US founded on "Christian Principles"?

articulett said:
I heard that many people think the "golden rule" (do unto others...) is a commandment. It's not, though, is it?
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Jesus appears to be citing Leviticus 19, verses 18 and 34, in his response to the Sadducee (love your neighbor as yourself).

In Matthew 7:12, Jesus pronounces what we now know as the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

In both cases, though, he appends essentially the same description to both of these statements -- that the law and the prophets are encapsulated in this idea of loving God and loving your fellowman.
 
Piggy said:
I'm not assuming.

If you find the need for the introductory pre-amble to be "ungodlike", then you are engaging in modern, not ancient, notions of God.
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Let me get this straight. An introduction was necessary by "God" according to ancient notions although that same "God" was responsible for creating the universe? C'mon...
 
Piggy said:
No. It's called scholarship.
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Much as you won me over long ago with your, Ralph's side of the island, and your intellectual posts, there is an issue here with anyone claiming to know the "real" facts in the Bible. To start with, there are many many versions. You yourself have said that.

So anyone's declaration about what 'god was to these people' [paraphrased] is pure speculation based on history spoken and written thousands of times over. History is very inexact at best. When you are talking about events that occurred before comprehensive written accounts occurred, and from a time when recording exact observations was a long time yet to come, then you add in numerous translations and recopying from text to text, and the censorship and selectivity of various religious leaders who clearly had political motives you cannot with the tools we have today ever hope to know what 'god was to these people'.
 
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articulett said:
That treaty states the truth.
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My point wasn't that it didn't state the truth, of course, simply that the statement in the treaty was not good evidence of its own truth. That treaty never fails to be trotted out in these discussions as though it were some kind of smoking gun (as I argued in my linked post), and people attribute a significance to it that it just doesn't possess.


articulett said:
Our country purposefully did not mention god in the constitution ...
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It's quite true that the framers of the 1787 constitution didn't mention God in it, unless one counts the purely ceremonial formulation "Year of our Lord".

Just for the sake of historical interest, however - rather than for the purpose of lending support to DOC's thesis - I note that the 1777 constitution (i.e. the original founding constitution, better known as the Articles of Confederation) does refer to God:

And Whereas it hath pleased the Great Governor of the World to incline the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in Congress, to approve of, and to authorize us to ratify the said Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union.
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I'll ask you just as I asked DOC.

And Whereas it hath pleased the Great Governor of the World
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Allah, Thor, Odin, Zeus, Baal, Gilgamesh, Krishna, Ganesh, etc. are all gods. Had this quote said hath it pleased the great, barbaric and jealous Yahweh you might have a point but that isn't what it said so how can you ASSUME this referred to the christian god?
 
It is a kind of "mythology buffet", where you get to pick and choose which bits you think should count, depending on how you feel on any given day.
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As in, 'I know the 10 commandments were intended for the Jews, but they apply to everyone, as opposed to the rule about not praying in church, which applies only to the Pharisees it was directed at'?
 
Safe-Keeper said:
As in, 'I know the 10 commandments were intended for the Jews, but they apply to everyone, as opposed to the rule about not praying in church, which applies only to the Pharisees it was directed at'?
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And one of my all time favorites from the Pharise-convert-jew from the tribe of Benjamin and citizen of Rome, women should remain silent in church and let their husbands speak. Sexist pig :D
 
~enigma~ said:
I'll ask you just as I asked DOC.

Allah, Thor, Odin, Zeus, Baal, Gilgamesh, Krishna, Ganesh, etc. are all gods. Had this quote said hath it pleased the great, barbaric and jealous Yahweh you might have a point but that isn't what it said so how can you ASSUME this referred to the christian god?
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I didn't "ASSUME" anything, so pipe down. I don't know what "point" you thought I was making, but I believe I made clear that I was noting a germane fact simply out of historical interest, not making an argument.
 
~enigma~ said:
So how did these "scholars" learn the ancient notion of god. Sounds to me as if you traded one god for gnosis of a "secret" source.
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Do we really have to go through this? Do you really not understand what textual and archaeological scholarship is?

There are no "secret" sources.

There are lots of dedicated people doing painstaking (and often mind-numbingly boring and thankless) work to study these subjects.

It involves studying ancient texts and languages (often reconstructing ancient scrolls flake by flake), excavating sites, comparing documents and inscriptions and artifacts across cultures, etc. etc. etc.

We're talking literally centuries of work and an enormous and hard-won body of knowledge.

This isn't some voodoo or guesswork.
 
~enigma~ said:
Let me get this straight. An introduction was necessary by "God" according to ancient notions although that same "God" was responsible for creating the universe? C'mon...
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The preamble was necessary to establish who the parties to the covenant were. As I said, it is formulaic and ancient.

It makes complete sense for the covenant to begin "I am Yahweh, your God" or "I am El, your God" because at that time the existence of other gods was accepted. This was an agreement between one particular god among many and one particular people among many.

Again you're bringing modern conceptions of God and the Bible to the table with you.

Keep in mind, Genesis and Exodus are not unitary texts. They weren't composed like a novel or essay or report or article. They were redacted from a slew of (often contradictory) source texts and oral traditions. So you can't look at a creation myth from Genesis and assume it has any bearing at all on a covenant text in Exodus.

Got it?
 
skeptigirl said:
So anyone's declaration about what 'god was to these people' [paraphrased] is pure speculation based on history spoken and written thousands of times over.
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No, it is not "pure speculation". Far from it.

There is a heckuva lot we don't know. There are terms that are lost to history, even though we have the written texts. There are huge gaps in our knowledge.

But we're not just speculating about everything. There are things we do know about how the ancients conceived of God, because they recorded their rituals, their songs, their covenants, their myths, their "histories" (which are not at all like what we think of as history), etc.

And a helluva lot of work has gone into peeling away the layers of these writings and rewritings to determine what was written when and how it changed. If you'd like to understand more about it, I can recommend some profs to take courses from.

This is bona fide scholarship, folks. We may not know half of what we'd like to know, but neither are we throwing darts at a map.
 
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I guess we are just arguing relative terms then, Piggy. I don't mean we have no information. I do take issue with the level of certainty you expressed in your post.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
Oo. Oo. Let me!

1) not part of the Constitution

2) not part of the Constitution

3) not part of the Constitution

4) not part of the Constitution
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You forgot one more

5) Separation of Church and State -- not part of the Constitution
 
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~enigma~ said:
Read through the treaty of Tripoli from 1796 and you will have your evidence that the US is not christian in any sense of the word.
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According to your reasoning

United States = United States government.

According to my thinking

United States = the citizens that make it up. The elected officials " the government" are not the totality of the United States of America. In theory this government is just a group of people whose job it is to serve its citizens.

You'll notice the Treaty of Tripoli specifically says

"Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion;"

And the new federal gov't of that time was weak. They didn't even have Income tax until around 1905. State's rights and State governments were much more powerful in relation to the federal gov't than they are now. That's one reason this weak federal government didn't even ban slavery. The powerful southern states would have never signed it... And those states at the time who had official religions would have never went along with a Federal religion anyway.

It wasn't until the government enacted Income tax around 1905 and the big money of the Industrial corportations came into play that the US Government had greater power over its citizens. This is exactly what Th. Jefferson didn't want. He wanted a government that was as small as possible.

So really when the Treaty of Tripoli says (to a Muslim nation it wanted to avoid war with) the U.S. government was not founded on Christianity it really didn't mean that much because the federal government at that time was actually pretty weak. It couldn't even keep its presidents and citizens from worshiping in the Capital building and Supreme Court Chambers -- but of course it didn't even want to at the time.
 
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