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>If you study the Founding Fathers of the USA.....they were very religious
>and highly educated men....
and:
>Such statements would have been against everything James Madison spent his
>life for!
I've heard it said that many of our founding fathers were religious men. I decided to research this topic a bit to see whether I could discover how they viewed religion.
I come to the conclusion that the founding fathers were deists, not theists - a critical distinction. They were, in general, certainly not believers in organized religions such as Christianity or Judaism, with the possible exception of James Madison who spent a great deal of his time and effort attempting to separate church from state.
http://www.postfun.com/pfp/worbois.html
http://www.deism.com/DeistAmerica.htm
Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the founder most influenced by the elightenment. He was clearly a practitioner of reason as opposed to superstition, religion, or any form of mysticism (see above links).
It is, I think, also unfair for us to assume that the founders would believe the same things that they did in 1780, were they alive today. After all, the founders quite reasonably might have changed their views had they been around to meet with Mr. Darwin, circa 1860, and to see the wonders of modern archeaology and anthropology.
The Omega Man
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