[lbo-talk] RE: 77% of Americans support the cretinous judge

[C. G. Estabrook]

Your paranoia is showing.  "...this is a Christian nation"?  I said
nothing of the sort.  It had been argued that "The judge and his
supporters are quite explicit that the point of the monument was to
underscore what they perceive as a fact -- that US law is founded upon the
will of God; that sure sounds like theocratic thinking." I meant to point
out that other Americans of some prominence (Jefferson surely being a
founder if not a framer) who would never be accused of being theocrats,
also thought that American law was founded on the will of God.  And that's
true even if one tries to construe the founders' deism as pantheism, which
seems to me difficult; the Declaration's concluding expression (probably
not by Jefferson) -- an appeal "to the supreme judge of the world for the
rectitude of our intentions" -- is rather far from pantheism...  --CGE

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Jon Johanning wrote:


> On Wednesday, September 3, 2003, at 11:33  AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
> > Then a number of interesting people are guilty of the same crime.  Cf.
> > Thos. Jefferson & friends, good Enlightenment liberals, who wrote in the
> > summer of 1776 that the independence of the American states was founded
> > upon the laws of God -- indeed, that it was "self-evident" that people 
> > are "endowed by their Creator" with fundamental rights.  --CGE
> 
> American history really ought to be taught better. The "Founding
> Fathers" who used this kind of God-talk were mostly *deists* (look up
> the word in a dictionary) -- very far indeed from the know-nothing
> Judge-Moore-loving idiots we have to contend with today. Over and
> over, we hear this historically mistaken crap that "our nation's
> founders were Christians, so this is a Christian nation."  Please,
> let's not have leftists falling into the same trap.
>