk of
immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul,
angels, God, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is
no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise... without plunging
into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and
sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or
troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no
evidence."
And, on whether the US was founded as a Christian nation: the treaty with
Tripoli drafted in 1796 under George Wa****ngton and signed by John Adams
in
1797 reads:
"As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on
the
Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the
laws, religion, or tranquility, of Musselman; and as the said states never
have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Moslem nation,
it
is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions
shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two
countries."
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