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This website is being renovated throughout 2008. Pages and the content of pages will continue to change until the end of the year and there may be some inconsistencies and missing links. Please do not quote from or link to specific pages (apart from the home page) without contacting the webmaster first. Atheist nation A proud tradition is under threat By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 772 words Publication date: March 13, 2005 As America inches closer to being a theocratic state, the country’s strong links with atheism are in danger of being airbrushed out of history. Despite the claims of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, that government derives its authority from God, the United States was never intended to be a Christian nation. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment that swept across Europe and North America radically altered people’s perceptions of nature, society and religion. Many Founding Fathers were Deists, who believed in God but not the Bible. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine and others saw Christianity as bigoted and intolerant. Benjamin Franklin came even closer to atheism, writing that “The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason”. The Declaration of Independence reflected their views. It was not by accident that the document refers only once to “the Creator” and makes no mention of any specific religion. The signatories’ clear intention was to allow every American to define their own relationship with God and to underline the point that no faith would be acceptable as the new country’s religion. The Declaration rejected Christianity. Eleven years later, in 1787, the Constitution rejected the Creator. Nowhere in that document, which forms the country’s legal foundation, is there any reference to God or religion. For the last 216 years (the Constitution was ratified in March 1789) ultimate authority in the United States has lain not in the myth of a supernatural being but in the reality of “We the People”. When asked why the Constitution made no reference to God, Alexander Hamilton responded “I declare we forgot it” – hardly the statement of a God-fearing man. But he was the rule, not the exception; some historians believe that only one in seven Americans belonged to a Church at the time of the revolution. Ten years later the nation’s distaste for Christianity again received the seal of approval from the Senate. In May 1797 that body unanimously approved the Treaty of Tripoli, where Article Eleven explicitly stated that the United States was “not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion”. The Founding Fathers died and the wall between Church and State began to crumble. “In God We Trust” first appeared on American coins in 1864, less than a hundred years after the nation’s birth. In 1892 the Supreme Court stated affirmed that “this is a Christian Nation”. And since 1954 the Pledge of Allegiance has included the words “under God”. Fortunately, not every American subscribes to superstition. In the nineteenth century feminist Susan B Anthony commented on preachers: “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” Republican President Abraham Lincoln stated explicitly that “The Bible is not my book and Christianity is not my religion”. And Mark Twain, chronicler of American life, concluded from the Old Testament that God was a “malign thug”; faith, he asserted, was believing “what you know ain’t so”; and his comment on the new coinage was "'In God We Trust.' I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true." The twentieth century also had its share of skeptics and disbelievers. Frank Zappa, the musician, wrote that “reality is what it is, not what you want it to be”. Film star Charlie Chaplin said “By simple common sense, I don’t believe in God”. Albert Einstein, the Nobel Prize winning scientist, wrote "I do not believe in a personal God ... If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." Gene Roddenberry, who created Star Trek, deliberately created a god-free universe, stating that “For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain." (More famous American atheists are quoted on www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/quote-b.htm) In the twenty-first century the light of reason is fading across America. Music and sports stars give effusive thanks to God for whichever award they have won. The president "appeals to" a "higher Father". No known atheist currently holds major political office, in Congress or a state legislature, anywhere in the United States. The men who freed this country were thinkers, not believers, who were proud to rejected a religion that rejected reason. George W Bush is – as Doonesbury pointed out recently – a believer, not a thinker, who embraces a religion that suppresses liberty and denies millions happiness. And Antonin Scalia, who some suggest may be the next Chief Justice, denies the Constitution on which the United States was founded. The Founding Fathers have been betrayed.
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If God existed, he would... admire the beauty of a universe that he did not create recognize that eternity is meaningless deny both heaven and hell disown all men and women who speak in his name denounce the harm caused by religious "morality" help the human race to thrive without him If God existed, he would be an atheist. |