After my last post, I thought about politics and religion.  I thought about how America was founded by a group of men who were leaving their country because religion had become so tangled with their government that they couldn’t take it anymore.  That they risked their life just to get here, and risked it again while fighting to stay separated.  Then, they wrote a document.  A document, that to this day, still stands up.  Has staying power that even they may not have believed was possible.  They argued, they ‘red-lined’, they analyzed every single word.  If you go to the Library of Congress, you can see the real deal and judge for yourself how committed these men were to creating a government that stood for freedom.

When you see for yourself what has been written… what has been fought over… what this country is founded on… I don’t think one can just sit back and ‘let it happen’ to them.  Go walk the halls of the Capitol, go walk the streets of Boston, check out all of the places where major battles took place.  Then, you tell me that you don’t care what happens.  That you won’t question your leaders (a right we all have in America… a right we are EXPECTED to exercise as written in our constitution) when they do something you vehemently disagree with.

Just because I voted someone into office, does NOT mean that I will always agree with their decisions.  Does not mean that I will not question their intentions.  Does not mean I will rest on my laurels and let them do whatever the hell they want.  In fact, if I voted someone into office, I almost feel more pressure to speak up when they are not meeting expectations.

So yes… when I see President Obama, who I voted into office, upholding something that I thought was not good under Bush, I’m not going too all of the sudden change my mind on that fact just because it is Obama.  I am not going to just trust that he’ll do the right thing.  I’m not going to put all of the power in his hands and then just walk away.  Never. ever.  He is my President, and I am the people, and I have my say.  Just because I voted for him once, does NOT mean I will vote for him again.  Just because others think he is the second coming… does not mean he is always right.  Just because the masses nod their head to every word he speaks does not mean what he speaks is truth.  Just because I agree with a lot of what he says does not mean I agree with ALL of it.

I question all of my politicians.  Republican, Democrat, Green, Libertarian, etc.  It is what is expected of me, it is the right I have, it is what those men fought and died for.  My freedom to voice my opinion.  I may not be religious anymore… but you can be damn sure that I will never stop caring about my country or my government or most of all, my freedoms.  In fact, I care even more now that I DON’T believe.  These freedoms are what allow me to think, believe/not believe what I want… openly, publicly and without government retribution.

Latest ramblings from our friend Newt Gingrich are so far from right, they are laughable.  Although, they’re not laughable, becuase this is how many politicians and voters from the religious right feel.  Here is what he said:

“I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history,” Mr. Gingrich said in a speech broadcast live over God TV, an evangelical Web site. “We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism.”

As I laid out in detail, this country was NOT founded on Christianity.  It wasn’t, never has been.  Why people must insist on twisting the truth is beyond me.  The forefathers would turn in their grave today if they saw how much religion has infiltrated our Government and laws.  It would sicken them, because this is the very thing they were leaving behind and faught a war to gain freedom from.

From The Library of Congress (Faith of our Forefathers):

Deism made its appearance in the 18th century. It was a religious movement, promoted by certain English and continental thinkers, that attracted a following in Europe toward the end of the 17th century and gained a small but influential number of adherents in America in the late 18th century. Deism rejected the orthodox Christian view of Christ, often viewing him as nothing more that a “sublime” teacher of morality.

Deism and some strains of “liberal religion,” which stressed morality and questioned the divinity of Christ, found advocates among upper class Americans, conspicuous among whom were Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Ben Franklin, but supporters of these views were never more than “a minority within a minority” and were submerged by evangelicalism in the 19th century.

A reference to what Benjamin Franklin (who is mis-represented by Christians, a lot) believed is pulled from here:

Mr. Butler, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at Yale University, is the author of Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard University Press, 1990). This interview was conducted by HNN editor Rick Shenkman for The Learning Channel series, “Myth America,” which aired several years ago…[Interviewer:] Let’s go through some of [the Founding Fathers]… Benjamin Franklin?

[Jon Butler:] Benjamin Franklin was even less religious than Washington and Jefferson. Franklin was an egotist. Franklin was someone who believed far more in himself than he could possibly have believed have believed in the divinity of Christ, which he didn’t. He believed in such things as the transmigration of souls. That is that human, that humans came into being in another existence and he may have had occult beliefs. He was a Mason who was deeply interested in Masonic secrets and there are some signs that Franklin believed in the mysteries of Occultism though he never really wrote much about it and never really said much about it. Franklin is another writer whom you can read all you want to read in the many published volumes of Franklin’s writings and read very little about religion.

…The principal Founding Fathers–Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin–were in fact deeply suspicious of a European pattern of governmental involvement in religion. They were deeply concerned about an involvement in religion because they saw government as corrupting religion. Ministers who were paid by the state and paid by the government didn’t pay any attention to their parishes. They didn’t care about their parishioners. They could have, they sold their parishes. They sold their jobs and brought in a hireling to do it and they wandered off to live somewhere else and they didn’t need to pay attention to their parishioners because the parishioners weren’t paying them. The state was paying them.

The above also references some other forefathers.  I have read in other places that Benjamin Franklin and other forefathers (like Thomas Jefferson) thought that the Christian Bible provided a good moral compass, which is why they thought it was good for the country, but that they didn’t necessarily believe in Jesus as a Deity.

I know that I will continue to get e-mails from people who think that the entire Constitution and country is built on a foundation of strong Christian faith, but that is just not the case.  It is not to say that there was not a respect of the religion, and some of the good items that come out of it, but they were not staunch believers either.

The quote from George Washington that I now see floating around is:

“The blessed Religion revealed in the word of God will remain an eternal and awful monument to prove that the best Institution may be abused by human depravity; and that they may even, in some instances be made subservient to the vilest purposes.  Should, hereafter, those incited by the lust of power and prompted by the Supineness or venality of their Constituents, overleap the known barriers of this Constitution and violate the unalienable rights of humanity: it will only serve to shew, that no compact among men (however provident in its construction and sacred in its ratification) can be pronounced everlasting an inviolable, and if I may so express myself, that no Wall of words, that no mound of parchm[en]t can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.”

If you read here you will see that this was in a draft of his inagural address, which he ultimately cut out.  Also pointed out on the site above, is that this was the only reference he made of the Bible in any kind of public way.

My ultimate point here is this… I was raised, as were many others, to believe that the forefathers were practically as important as Jesus himself.  That they represented strong Christians who wanted this country to run completely on Christian ideals.  As I grew up, got an education and started to peel myself away from the Christian Church, I began realizing that this was just a bunch of nonsense.  Yes, some had strong Christian faith, yes, many thought the morals spelled out in the religion were good… but, no, not all of them wanted a country that ran on the principles of the Christain Bible through and through.

There is a reason that religion (any religion), for the most part, is actually left out of the Constitution.  Besides saying they could make no laws concerning religion, nor could they prohibit the free exercise of religion (notice they don’t call out WHICH religion), they really don’t mention it much.  They didn’t feel it belonged in there, so much so that they actually got much heat from people to put something in there.

Curious how you feel about this topic.