Salon magazine, as well as other allegedly liberal voices among the webloids, must put up at least ten anti-Christian, anti-religious articles to any one which takes a less hostile view of religion. The one they have up right now by Steven K. Greene, "Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding" isn't as bad as most, it actually makes some valid points even as it misrepresents what some of those men who are to be taken as having a quasi-divine authority, "the founders", said. I've been over, and over and over the documentary record left by such of them as Jefferson and Madison and Adams and am tired of making those points. As it is, I think we really need to get over those 18th century aristocrats who declared independence and set up a constitutional system but it is a complete and absolute lie to say they are the ones who founded the United States as it developed and as it is today.
Their system was openly and explicitly racist, not only disenfranchising and enslaving black people, a large part of the population, but in reducing them to a fractional part of a human being, even that fractional part not counted towards their own interest but that of the men who enslaved them and robbed them of all of their rights as human beings. It, in fact if not explicitly in words, also reduced and stole the personhood of women, other minority groups and even a portion of the humanity of unpropertied though nominally free white men without means and who were disenfranchised in some of those "several states".
The founders, to put it in the vulgar vernacular, screwed us, intentionally, explicitly and to their own benefit. That was the purpose of setting up the Constitutional Convention in response to rebellions by Revolutionary War veterans who went home and found they were screwed by the very class which had fomented that war for their own benefit, any promises made to them reneged on by those very same founders whose empty words in the Declaration were, as well forgotten. I will point out, in passing that when Jefferson, et al, tried to come to an explanation of their rights and where those come from, they had no other recourse but to admit that those were an equal endowment of all people from God, or, in their late 18th century style, their Creator. I'm sure if they had been able to locate the origin of those rights any other way, being men of their time, they'd have made that argument, one which is still unable to be made in an effective and coherent way under the regime of scientific thinking two and a quarter centuries and counting, later.
I am tired of the argument about the "founders" as if their system was so great when it took the abolitionist movement, the horrible, bloody Civil War, the woman's rights movements, movements for the rights of the Native Americans who were terrorized, murdered and robbed by those Founders and their followers, and movements to extend the vote to even poor white men, and myriad other reform movements of the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries to make their crappy constitution tolerable, having, to fight and shed blood against it and the entrenched oligarchic interests who have used the "founders" creation to thwart equality, justice and to impose the preferential option for the rich embedded in that system.
Every single one of those movements, including the woman's movement, including the LGBT rights movement, certainly the abolitionist and civil rights movements were peopled by religious believers, most of them Christians and in large part motivated by the religion of those involved,for the large majority of them, Christianity.
Whatever we enjoy as an egalitarian and just society is largely thanks to the efforts of Christians and Jews and, these days, Muslims, Buddhists and others in persuading other Americans that it was a moral obligation to do justice to other people, the backlash against that has far more depended on a mythical originalist interpretation of the damned Constitution and the most thoroughly corrupt and undemocratic branch of government, the Supreme Court, to thwart and overturn any progress that has been made. And they rely on the Constitution to do that, not religion. The ones most identified as the "Christians" on the Supreme Court just made it legal for states to murder people using excruciating pain in the process. That's something they found their warrant for in the Constitution, not in the words of Jesus or his apostles.
If I had to choose to live under the words of Madison, Mason, Adams, Jefferson and Washington or to live under the words of Jesus, I'd never hesitate but to choose the later. It would produce egalitarian democracy and, in accordance with the economic laws of Moses, a radically level and economically just society. As to the often misrepresented mentions of slavery by Paul, slave owners were to treat those they legally held in slavery, not as slaves but as equals, as if they were members of their own families. Under the teachings of Jesus, slavery as the Founders practiced and supported and embedded in their Constitution could not have been maintained.
The real founders of any America which we find even barely tolerable, today, weren't 18th century aristocrats, they were the people who forced changes in the Constitutional system and the laws made in accordance with that Constitution. Those are founders of America as it's worth keeping, as we will discover if the "originalists" regime really gets its way. It is no shocking realization that among the greatest supporters of that originalist myth are the pseudo-Christians, the very incarnation of the Antichrist in our midst, who have a pantomime Jesus as its central figure, a phony idol which never lived and which has to disregard the gospels, the Law and the apostolic tradition.
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