Originally posted by sithsaber408
So 82% of the country identifies itself as Christian, our laws are based on Judeo-Christian values, we have many founding fathers and presidents claiming that God is the head of this nation and that the scriptures (meaning the Bible) are our truths, you can find God written all over monuments or statues and government buildings in D.C., the Supreme Court even has the Ten Commandments posted inside the building........but this isn't a Christian nation.
[list=1][*]While 82% of Americans identify as Christian, the majority are Roman Catholics, and a full 40% are not a member of a church; True Christians™, indeed.
[*]Nearly all of the Founding Fathers were Diests and Freemasons; very few, if any, were Christians.
[*]Freemason iconography is on government buildings, monuments, and the Great Seal of the United States, but it does not follow from this that America is a Freemason nation.[/list]
Originally posted by StrangeloveSS? You there?
I'm sorry....proof? The Supreme Court has actually ruled that having the 10 Commandments inside a government building such as a courthouse is unconstitutional, so why would it be in the Supreme Court building itself? That's just silly.And I am failing to think of any monuments that have "god written all over them." Example please?
Originally posted by sithsaber408
"Christians far outnumber members of any other faith in the country, with 82 percent of the poll’s respondents identifying themselves as such. Another 5 percent say they follow a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism or Islam."http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17879317/site/newsweek/
🙂
“The New Atheists” Ronald AronsonWe commonly hear that only a tiny percentage of Americans don't believe in God and that, as a Newsweek poll claimed this spring, 91 percent do. In fact, this is not true.
How many unbelievers are there? The question is difficult to assess accurately because of the challenges of constructing survey questions that do not tap into the prevailing biases about religion.
According to the American Religious Identification Survey, which interviewed more than 50,000 people, more than 29 million adults—one in seven Americans—declare themselves to be without religion.
The more recent Baylor Religion Survey ("American Piety in the 21st Century"😉 of more than 1,700 people, which bills itself as "the most extensive and sensitive study of religion ever conducted," calls for adjusting this number downward to exclude those who believe in a God but do not belong to a religion.
Fair enough. But Baylor's own Gallup survey is a bit shaky for at least two reasons. It counts anyone who believes in a "higher power" but not God as believing in God—casting a vast net over adherents of everything from spirit to history to love. Yet the study allows unbelievers only one option: to not believe in "anything beyond the physical world," leaving no space for those who regard themselves as agnostics or skeptics, secularists or humanists.
Contrast this with a more recent and more nuanced Financial Times/Harris poll of Europeans and Americans that allowed respondents to declare agnosticism as well as atheism: 18 percent of the more than 2,000 American respondents chose one or the other, while 73 percent affirmed belief in God or a supreme being.
A more general issue affects American surveys on religious beliefs, namely, the "social desirability effect," in which respondents are reluctant to give an unpopular answer in a society in which being religious is the norm. What happens when questions are framed to overcome this distortion? The FT/H poll tried to counteract it by allowing space not only for the customary "Not sure" but also for "Would prefer not to say"—and 6 percent of Americans chose this as their answer to the question of whether they believed in God or a supreme being. Add to this those who declared themselves as atheists or agnostics and, lo and behold, the possible sum of unbelievers is nearly one in four Americans.
[Then, there are tacit atheists.]
I am speaking first about many millions of Americans who nominally belong to a religion but effectively live without any active relationship either to it or to God, or belong to a church and attend services but are "tacit atheists," living day in and day out with only token reference to God. And I also include the many believers who accept the principle of America as a secular society. These include members of the liberal Jewish and Christian denominations, who have long practice in accommodating themselves to science and the modern world and who, as the National Council of Churches website tells us, may remain inspired by Genesis while not needing to take it in "literal, factual terms."
Many of these turned up in the most significant finding of the Baylor survey, namely that more than one in four American "believers" does not mean by this a personal God at all but a distant God who has little or nothing to do with the world or themselves. This sounds very much like the deist God of "unbelievers" Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
These believers, along with those who think of themselves as "spiritual," as well as professed unbelievers, help to explain why according to the Pew study so many Americans—32 percent—want less religious influence on government. Twenty-four percent say that President Bush talks too much about his religious faith and prayer, and 28 percent deny that the United States is a Christian nation. Most dramatically, a whopping 49 percent believe that Christian conservatives have gone too far "in trying to impose their religious values on the country."
This, then, is an unreported secret of American life: Considerable numbers of Americans, religious and secular, are becoming fed up with the in-your-face religion that has come to mark our society.
Re: In God We Trust
Originally posted by Strangelove
What does it mean?In 1956, an act of the United States Congress effectively supplanted the national motto "E Pluribus Unum" for "In God We Trust." This was largely a move to cast the United States in a light opposite that of Communism, which was largely associated with atheism (adding "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance was also part of this movement). Not only was that not really true, but Communism is no longer a threat to any sort of religion or political regime. So why keep it?
Keeping "In God We Trust" as the national motto of the United States of America is still casting us in a light opposite that of others. Except now we're the bad guys. Keeping such a federal endorsement of religion emboldens the radical evangelicals and helps in part to keep the United States behind in social and technological developments (in addition to being a violation of the Constitution). There was once a time when religion controlled the government. They were called the Dark Ages.
The radical religious right prevent us from legalizing gay marriage, which is a human rights issue and has nothing to do with religion. The RRR prevents stem cell research, because using frozen embryos that are going to be discarded anyway to cure diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and spinal injuries is somehow 'destroying life.'
However, "E Pluribus Unum" (Latin for "Out of many, one"😉 is a uniting motto as opposed to a dividing one. Originally referring to the original thirteen colonies becoming one nation, it evolved as America became a nation of immigrants. No matter what or how many different cultures enter our borders, no matter what hardships we all face, we are [b]one
nation and we stand united.But no. We continue to have a motto on our money and in our lives that continues to send a message that is categorically un-American. [/B]
I saw a Boston Legal episode the other day where a principal won a case in court to have Intelligent Design taught in science classes alongside evolution specifically using the argument that since America has the motto "in God we trust" it should mean that all Americans should be religious, or something to that effect.
I simplified the argument a bit, but that's basically what the argument was - America has always been religious, therefore there should be no reason not to teach Intelligent Design (which as we all know is basically a pseudonym for Creationism) in science classes.
It still gives me the shivers...