LAB1663.NET - Sam’s bit o’ the web

This last-minute pre-bedtime snark is prompted by having just watched someone on TV spew this particular bit of ignorance for the millionth time and having lost my patience for it…

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Attention: Despite what you may have been taught in school and despite what every other politician and conservative activist in America will tell you, the United States of America was not founded upon Judeo-Christian values.

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I say that not to belittle Judeo-Christian values, I believe that a great many people undertake a great many positive public works because of those values. But they weren’t the founding principles of America, and anyone who tells you differently does not understand the forces that inspired and informed the American Revolution.

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In fact, the American Revolution can be viewed as the culmination of over a century of social, political and philosophical discourse in Europe that was based in science, reason and mostly done from a overtly humanist perspective. This discourse is collective known today as the Age of Enlightenment.

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It is the principles of the Enlightenment that inspired the American Revolution and informed the opinions of the men who conducted that rebellion and those who established the American system of government. Those principles included critical examination of established power structures and moral conventions, including those of the various Christian denominations which were prevalent in Europe (and North America) at the time.

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Although many of formative personalities in America’s early history did belong to traditional Christian sects and believed in an Abrahamic deity, some others were deists and/or humanists. That latter number includes three of the most influential: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

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Does any of this invalidate Christian principles? Not in the least. I firmly believe that many of the Enlightenment thinkers that contributed to the momentum that resulted in the American Revolution would agree that many of the core principles of Christianity - service to others, humility, virtuous behavior - were also key principles of some aspects of the Enlightenment. But to say that the United States was founded upon Judeo-Christian values or is a “fundamentally Christian nation” is a falsehood and should be decried wherever it is spoken. The United States of America is a secular nation, wherein people of all faiths (or no faiths) are supposed to be able to live in an atmosphere of tolerance and liberty.

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