No, really. Go for it!
This weekend's Wise Words are from or about our Founding Fathers. I keep hearing all about how this is a Christian country and how the Founding Father's designed it that way. I think they were conscious of people's beliefs and their right to believe, but this quite obviously had nothing to do with how they saw the relationship for God and Country. Or more appropriately, Country and maybe, God. They had I'm sure, no desire whatsoever for God or religion to take over the country the way they have in past years.
They may have been Deists (belief, based solely on reason, in a God who created the universe and then abandoned it, assuming no control over life, exerting no influence on natural phenomena, and giving no supernatural revelation.); and believed in "a" God, but they were by no means Theists (belief in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief in a personal God as creator and ruler of the world.). They didn't believe in any kind of organized religion, as you will see below.
Not at all, not from these Deists and mostly Freemasons.
So to all those Theists....
George Washington:
Historian Barry Schwartz writes: "George Washington's practice of Christianity was limited and superficial because he was not himself a Christian... He repeatedly declined the church's sacraments. Never did he take communion, and when his wife, Martha, did, he waited for her outside the sanctuary... Even on his deathbed, Washington asked for no ritual, uttered no prayer to Christ, and expressed no wish to be attended by His representative."
John Adams:
"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved-- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"
-letter to Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson:
"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."
- "Notes on Virginia"
Benjamin Franklin:
"I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father, expects or requires no worship or praise from us, but that He is even infinitely above it."
- "Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion", 1728
Abraham Lincoln:
"The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my profession."
-Spoken by Abraham Lincoln, quoted by Joseph Lewis
Now... you were saying?
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