Posted on 09/02/2006 8:14:14 AM PDT by Petrosius
bookmk ping-a-ling , for later
What you write is, despite your link, unsourced, and directly contradicted by sources I have cited (which, I confess, do place it closer to 50 than 60). Please explain the basis for your as yet unfounded assertion.
Dear dangus,
Okay. Sorry, that wasn't clear to me.
Even so, I'm not sure that this is quite true:
"Given that no group was dominant, freedom of religion was given to all."
I think that many of the founders were in favor of religious freedom in principle, not because practically speaking, no single religious group predominated.
But that's only a step above a quibble. ;-)
sitetest
Protestants are just like Wahabbis -- and that's an insult to Wahabbis! Except when he wants to claim Protestant American frontiersmen for medieval Catholicism.
Then there's the Catholic commenter who made a snide remark about burning witches. There's really nothing that can be said to him: a Catholic who would say such a thing has deliberately chosen to abdicate all self-awareness and intellect.
Completely wrong in every detail.
You should stop repeating propaganda.
Discuss the issues, don't make it personal.
Excuse me, but several of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Deists, not Protestants. One was a Roman Catholic. One of the colonies, as has been mentioned, was founded by and for Catholics. (That particular aspect of Protestant religious tolerance didn't last long.)
There were Spanish Catholic missions on the east coast, in what is now Florida, Georgia, and southern South Carolina, before the Pilgrims landed. There is a Catholic church standing today in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that was 13 years old when the Pilgrims set foot in Massachusetts. The Spaniards made it as far north as Kansas decades before the English arrived on the east coast.
Most of the interior of the country was opened up by French Catholic fur trappers and explorers. There were French Catholics exploring in central South Dakota -- the heart of the continent -- 40 years before Lewis and Clark got there. A French Catholic Jesuit priest, Fr. Jacques Marquette, led the expedition that first explored the Mississippi from the mouth of the Wisconsin river to the mouth of the Arkansas, back in 1673.
You don't write me and my co-religionists out of the history of this country, and I won't write out you and yours. Deal?
The Protestants "who established the United States" (see my post above) had nothing to do with that "nice little tract of land", which was given to the Catholic Lord Baltimore by King Charles I of England. Catholics were never a majority in Maryland. During the Puritan dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, the capital of Maryland was attacked by an English warship (named -- guess what -- "the Reformation") and the Catholic church building there burnt to the ground.
Maryland enacted an Act of Toleration in 1649, which required toleration of all Christian denominations.
This lasted until after the English Protestants deposed the lawful King (the Catholic Stuart James II) in the so-called "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. By 1692, the Church of England had been established as the state church in Maryland, and the period of religious tolerance was ended.
Catholic prosperity in this country has nothing to do English Catholic aristocrats practicing religious tolerance in Maryland in the 17th Century, and everything to do with the hard work of Irish, German, Italian, and other immigrant groups which helped to build this country.
Oh, now you speak of integrity.
My posting of the list of English martyrs was to show that religious freedom was not, contrary to Protestant mythology, part of the motivation of Protestant Reformation (Catholic Emancipation did not occur in the UK until 1829).
As for the development of religious freedom in the United States, it was more the result of the American form of the Enlightenment and the practical need for a peace at the federal level between the various Protestant churches in the collective states. Even at the time of the ratification of the Constitution many of the states had established state churches. The last of these was disestablished in Massachusetts only in 1833. The First Amendment was as much to prevent the attempt to establish a single national church on the pattern of the then existing state churches, which would have threatened the position of any opposed state denomination, as it was based on a philosophical principle of religious freedom.
The underlying point, though, that the nativist KKK was as much anti-Catholic as it was anti-Black and anti-Jewish is valid.
Well, thank you for wasting my time. Nothing in Fogel's article had anything to do with anything before AD 1500, and was based on economic structures which did not exist before then, so any extrapolation is not only unfounded, but inherently wrong.
Your first link links to a password-protected site. If you would like to exerpt something of use, that might be helpful.
>> You should stop repeating propaganda. <<
The propagandist, in this case, was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was protestant at the time.
I don't think you can. And even if he did say that stuff, he was wrong. Perhaps Aquinas and definitely Augustine had influence, but that was by way of influencing Calvinism. If you think that's wrong, then go find a Founder saying it was based on Catholic Natural Law theory. ("The laws of Nature and Nature's God" won't cut it.)
And BTW, the Constitution presupposes Total (not utter) Depravity.
To be clear, I only assert that Thomas was the source for the first part of the argument, that it was based on Aquinas and Augustine. But was Thomistic (Aqunias :^D) was specifically the notion that a secular institution could nonetheless be a prevening grace to aid in the salvation of the world. Thus, the Constitution is not Thomistic by way of Calvin, but actually in the areas of Thomistic and Augustinian thought which is most directly contrary to Calvin.
I'm not sure what you mean by "aid in the salvation of the world" here. But unless you mean something any theologian would consider heretical, it's not contrary to Calvin at all. He said, "Now, as it is evident that the law of God which we call moral, is nothing else than the testimony of natural law, and of that conscience which God has engraven on the minds of men, the whole of this equity of which we now speak is prescribed in it. Hence it alone ought to be the aim, the rule, and the end of all laws."
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