I watched a debate today between Christopher Hitchens and Ken Blackwell on the issue of whether or not America was founded on Christian ideas (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJNsWN-QGW8). While I'm not going to discuss the debate dircetly, I am going to discuss the main issue of the debate.
62% of Americans believe that the U.S. is a Christian nation according to a recent Newsweek poll. To put things nicely, 62% of Americans are not aware of their country's history and what their founding fathers declared. The Declaration of Independence (http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/index.htm linked here so that you can be sure I'm not making anything up) does make mention to "Nature's God" and that "men...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." It does not make any direct references to Christianity. Nature's God and Creator could be interpreted as many things, technically speaking it could refer to Nature itself and the natural processes by which we came into existence.
The Declaration goes on to mention of the tyranny of the King of Britain. A man who had absolute power and control over his people. It would seem to me that those founding a country that is supposed to be free from such tyrannical rule would not found the country in the name of any single religion. We have recently seen what happens when a country is allowed to be controlled by religious ideals. In Afghanistan the government has considered the legalizing of rape of women within marriage all to appeal to the religious. Let's not forget Saudi Arabia, where a woman can be punished because she was the one who was raped. Religious control of a country breeds the tyranny the founding fathers fought against.
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