Yeah, about that... wrote:
Thanks for the help. I'll accept all your attributions, at least for discussion's sake.
The Constitution had 39 signers. The deists you listed (presumably, every one you could come up with--and I'll include George) number seven. Please tell me how seven out of 39 is "mostly."
Deism is, by definition, one kind of theism, so it certainly does not "differ[ ] a great deal" (your words) from theism.
And, when you get a chance, please try to focus on the main point: god-believers created a godless Constitution/government!
I believe in my initial post I said "Founding Fathers." You defined this term as all of the signers of the Constitution, which is was not defined in the initial post. I know it's semantics, but who the hell has even heard of Gunning Bedford, Jr? As for the more obscure of the 39 signers, I can't speak to their religious beliefs since their letters are not as public as the ones I mentioned. I don't think it would be a stretch to think that with similar education that they probably had similar beliefs to the signers I did mention. Now if you can demonstrate that the other 30 signers were militant, fundamentalist Christians or even mainstream in their thought, then I'll concede the point.
As for creating a godless gov't, that's a little misleading. The framers didn't create a "godless gov't" but merely separated the spheres of government and religion because they had, say, over 200 hundred years of bloody European history to look at as a cautionary tale of what happens when government and religion become overly cozy with each other. Your emphasis of the word "godless" is odd to me. Just because they didn't think that state religion should be shoved down everyone's throat doesn't mean it was "godless." Is that focused enough for you?
To be frank, your deism/theism argument is silly and you are beating a dead horse. I delineated the differences for you quite clearly. You are basically saying that a pitbull and a chihuahua are dogs. Since both fall under the subset "dog" there is no difference between the two breeds.
You can bend and twist it around all you want, but the bottom line is that the framers don't resemble anything close to mainstream Christianity today or even at the time.