RE: When is a Religious Belief Delusional?
September 5, 2018 at 3:42 am
(This post was last modified: September 5, 2018 at 4:05 am by Fake Messiah.)
(September 4, 2018 at 4:28 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: The idea of “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” was a revolutionary and historically unique formulation born out of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
I guess it is fascinating to see how much some people ignore history and reality in general - but hey it comes in a package of being deluded by Christianity.
I mean this is it: delusion in action. This is simply put neoconservative revisionist history concocted to promote its own political agenda.
The two documents the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States--contain not a single word about Christianity, Christian principles, the Bible or Jesus Christ because Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, among many others, held Deist, rather than Christian, religious beliefs.
Neither is there any mention at all of the Ten Commandments, Heaven, Hell or being saved. Not a word! The phrase "they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" was a reference to the Deist Creator, rather than the God of Christianity.
Not to mention that George Washington himself negotiated in 1797 the Treaty of Tripoli which declared that "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Congress unanimously approved the text of this treaty.
Moreover during the Presidential campaign of 1800, Jefferson was labeled "a howling atheist" by his political opponents. Jefferson wrote in Autobiography that "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined or imprisoned." Jefferson also wrote "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
Thomas Paine wrote an entire book, The Age of Reason, which directly attacked and rejected the Bible as being the Word of God.
THE REAL CHRISTIAN INFLUENCE over the Founding Fathers was King George III's absolute mandate that his subjects worship in a manner approved by the Church of England. Witch burning and mandatory church affiliation, among other factors, led the Founding Fathers to establish a "Wall of Separation between Church and State," allowing, at each citizen's discretion, freedom of religion or freedom from religion.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"