NeilUnreal

Scigirl, don't you have a thesis to write?

-Neil

p.s. Just kidding! Good to see that you're taking a break or two. Hope it's going well.

Koiyotnik

I'm just sad that Canada was left off that tiny list of Religion-State Separatist countries.

Wouldn't it be more impressive to say "North America and Western Europe"? That way, you have a whole continent backing the idea.

Sorry if that was off-topic...

Justine.

RufusAtticus

Ahh, the randman we've come to know and love.

-RvFvS

randman

Ya'll are woefully ignorant of history. First of all, the American Revolution predates the Constitution by a long shot. Maybe ya'll are not aware of that. The Declaration of Independence is pretty clear, namely that we hold thse truths to be self-evident, which by the way is a wholly unscientific statement, and goes on to talk about how men are CREATED equal and ENDOWED with certain inalienable rights. Regardless, if whether Deism or Christianity was beleived, it doesn't matter as far as what I am talking about. The idea that men are created in the image of God is the idea which forms the basis for individual rights. Otherwise, rights are mere political favors granted by governments whereas the Revolution expressly referred to those rights as having come from God.

In terms of freedom of religion, it is very clear that the first and major proponents of this idea were Christians. Jesus was the first to teach that religion should be voluntary. The Greeks and Romans did not believe this, which is why they bitterly persecuted anyone that did not participate in the official sacral rites. It is true that if you participated in the rites, you could also do just about anything else religion wise, and be disdainful of religion, but you had to participate.

When the Roman Empire merged with a portion of Christianity, they took that same idea and continued on with it, only it was a Christianized rite. Most of the people that were persecuted over the years were actually Christians who rightly saw this as the paganization that it was. These followers of Christ were bitterly persecuted over the centuries, and they all had the same doctrine as the ealry church, and it has been proven by Leornard Verduin actually that basically from the 4th century on to the early Protestant reformation, these so-called heretics were all called by the same derogatory names, all of which basically revolved around the concept of volunteerism, that religion ought to be free, and separated from the state.

The persecution stemmed from the Roman and Greak spirit infiltrating and coopting Christianity, not the other way around. I find it laughable that people actually point to the ancients as upholding religious freedom when the exact opposite was the case. The elborate rituals, the use of the government to compel religious worship, etc,..all of that was from Rome, not Jesus and His followers.

Furthermore, Locke and Paine and secular humanists came centuries late, and did not lay down millions of their lives for the cause of religious liberty as the followers of Jesus did. I think where the secularists gained full control, there was quite a lot of bloodshed. Note the differences in the French revolution, which was more secular based, and the American, which was theistic, and I think the point is obvious.

Too bad, some of you are so hardened against religion that you won't bother to learn the truth.

I would recommend Verduin's book "The Reformers and Their Stepchildren." Though much of the footnotes are in the original lanquages, you don't have to be able to read them to understand the treatise. It is completely based on original sources which he had access to in the 1950s on a Fulbright scholarship. Much of the original papers he examined had been locked away for centuries, and the letters of the Reformers and their persecution of what he calls the stepchildren, or the resitutionists, are quite compelling. I think it is the best historical work I have ever seen, and the level of scholarship exceedingly above the norm.

[ March 23, 2002: Message edited by: randman ]</p>

pseudobug

Daggah, Ipterich, sci-girl,

You are now seeing another side of randman-- my visicious pet fundie-- that I saw months ago.

Not only does he have a warped view of evolution twisted all out of shape by fundamentalist bullshit; his view of world and US history is also seriously warped by the same bullshit.

Randman has heard the same thing you folks are telling him before. He has been thoroughly rebuffed and refuted on these issues as well.

Next he will be telling you people that everything you learned about the history of Western Civilization was bullshit but that the version he got from reading Baptist comic books on the crapper is correct.

Un-frigging-believable. The guy is a broken record of Christian lies.

Daggah

However, the men who wrote the Constitution are the same as the men who fought the American Revolution.

Without a theory of evolution, it was pretty obvious to most at the time that man was created by a god. Similiarly, before we knew what lightning really was we thought that was god-made too. The importance of this statement in the declaration is that our rights are based on nature and not on authority as previously thought. Furthermore this concept is very drastically different from the belief that the monarchy had authority - and THAT governmental concept really WAS drawn from Christianity.

They never said a single damned thing about "created in the image of god." Again, the importance was that these rights were natural in origin.

Those Christians laid their life on the line for the right to believe in Christianity, not the right to believe as one so chose. Name a single early Christian who espoused the view that man had the right to believe as he saw fit - go for it.

And again, the American Revolution was not theistic in the slightest. If it was it would not have ultimately resulted in the culmination of a secular constitution and government. As I said before, it is extremely difficult to overstate Paine's influence of the American Revolution (and why do you mention secular humanists at all? Locke and Paine weren't.) Ever heard of Common Sense?

Yours is not the truth. Yours is a pack of revisionist Christian lies.

Daggah

Furthermore, if you look at world history, you will note that theistic governments are often authoritative, and that authoritative governments are FAR more likely to be bloody.

Kevin Dorner

Rvfvs has already, clearly, indicated that this thread would be moved if it did not return to the topic of this forum. As it has clearly become a church/state separation discussion, I am sending it to there.