Consider our Liberties

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."

These two statements were written into our country's founding document, The Declaration of Independence. I've placed them into this blog post as a proof that deism, the belief in a god or gods, is a part of our nation's founding. I cannot find any explicit rejection of these statements in the Articles of Confederation, nor in the United States Constitution, nor in the Bill of Rights.

I then believe that all laws and their interpretations must therefore include a consideration of deism. Furthermore, our leaders must make decisions respecting an active god, a creator who has given to every human being unalienable rights. Our leaders must also perceive a caring god, our founders relied upon the protection of Divine Providence. Though the establishment of a state mandated religion cannot and should not take place, just as surely, our laws and policies should reject humanism as a guiding precept. We must consider and interpret our laws and policies with at least a minimum of respect for our founding ideology, that is, an active and caring god.

Recently, President Obama declared that the United States is not a Christian nation. This is true but only in the narrowest sense. Our founding was rooted in deism and that deism just happened to be most represented by Christianity. So, Christian thought is apparent within our Declaration of Independence, a document that is fundamental to modern conceptualizations of humanity's innate rights. This is not surprising to me, I feel that Protestantism encouraged people to believe in one's personal relationship to or fellowship with God. Contrast the liberating thought of a god who meant for you to live and cares about it to the humanist's thought of an uncaring creator. A humanist will believe in a morality imposed by human thought. Our founders dismissed this humanist supposition spotting instead the frailties of such thought.

And so when we debate the future of our country I wish to encourage people, insist upon a respectful deism, it was a part of our nation's founding.