Just because the Constitution recognizes the division between church and state, doesn't mean the people who created it were not Christians
Irrelevant. Although there were undoubtedly Christians involved, there is no indication in the Constitution of their Christianity. There is nothing in the US Constitution that lets you know whether its writers were Christian, Jewish, atheist, or deist.
Secular is not to be identified as atheist or even anti-christian
But it is non-Christian. And you can be sure that the church was none too happy with this idea of church-state separation, or are you also suggesting that that idea is of biblical origin?
You are arguing that the American government was founded on Christian principles, yet the fundamental principles found in the Constitution of the US cannot be found in scripture. You won't find anything there about democracy, limited, divided and transparent government, the rule of law, church-state separation (secular government), guaranteed personal liberties such as freedom of expression, the autonomy of the individual, and the like.
The biblical model is the one that the US revolution intended to topple - kings, commands, subjects, divine right. You call yourself a rebel. The Bible commands you to submit to kings. Remember these?
- "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves."- Romans 13:1-2
- "Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient" - Titus 3:1
No room for rebelling there.
You are simply insisting on something that is demonstrably untrue. If the US Constitution were the child of biblical scripture, there ought to be a family resemblance. Instead, there is almost no overlap.
Christianity and Islam have nothing in common.
Did you forget all of this:
Islam and Christianity are pretty much the same religion on paper. Each reveres a Semitic desert god who is an angry, petty, vengeful, jealous, judgmental, capricious, prudish, strongman requiring worship and submission under threat of cosmic reprisal.
Believers of each attend temples (Mosques or churches) and obey paternalistic, misogynisitic clergy.
Both religions embrace magical thinking, mythology, dogma, the supernatural, and ritual.
Each feature demons angels, prayer, an afterlife, a judgment, and a system of reward and punishment after death.
They each think they have the right to determine who should be allowed to diddle whom how, who should be able to marry whom, and what women must do regarding their bodies.
Both are patriarchal, authoritarian, misogynistic, sexually repressive, anhedonisitic, atheophobic, homophobic, antiscientiific, use psychological terrorism on their children, have violent histories featuring torture, genocide and terrorism, and demand obedience and submission.
Each consider faith a virtue and reason a problem.
Each advocates theocracy over democracy.
And if you recall, that list was first provided as part of an argument that the difference in the way the Islam and Christianiity religions are manifest - one still embracing brutal practices reminiscent of the Christian church in the Middle Ages, the other more civilized - was due to the humanizing effect of secular humanism. It's not a coincidence that they stopped killing witched in the colonies once Enlightenment political philosophy gave us the modern, secular, liberal, democratic state with guaranteed protections from such abuse by the church. There is no reason to believe that the Christian church would ever have given up torturing those who it disapproved of had more civil behavior not been imposed on them.
Did you have a rebuttal for that beyond the unevidenced claim that Islam and Christianity have nothing in common?
This is the opposite problem to the one just discussed - the lack of a family resemblance between the Bible and the US Constitution, which you claim are closely related. Here you want to say that Islam and Christianity have nothing in common when it is easy to make long lists of what they have in common. How did Abraham and Moses make it into both religions? Why do they both have creationists fighting science? The answer is easy - they're kissing cousins.
This is the difference between reason and evidence based thought, and faith-based thought. With faith, you just declare whatever you wish to be true and then believe it as if it were. There's a better way to decide what is true about the world, but it involves looking at it and evaluating the evidence.
You also might like to take notice of the fact that whenever you make these unsupported claims that fly in the face of the evidence, you invite others to make compelling arguments that you are wrong that you counter only with unevidenced claims. Is that what you're looking for?
Nonsense. I have serious doubts you were ever a born-again Christian. If you ever had been you would have experienced the awesome presence of the Holy Spirit in your life and you would have known without a doubt it was real. What you no doubt did was give Christianity the usual "bum's rush". So save your claim as being a Christian for some other spiritually-challenged skeptic who is also clueless about the Holy Spirit and the historical Jesus.
Actually, I came to understand that what I was feeling and had been calling the Holy Spirit was just my own mind in the presence of a gifted and charismatic pastor. I was in the Army at the time, stationed on the east coast. Upon discharge, I returned to California,and was never able to find that Holy Spirit again. The churches I tried were all lifeless.
A few years later, I left Christianity altogether.
