Happy 4th of July

So it's the Fourth of July, the day that celebrates our nation's creation.  Beyond this one fact of the date, much of what we believe about how we came about is buried in mounds of myth and bullshit.  Our beginnings were precipitated on noble ideas, but the functional parts of the noble cause were anything but noble.  It was an ugly situation to be embroiled in a revolution.  Thankfully King George decided he had other fish to fry and pulled out.  He could have dragged it out like we have recently in the Middle East.

Today is not a day to worry about stupid foreign policy fails.  Today I want to think about that which many folks do not consider when they think of our honorable founding fathers and their alcohol infused hoe down during the second meeting of the Continental Congress in June and July of 1776.

It is a convenient myth that the Founders were inspired by God and what resulted was a democratic and free nation under that god. While most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were men of religious fervor in public, in private, more than a few were anything but. As a matter of fact the main man who is credited with the final draft was not a religious man in the typical norms of the day.  Thomas Jefferson rejected most of the popular Christian tenets at the time.  Jefferson and many others were Deists.

In a nut shell, Deism is a belief that God may have started everything, but that is where God's participation ended. God was not interested in the affairs of Man and was then as God is now, just a spectator.  Deism becoming  popular was a natural result of the Age of Enlightenment, when a growing intellectual class was scrutinizing everything, patrticularly religion.  The draconian days of hard line Christianity were waning, but still held sway among the rank and file.  Deism was considered blasphemous by many leaders, religious and political. They wanted to criminalize its advocacy.  So, many true deists kept their opinions to themselves, went to church, kneeled with the best, and went home to live the rest of their week in heathen joy.

Americans at that point had not known real government that was in theory under their control. They had always been chattels and tied to the whims of a government thousands of miles away.  Many of the early settlements were created by religious dissenters who emigrated from England and Europe. Many of the early colonies were actually set up under local theocratic rules which had unbending and rigid religious based ideas about how one should live their life or pay serious consequences. 

Some modern theologians seem to want to bury the notion that Deism had anything to do with the creation of this country.  Mark David Hall, a professor at the religious university, Fox University in Oregon, wrote a book debunking deism's contribution to the formation of America as we know it.  I only read the first chapter, "The Myth of the Founders Deism".  It was enough to tell me like any less than objective historian, he was interpreting the facts to fit his forgone conclusion.  Nothing wrong with that I guess, but it does not treat the subjects they write about fairly and objectively.

It would have been logical for the new United States to be set up with more religious control than it was.  You can thank the Deists that it was not.  They insisted on keeping the idea of the separation of church and state front and center.  And their first battle was while drafting the original Declaration of Independence.  The real battle came eleven years later when the Constitution took form. Sane men of religion who understood the wisdom of Separation joined forces with the Deists to insist that separation became one of the bedrock notions upon which this country was established.  Without the Deists and their influence, I wonder where and what we would be?

So the next time you go to church, thank God for staying out of the affairs of Man and respecting the Deist way of life.  Snicker, snicker, snicker.

Later ..................................................