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What it Would be Like to be in That Promised Land

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Tea Party people and the Texas Board of Education are hell-bent on convincing us that this is supposed to be a Christian nation.  That is just another way of saying that they are hell-bent on convincing us that if you are not a Christian, you had damned-well better get used to the idea that this is not your kind of place!

And not just Christian, but a Protestant Christian, not Catholic Christian nation!  Christians with anti-abortion billboards in the front yard, and with no evolutionists in the back yard!  Fundamentalist Christians, who believe the earth is very old--about six thousand years old--and that God arranged for Caucasians to sail from the British Isles and establish a God-fearing nation of people peculiarly like a congregation of gun-toting Baptists! 

"Well," they ask, "were not the Pilgrims hell-bent on following God to this Promised Land, and did they not intend to found a religious nation, just as soon as they could beat back the people who already lived here, who were heathens?  Did they not celebrate Thanksgiving?"

"Were the Founders not good, decent Christian people who talked about Nature's God, and who put 'In God we Trust' on our coins, eventually?  Did not some of the Colonies establish official religions, mostly Congregational up north, and Anglican down south?  And do we not have a Declaration of Independence in which you will find things like, 'the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God', and that we are endowed by our Creator with 'certain unalienable Rights'?"

And do we not have a Constitution which does not really talk like that, at all? 

We do.  In fact, there is not one work about Buddha, or Mohammed in our founding documents.  And there is not a word about Jesus, either.  There is some suggestion that the laws of nature reveal God, or something like that, but that seems to be a way of saying that we have "certain unalienable rights" which cannot be denied, things like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

The writers of the Declaration and the Constitution did, indeed, make vague and general references to God and God-given rights, but they did not say, nor even suggest, that they were intending a Congregationalist, or an Anglican, or Christian nation;  not at all! 

In fact, they found it necessary to say, in article III of the Bill of Rights, soon added to the Constitution, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". 

There will be no state religion, but you can be religious if you want to be!

The current, fervent, well-armed campaign to try to convince us that we are supposed to be a Christian nation is ignorance of history, at best, and racism, religious intolerance, stupidity about science, at worst.  It is a claim made by ignorant people who hide their anger beneath the remnants of ancient religious ideas and the belief that they are God's Chosen People, and that we aren't, unless we are caucasians like them, fundamentalists like them, and paranoid like them. 

Even people who aren't religious should wake up every morning and thank god they do not live in that promised land!  It is a mean place.

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