Nations Also?
May 10th, 2008 by Randy Toman
In my last posting I talked about the “Reprobate mind” and the inability of men to reason correctly. Those implications are immense and the ramifications of that flaw catastrophic.
In this posting I would like to touch on the reasoning of our founding fathers. And you can’t get any more founding then Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Thomas Paine, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Ben Franklin. What and how did those guys reason? Where did they get their building blocks of reason? What did they think of religion, Jesus Christ, the Trinity, Christ bodily resurrection and accession into Heaven, Christ as God and man, the Bible as being infallible and the very word of God? Well the fact of the matter is they didn’t think too much of those things and they didn’t believe any of it. They were all well outside the Reform Faith has it came over on the “Mayflower”. Between 1620-1776 there was a radical change in belief in religion and what constituted faith in God? The change was in and came about through substitution of reason for a faith in Christ and what made up that Faith. The men mentioned above were all “Deist” in their belief. This had major implication in and on what they believed and how they used the Bible in their thought process as it pertained to guides of life.
They believed God to be a watchmaker and got it started and then stepped back to leave the Earth run and man to reason through it. There was no Hell, no sin through Adam, no judgment by some cruel god, and man can work his way into Heaven with good works.
There certainly was not, as John Calvin wrote, a sovereign God, who predestined man, as a matter a fact Jefferson thought Calvin was a Heretic and Calvin’s five points of Calvinism was an abomination. (Many pastors believe that to be the case today) We have then not a “Mayflower Compact” type document in the “Constitution” but a secular document base on reason and Enlightenment Thinking.
We have some inalienable abstract rights for “We the people…”given to them by some god of nature or natures god. (The Puritans of New England 1620 never believed government was of “We” the people but government was “For” the people based on Biblical laws.) And Jefferson did not and would not use the Bible to develop a common law system. Jefferson’s separation of church and state did mean just that to include no state religion or religion within any government in any foam. He didn’t want it anywhere in any government. Jefferson believed religion was a private matter and rarely went to church on Sunday. Jefferson was categorically opposed to public profession of religious beliefs by public figures or government officials. Alexander Hamilton … called Jefferson an “atheist and fanatic”.
Well were does all this lead us and/or leave us? If this guy Alan Dershowitz in his book “Blasphemy” is any were close to being correct it certainly looks like we may have had the secularization of the country started with the “Constitution” and as for a “Christian” nation forget about that, the “Constitution” is/was not, intended to be a Christian document, not by Jefferson anyway.
Jefferson believed in science through reason and questioned God’s creation of the Earth, so it was no wonder Darwin’s theory found fertile ground some 60 +/- years later after Jefferson’s death and was planted in Jefferson’s garden.
We shall see how merciful our Heavenly father will be to this country in the next couple of years. For it is once to die and then judgment, that judgment is not only for individuals but will fall on “Nations Also”.