I very much believe organised religion to be a contrivance of man, used to manipulate people for reasons other than spiritually, the worst and most stark example currently in America being the Evangelicals and their love for Trumpism, Christian Nationalism, and their insistence the United States was founded as a Christian Nation. They would impose their perversion of Christian Morality upon us all as a matter of law, as well as their likewise perverted blind patriotism.
That is the latest in a string of examples when man has used a denomination as a tool to project power over others as opposed to a code of behaviour for oneself to commit to in his or her treatment of others. Do onto others as you would want others to do onto you. How simple and clear does this basic tenant of all religions need to be.
This latest religious/nationalist fervour in America had me to go back and look at the writings of the "Founding Fathers", those people who these morons cite as evidence America was to be a Christian Nation. I can only conclude they haven't read very much of what they wrote or are having dreadful issues with reading comprehension.
Without going into a lot of history and writings pointing to the contrary, things like the Princeton Congresses &c, it was fascinating to discover how many of the Founding Fathers were Deists rather than Liturgical Christians, putting paid to the whole modern notion of American Christian Nationalism as a movement then and as anything but a baldfaced lie now.
Many were pure Deists, like Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin. The latter found Deism to square with his being a believer in the Enlightenment and a man of science. Indeed Deism was a mainstrwam belief of many like minds of the period.
John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, even George Washington were Deists, some were more specifically Christian Deists, ones who believed in the moral teachings of Jesus; love, peace, and kindness to others, but not in the divinity of Jesus as taught by the church.
I find a lot to like in the idea of Deism, the notion of the intended message of morality with respect to treating others by the "golden rule" but the rejection of man-made organised religion as a matter of law, whether church law or civil law, law based on its convenient interpretation of liturgy it alone created.
I do like the notion of personal belief in a supreme being as a matter of comfort and inspiration whilst rejecting all the man-made claptrap imposed by organised religions on others, especially imposed by those who think they somehow have been "chosen" to do so. As soon as I hear some sort of exclusivity, who to hate, who is a lost tribe, have I joined the club by accepting this and that, the one true anything, I'm out. The Golden Rule is not exclusive.
And to the Christian Nationalists, I offer this quote by Ben Franklin: "When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself and, when it cannot support itself and God does not take care to support so that its professors are oblig'd to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
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