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wannago
Joined: 16 Apr 2004
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 Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2005 3:59 am Post subject: |
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| The Bobster wrote: |
Our Deist Forefathers did not condemn Christ - they appreciated the wisdom of his words much more than is indicated by many - but they had strong opposition to organized Christianity in the form of religious institutions, which they saw as key allies in the kind of sppression from governmental tyranny that they were working so hard to dispel in America. |
I really agree with a lot of this, bob, but there are so many out there that want to paint ALL the forefathers with the same deist brush...and that just ain't so. I do believe the Founders were very sensitive to not having a state religion, but I also think they were consciously trying to frame a government that was meant for a nation whose populace was overwhelmingly Christian.
As for Jefferson, he may have been an astute politician, but an expert on Christianity he was not. He should have stuck with government and science. |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2005 5:08 am Post subject: ... |
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I do have to agree with wannago in this respect. The separation of Church and State that we have only prohibits state-based religion, a response, I assume, to the Church of England.
As to the Adams quote, I feel disenfranchised as I'm not a "religious" person. That said, I'm not a slave-holder either.
My high regard for the Founding Fathers begins and ends with the government that they set up, not their religious beliefs or other practices.
Yes, many of them spoke of God overseeing their proceedings, but, at that time, was their room for an atheist Founding Father? Would he, like women or slaves, have been accepted?
I do agree with Bobster about the Civil War. It was Christians vs. Christians.
As for the modern day, America is a country of many faiths and even non. It is, by any definition, not a nation strictly for Christians. While I don't mind if Dubya talks to God, I would prefer a President who can talk in a press conference and otherwise explain himself coherently rather than getting angry that his own logic leaks like a sieve and then retreat into religion to defend himself when his own actions are far from the acts of a "good Christian". |
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Alias
Joined: 24 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2005 5:39 am Post subject: |
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| While I don't mind if Dubya talks to God, I would prefer a President who can talk in a press conference and otherwise explain himself coherently rather than getting angry that his own logic leaks like a sieve and then retreat into religion to defend himself when his own actions are far from the acts of a "good Christian". |
Its not scary that he talks to God. Its scary that he thinks God talks back to him. |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2005 5:59 am Post subject: ... |
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That depends on the "talking back".
When I "talked back" to my parents, they "talked back" to me.
When Dubya talks to God, does he get all pissy and say, "Only one question at a time", like he does with people he's representing?
Perhaps along with the State of the Union, we could have the "Questions for God Address".
First question:
Who would Jesus bomb? |
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desultude
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Location: Dangling my toes in the Persian Gulf
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| Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2005 6:23 am Post subject: |
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| The Bobster wrote: |
| Kuros wrote: |
| I think that a moral people would have been discontent with slavery, but only a religious people could have had the conviction and strength to shed the blood of brethren in order to rid our nation of that poison. |
Kuros, I love the contributions you make to this forum, and I may be misreading you, but nothing I have read or been taught about the American Civil War leads me to think it was in any way a religious one, or even religiously motoivated. Soldiers killing each other on both sides of the Mason-Dixon went to the same churches and were taught from the same denominations of Protestant Christianity.
It wasn't even totally about the issue of slavery, I believe. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation rather late in the war, what many historians see as a brilliant move, not to promote the rights of human beings, but rather to undercut the moral currency of some factions in England that were supplying the Confederacy with materiel and were working to delivery official diplomatic recognition for it as well.
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| One thing I also really like about the above quote is that the word Christian is not even mentioned at all. |
Now that you mention it, this is something I love about it as well, and I think it also applies to the passage he brought us from Ben Franklin. That point alone does seem to undercut the intention he is trying to make, I think.
See, although disagreeing with the notion of his divinity, Deists in no way repudiated Jesus Christ, but rather the opposite, they believed his words and ideas were some of the flowering acheivements of Western Culture. (As do I, by the way.)
When, as president, Thomas Jefferson first allowed missionaries access to "Indian Territories" for proselytization, he required those missionaries to carry only Gospels specially published by himself, copies of the New Testament in which only the actual words spoken by Christ appear, something like the "red-letter" edition of the Bible I had as a child, but with all the words in black left out.
Our Deist Forefathers did not condemn Christ - they appreciated the wisdom of his words much more than is indicated by many - but they had strong opposition to organized Christianity in the form of religious institutions, which they saw as key allies in the kind of sppression from governmental tyranny that they were working so hard to dispel in America. |
Yes, the civil war could be seen as the last battle between the Federalists and the agrarian anti-Federalists, or northern capitalist industrialism vs. fuedal agrarianism. It was, in many ways, as much about slavery as the war in Iraq is about WMD. The slaves were "freed" to become tenant farmers and wage slaves. |
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sonofthedarkstranger
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2005 8:30 pm Post subject: |
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| nothing I have read or been taught about the American Civil War leads me to think it was in any way a religious one, or even religiously motoivated. |
There were very strong religious underpinnings to the hardcore abolitionist movement. But you're right, the Civil War itself wasn't fueled by religious zeal on either side. At least not primarily or even secondarily.
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| It was, in many ways, as much about slavery as the war in Iraq is about WMD. |
That would imply that it had nothing to do with slavery, when in fact it had everything to do with slavery--but not so much as a moral issue. The question of slavery would determine which side's vision of America would be realized, who would control the future direction of the nation, who would wield power, whose way of life would survive and flourish and who's would go extinct. There was much more to the issue of slavery than slavery itself. The stakes were high.
Also, Lincoln's stated (and true) reason for waging war wasn't Southern slavery, but Southern secession-my point I guess being that there were no lies and subterfuge--the stated reason and the real reason were the same, unlike nowadays with Bush. Lincoln, while personally anti-slavery, was no abolitionist, certainly not the threat to slaveholding interests that southerners perceived him as, and would have been happy to honor the Missouri Compromise. The South probably could have clung on to thier peculiar insitution a while longer had they not seceded. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2005 6:40 am Post subject: |
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Quote:
nothing I have read or been taught about the American Civil War leads me to think it was in any way a religious one, or even religiously motoivated.
There were very strong religious underpinnings to the hardcore abolitionist movement. But you're right, the Civil War itself wasn't fueled by religious zeal on either side. At least not primarily or even secondarily. |
Does anyone remember the Battle Hymn of the Republic?
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Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel;
��As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal��;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Since God is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat;
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet;
Our God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free;
[originally ��let us die to make men free]
While God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! While God is marching on.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty, He is honor to the brave;
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on.
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Our God is marching on. |
I love the part that they changed. 'Let us die to make men free.'
The South was not simply about preserving its agrarian society in the face of Northern aggression. How did the South muster so many white sons of the soil to defend the birthright and plantations of so few white masters? By promising them a piece of a slave Empire that would extend from the Potomac to Cape Horn. It was enough that Lincoln was against the expansion of slavery, for he did not campaign on the platform of the immediate elimination of the hateful institution, for Southern states to secede in droves.
The reason that the Northern states could not abide this expansion was because it upset their Christian consciences and sentiments. Certainly, I would not call the Civil War properly a religious war, as it did not center around religious factionalism or differences on doctrine. But religion was a major motivation of the strong abolition movement, which was influential enough to help form a new party on the platform, the Republicans, no mean feat in 2 party America. |
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The Bobster
Joined: 15 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2005 9:32 am Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
| I love the part that they changed. 'Let us die to make men free.' |
I've heard the song before, and I've heard that line of it also ... do you really think they were singing about making black men free? It never occurred to me to read it that way - and I'm interested in doing a little research about it now.
The churches that served white people and black were segregated, the doctrine and texts similar but the congregations did not mingle. For whatever reasons, this remains true in many parts of America even today.
I've yet to see much from any historians who claim what you seem to be claiming, that the mothers and fathers of white soldiers from the North sent their children to fight and possibly die to help the human rights of black people in parts of their country they would likely never visit or have a chance to meet.
In truth, racism was as prevalent in the North as it was in the South, and I'm not qualified to say whether that has changed much either. The only difference is that black people in the North were not codified by law as thelegal equivalent of property just slightly human more than livestock. |
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