Sorry dear but my information is correct and ultimately derived either directly or indirectly from scholarly sources even though so much of your own was easy to refute because it was incorrect as are your false ad hominem allegations which but undermine your character.
Your assertion that the founding fathers beliefs, publications, stated positions, etc... have no bearing on their intent for "the actual text" of U.S. founding documents such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is not only patently false: it's ridiculous. Of course they do and that's why the only one engaging in revisionism in this discussion is you.
Contrary to your false assertion, the founders do mention religion in the Bill of Rights. Specifically in the First Amendment they state that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Obviously this is not an "utter lack of any mention of Christianity (or religion in general, save for the prohibition of religious tests of holding public office as stated in Article 6)." You should at least read the document you make false assertions concerning it.
And to discover their intent, all one has to do is to go directly to the delegate discussions pertaining to the wording of the First Amendment to ascertain the context and original intent of the final wording (Annals of Congress, 1789, pp. 440ff.).
The facts are that by their use of the term “religion,” the Framers had in mind preventing any single Christian denomination from being elevated above the others avoiding a theocracy (something they had endured under British rule with respect to the Anglican Church). They further sought to leave the individual States free to make their own determinations with regard to religious (i.e., Christian) matters (cf. Story, 1833, 3.1873:730-731).
The “Father of the Bill of Rights,” George Mason, actually proposed the following wording for the First Amendment, which demonstrates the context of their wording:
"All men have an equal, natural and unalienable right to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that no particular sect or society of Christians ought to be favored or established by law in preference to others" (as quoted in Rowland, 1892, 1:244, emp. added).
By “prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” the Framers intended to convey that the federal government was not to interfere with the free and public practice of the Christian religion—the very thing that the courts have been doing since the 1960s.
The wording of a sentence from Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution states: “If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a Law, in like manner as if he had signed it..." If this provision had been made in respect of Jews, the Constitution would have read “Saturdays excepted.” If provision had been made for Muslims, the Constitution would have read “Fridays excepted.” If the Founders had intended to encourage a day of inactivity for the government without regard to any one religion, they could have chosen Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. Instead, the federal Constitution reads “Sundays excepted” because America was Christian in its orientation and the Framers shared the Christian worldview and gave political recognition to Sunday as accommodation of this fact.
And note immediately after Article VII, the Constitution closes with the following words:
"Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth.... Their work was done “in the Year of our Lord.” The Christian world dates all of human history in terms of the birth of Christ. “B.C.” means “before Christ,” and “A.D.” is the abbreviation for the Latin words “anno Domini,” meaning “year of our Lord.”
If the Framers were interested in being pluralistic, multi-cultural, and politically correct, they would have refrained from using the B.C./A.D. designation and used “C.E.,” Common Era (used as early as 1708 in English and traced back to Latin usage among European Christians to 1615) and avoided offending Jews, atheists, agnostics, and humanists. Or they could have used “A.H.” (anno hegirae—which means “in the year of the Hijrah” and refers to Muhammad’s flight from Mecca in A.D. 622), the date used by Muslims as the commencement date for the Islamic calendar.
Instead, the Framers chose to utilize the dating method that indicated the Christian worldview they shared. What’s more, their reference to “our Lord” does not refer to a generic deity, nor does it refer even to God the Father. It refers to God the Son: an explicit reference to Jesus Christ.
So it's no surprise that the Declaration contains four allusions to the God of the Bible. It's no surprise that the founders publications, speeches, letters, etc... are replete with declarations of literal intent that the United States should rest on the Christian worldview. The U.S. Constitution contains allusions to the freedom to practice the Christian religion unimpeded, the significance and priority of Sunday worship, as well as the place of Jesus Christ in history.
And your analysis of John Adam's statement simply proves the point that the Framers believed genuine liberty derived from God (denominationalism notwithstanding) and was reflected in Western Civilization the metaphysical foundation of which was the Christian worldview. It was because the Western Civilization of their era was rooted in the Christian worldview which depicts God as a real, rational, responsive, dependable, moral, omnipotent, etc... that the world was rational and knowable in a way that produced an authoritively normative moral liberty (the benefits of which are being lost as the nation drifts from God), the rise of modern science, etc... not apart from it.
Read Rodney Stark, Stanley Jaki, etc... and learn why the prevailing epistemologies in civilizations outside Europe stifled their progression in these areas (e.g. a cyclical approach to time, an astrological approach to the heavens, metaphysical views that either deified nature [animism] or denied it [idealism]).
Modern science arose in Christianized medieval Europe in a culture dominated by belief in a conscious, rational, all-powerful Creator who's handiwork could be known. If you want to see the hypocrisy and disingenuousness of your Enlightenment intellectuals laid bare, start with Rodney Stark's 'For the Glory of God' chapter 2 'God's Handiwork: The Religious Origins of Science."
As Rodney Stark explains:
"The identification of the era beginning in about 1600 as the 'Enlightenment' is as inappropriate as the identification of the millennium before it as the 'Dark Ages.' And both imputations were made by the same people- intellectuals who wished to discredit religion and especially the Roman Catholic Church, and who therefore associated faith with darkness and secular humanism with light. To these ends they sought credit for the "Scientific Revolution" (another of their concepts), even though none of them had played any significant part in the scientific enterprise.
One of the first steps in this effort was to designate their own era as the 'Enlightenment,' and to claim it was a sudden and complete disjuncture with the past. To this end, the 'Dark Ages' were invented. Among the very first ever to do so, Voltaire (1694-1778) described medieval Europe as hopelessly mired in 'decay and degeneracy.' This became the universal theme. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) wrote of previous centuries:
'Europe had relapsed into the barbarism of the earliest ages. The peoples of this part of the world, so enlightened today, lived some centuries ago in a condition worse than ignorance.' A century later, when Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) popularized the idea of the 'Renaissance,' the 'Dark Ages' were a historical certitude, not to be shaken until late in the twentieth century.
Moreover, it was not enough to blame the 'Dark Ages' on Christianity; religion must also be denied any credit for the rise of science. Hence it was necessary to discredit the achievements of the Scholastic era. In keeping with this aim, John Locke (1632-1704) denounced the Scholastics as hopelessly lost in a maze of trivial concerns, as 'the great mintmasters' of useless terms as an 'expedient to cover their ignorance.' In similar fashion, one after another of the philosophes condemned Catholic scholarship until the word 'scholastic' became an epithet- defined as 'pedantic and dogmatic' according to any edition of Webster.
With the past out of the way, the central aspect of the campaign by the likes of David Hume, Voltaire, and their associates consisted of wrapping themselves in the achievements of science to authenticate their condemnation of religion in general, and Catholicism very specifically. Franklin L. Baumer noted that 'the Enlightenment was a great Age of Faith. Then he asked, rhetorically, 'But faith in what?' Not religion, but 'belief in man's power.' And the proof of this power was science, which, to paraphrase Laplace, made God an unneeded hypothesis. Never mind that the actual discoveries had been made by 'serious and often devout Christians.'
What mattered was that, in the words of Peter Gay, 'science could give the deists and atheists great comfort and supply them with what they wanted- Newton's physics without Newton's God. "Indeed, although Voltaire and his circle were careful to acknowledge Newton's commitment to a Creator (albeit only to a remote and impersonal Prime Mover), subsequent generations of 'Enlightenment' ideologues took great pains to further minimize Newton's faith.
The leading scientific figures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries overwhelmingly were devout Christians who believed it their duty to comprehend God's handiwork. Turning to an assessment of the 'Enlightenment,' I show it to have been conceived initially as a propaganda ploy by militant atheists and humanists who attempted to claim credit for the rise of science. The falsehood that science required the defeat of religion was proclaimed by such self-appointed cheerleaders as Voltaire, Diderot, and Gibbon, who themselves played no part in the scientific enterprise-a pattern that continues."
And continues with people like yourself. The first thing to go is integrity when one abandons God's normative morality for "an end that justifies the means." Stark and a host of other scholarly historians soundly prove each of these assertions. But then it's ignorant to ignore all of them just as its ignorant to ignore Edwards, Witherspoon, etc... as if the founding fathers and America wasn't in the middle of a huge religious Great Awakening that helped unite the colonies prior to the American Revolution and influence the founders decidedly Christian focus.
And speaking of that normative moral human liberty, it wasn't the intellectuals of the Enlightenment that brought about abolitionism. The Humanists longed for the glories of Greece and Rome and asserted the superiority of pagan classicalism largely indifferent to the fact that these were slave societies. A virtual Who's Who of Enlightenment figures fully accepted slavery. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Voltaire, Baron Montesquieu, Comte de Mirabeau, Edmund Burke, David Hume, etc...
The vast majority of the intellectuals of the "Enlightenment" fell far short of matching the extent and passion of abolitionist commitment spreading through Christian circles and I will be happy to prove it to you using their own words and actions.
It was people of intense Christian faith (both Protestant and Catholic) who opposed slavery because it was a sin against the Imago Dei of God who endows all normative moral liberty (not to be confused with the immorality). This is reflected in the Declaration and founding father's publications though they had to compromise with the minority of Americans that would not relinquish slavery to ensure the unity of the union.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay noted that there had been few serious efforts to dismantle the institution of slavery prior to the Founding Fathers in world history and it's worth nothing that Washington and other founding fathers freed their slaves before their deaths though your fetish Jefferson did not even though it's obvious from his writings that he too knew and agreed human slavery was morally wrong leaving it for the next generation of young men to achieve:
The Founding Fathers and Slavery (Founding Fathers) -- Encyclopedia Britannica
And you've latched onto a single, altered, and mistranslated treaty with far flung Muslim pirates to bolster your false assertion. The translation of the Treaty of Tripoli by Barlow has been found faulty, and there is doubt whether Article 11 corresponds to anything of the same purport in the Arabic version.
In 1931 Hunter Miller completed a commission by the United States government to analyze United States' treaties and to explain how they function and what they mean in terms of the United States' legal position in relationship with the rest of the world. According to Hunter Miller's notes:
"The Barlow translation is at best a poor attempt at a paraphrase or summary of the sense of the Arabic" and "Article 11... does not exist at all." After comparing the United States' version by Barlow with the Arabic and even the Italian version, Miller continues by claiming that, "The Arabic text which is between Articles 10 and 12 is in form a letter, crude and flamboyant and withal quite unimportant, from the Dey of Algiers to the Pasha of Tripoli.
How that script came to be written and to be regarded, as in the Barlow translation, as Article 11 of the treaty as there written, is a mystery and seemingly must remain so. Nothing in the diplomatic correspondence of the time throws any light whatever on the point.
From this, Miller concludes: "A further and perhaps equal mystery is the fact that since 1797 the Barlow translation has been trustfully and universally accepted as the just equivalent of the Arabic... yet evidence of the erroneous character of the Barlow translation has been in the archives of the Department of State since perhaps 1800 or thereabouts..."
The evidence for U.S. Christianity is indisputable. Invoking an altered and mistranslated treaty that sought to assure Muslim pirates they were not in a religious war changes nothing.
As John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, declared:
"From the day of the Declaration, the people of the North American Union and of its constituent States, were associated bodies of civilized men and Christians, in a state of nature; but not of Anarchy. They were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of the Gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledged as the rules of their conduct" (1821, p. 26, emp. added).
But back to the Enlightenment intellectuals; despite their disingenuousness and hypocrisy they did assert the protection of the individual, his liberty, and his property; freedom of conscience and religion and to express collectively a religious belief through religious community; universal compulsory schooling; and social welfare. John Adams understood that the modern quest for their freedom originated primarily on the soil of Christendom in a cultural environment that was shaped in important aspects by Christian beliefs and values whether or not they liked or agreed with it. Hence his statement.
If only John Adams could have lived long enough to see the Enlightenment intellectuals false assertion that the state was the highest authority lead to the sweeping state atheist democide and persecution of religious people over much of the world in the 20th century, he may not have been so gracious in his statement. Most likely not.
Yes, let's move on. More than half of the signers of the Declaration held what are today considered seminary or Bible school degrees and you state that it's "a completely irrelevant point." Obviously not. Obviously, your continuing denial of reality is misleading you from the point. Dismissing the vast majority of the Framers to cherry pick out a few because you believe they support your false hypothesis is disingenuous.
But sadly, you fail to represent even them correctly. Here's Thomas Paine's speech (delivered in Paris on January 16, 1797):
"It has been the error of the schools to teach astronomy, and all the other sciences and subjects of natural philosophy, as accomplishments only; whereas they should be taught theologically, or with reference to the Being who is the author of them: for all the principles of science are of Divine origin. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles. He can only discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.
When we examine an extraordinary piece of machinery, an astonishing pile of architecture, a well executed statue or a highly finished painting where life and action are imitated, and habit only prevents our mistaking a surface of light and shade for cubical solidity, our ideas are naturally led to think of the extensive genius and talents of the artist. When we study the elements of geometry, we think of Euclid. When we speak of gravitation, we think of Newton. How then is it, that when we study the works of God in the creation, we stop short, and do not think of God? It is from the error of the schools in having taught those subjects as accomplishments only, and thereby separated the study of them form the Being who is the author of them...
The evil that has resulted from the error of the schools in teaching natural philosophy as an accomplishment only has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of the creation to the Creator himself, they stop short, and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of His existence. They labor with studied ingenuity to ascribe everything they behold to innate properties of matter; and jump over all the rest, by saying that matter is eternal."
Yet you continue to falsely assert that the founders beliefs, words, actions, the predominance of Christian institutions they founded, etc... are completely unrelated to the work they produced. Obviously not. Obviously, you are in deep denial [Part 1 of 2].
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