MUCH ADO ABOUT JESUS

Submitted by DANIEL REDMOND (United States), Jan 9, 2008 at 01:07

I can't count how many times I've heard people tell me that "our Founding Fathers were Christian and they wanted this to be a Christian nation," which is, of course, exactly wrong. Our Founding Fathers---men like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin---were mostly agnostics or atheists and they deliberately chartered a secular nation by providing it with a brilliantly crafted written Constitution that guaranteed a separation of church and state.

These men must be rolling over in their graves to see that now more than two hundred years later we still consider someone's religion to be of paramount importance when voting in an election. Given the fact that religion is prohibited from entering into our governing process it would stand to reason that the best candidates for public office would be those who either profess no religious faith at all or who vow to ignore their religious convictions completely while in office. Instead we find that non-Christians, or those thought to be non-Christians, are considered to be political 'outcastes' with limited opportunity to serve in public office, and that atheists have virtually no chance at all of being elected.

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