@Chosen Daughter @sneakypete Thus where you are so wrong. The Founding Fathers of many different denominations recognized one truth in Christ. Liberty.
I challenge you to find one example in the New Testament where Christ forces himself on anyone. Yes our government was founded on that truth that all men are created equal and with Liberty, and freedom.
I have been reading your replies. Your whole premise about God is he is a God of wrath and hell. Hell is a life without God. It is living in darkness with no relationship with a loving Father in Heaven
I am a person who recently has had Cancer. I am so grateful for my faith in God. Faith isn't about death it is about life. A life in Christ is about strength. A strength to live, and to do it with strength. Not a strength that comes from myself but a strength from God.
And the stupidity of people who argue the Bible is that it isn't meant for you if you choose not to believe. Simply don't worry about it. Why are you so concerned about hell if you don't believe in it?
Our government doesn't force God on anyone either.
Ditto that. The overwhelming majority of our Constitution's Framers were devout, conservative Christians. If my memory of American history serves me correctly, there were 55 delegates to the Convention. Of these (again, quoting stats from memory), only a handful considered themselves Deists (maybe 3 or 4?). The rest were Quakers, Roman Catholics, plus one Jew, and a plethora of Protestants.
Notice that the data suggests that the non-religious or only quasi-religious fellows (the Deists) were outnumbered by the seriously religious fellows to the tune of about 14 to 1, or perhaps even 18 to 1. It also turns out that one of the very few professed Deists in the Convention was actually
Benjamin Franklin himself--who was a lot more religion-minded than most of today's churchgoers. Franklin was a close friend of the Calvinistic Congregationalist preacher Jonathan Edwards and also an admirer of the Calvinistic Methodist evangelist George Whitefield.
If we were to move Franklin away from the presumably only quasi-religious category (the Deists), then those weakly (?) religious fellows are discovered to have been outnumbered by about 20 to 1.
Next, it is interesting to notice the breakdown of religious views among the seriously religious Framers of our Constitution. If I remember the biographical sketches that I read several years ago for all of the Framers, there were 3 Quakers, 3 Roman Catholics, and 1 Jew. All of the rest were devout Protestants--which means that the
Protestants dominated the faction of the seriously religious Framers--which seriously religious Framers, in turn, numerically
overwhelmed the marginally religious Framers.
The dominance of the Protestants in the Convention cannot be fully appreciated unless we understand that the Protestants of that era were peculiarly strong adherents to the Reformation's position of
Sola Scriptura. (Even the Methodists in the Protestant group [5 or 6 in number, as I recall] were pretty strong Protestants in that era, as presumably also was the only Lutheran in the Protestant mix.)
The main reason for my mention of the
Sola Scriptura position that pervaded the underlying views of our Framers is to point out that essentially our
entire Constitution was framed based on
the Bible itself. Even during the ratification process, the details of the Constitution's sundry provisions were largely defended by Christian ministers explaining the proposed Constitution using Biblical citations from both the Old and New Testaments. They preached these defenses of the proposed Constitution in churches and Statehouses throughout the colonies.
A few years later, Benjamin Franklin reportedly delighted to describe our American experiment to the crowned heads of Europe by saying
We have founded a nation on the Bible.
Finally, I would point out that the Baptists (a small group in America at the time of the Framing) had an important role in the wording of the First Amendment, specifically lobbying for the provision guaranteeing
Freedom of Religion. It was a Baptist preacher from Massachusetts named Isaac Backus who vigorously argued from the New Testament itself that the Bible
rules out State Religion,
rules out religious coercion of any sort by any proper government. Backus regarded any forced religious confession--or
any mandated suppression thereof--as an affront to the Gospel.
Thus, even though hostility toward "Bible-Thumpers" is popular in our day--for example, among those who want to read the First Amendment as guaranteeing the haters of the Judeo-Christian God a kind of freedom
from religion, a freedom
from any sociopolitical vestige of religion--it turns out that our Framers would regard those anti-Judeo-Christian folks as second-rate patriots at best and at worst, political reprobates (like most of the Democrats in our day).
We therefore should not be terribly surprised that the majority of manifestly genuine Christians are Republicans (or have lately re-registered as Constitutionalists or Independents--in view of how crooked our own lying politicos have become). By the same token, we should not be surprised that a frightfully high percentage of Democrats openly despise our Judeo-Christian Constitution. They want no part of the God of the Bible.
