You may worship as you please in this great country precisely because ours is not a God-run government. Separation between church and state is healthy for the best that religion ever had to offer. If there really is a loving God, I doubt he, himself, would have it any other way.

What kind of God would prefer automatons over reasonable individuals who value conducting their lives thoughtfully?

Why was it only 234 years ago in 1776 that Individual Rights were codified into the structure of government? The reason was because the Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke (1632 - 1704) recognized and wrote about the sovereign Individual being the fundamental political unit of power in a nation and about the absolute necessity that government protect each individual’s Rights as its sole reason for existing. It was these Enlightenment ideas that led to Individual Rights in 1776. It was not Judaism or Christianity.

Certainly America’s Founders were religious men, but so were most government leaders and Monarchs (Divine Right of Kings) for 1776 years of Christianity and 4,000 years of Judaism, but none of them created Individual Rights. Religious government leaders did create horrendous persecution of each other’s religions in Europe which is what American colonists came here to escape. Religious government leaders did create a 1,000 year long Dark Age, several Inquistions, witch burnings, the burning at the stake of intellectuial dissenters like Giordano Bruno, and the threatening of the life of scientists like Galileo. However, these long centuries of religious leaders did not create Individual Rights.

It was Enlightenment ideas that created the sovereign individual as the fundamental political unit of power and created Individual Rights which brought with it religious tolerance because each man now had the Right to worship any religion or no religion as he saw fit.