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You do know that the Bible you read today was written and voted upon by humans? (Romans to be exact) It's a popularly voted upon instruction manually for people who wanted to unify under a common banner where they got to pick and choose what to put in... It doesn't "change over time". The people that decided what to put in and what order to place them did that. They sat down with various religious documents and tried to come up with one that they could stand behind and preach. So, how are you supposed to follow a manual that doesn't include all the instructions, maybe puts some of them in different orders and isn't consistent? How do you seriously constitute that to the "will" of said god? Maybe that ignorance you speak of is not mine.

http://www.deism.com/bibleorigins.htm

I wouldn't trust Wikipedia's definition for anything religious or spiritual -- it's garbage. e.g. The article on Gnostic is a joke.

a) Wikipedia asserts without any references that religion is external, not internal which is nonsense. Religion doesn't depend on "popularity."

... but religion differs from private belief in that it has a public aspect ...

TRUE religion is the act of living the life to prove your beliefs; or said another way "Religion is Applied Philosophy". Thomas Paine also has an interesting perspective on Religion: http://www.deism.com/paine_essay_religion.htm

b) While Sunderland is correct with his definition of Religion he is also [appears? to be] ignorant of the fact that _everyone_ has faith; but he is correct not everyone has Religion or religion. Initially you can't prove your beliefs -- you take them on faith. If you don't have faith in your beliefs then why do you have them [beliefs] in the first place? The belief in God is orthogonal to Religion. Which is what the point he was driving at.

Note: These two reasons are why Science is a Religion:
Faith? Check mark.
Desire to Prove Beliefs? And Check mark again.
QED.
Science is only _one_ way to arrive at the answers / proof.

i.e.
Scientists take it on faith that the speed of light is constant throughout the universe.
Scientists take it on faith that there was no 'time nor space' before the Big Bang.
etc.

I never said that they were secular humanists. That's a 1930s thing. I said they were Deists. Many were also Freemasons. These were popular things to be amongst the intellecutal elites of the 17th and 18th centuries. Deists aren't Christian, nor are they secular humanists. They believe in the God of Nature and the concept of Natural Law. See this link for more info. (Disclosure: I am not now nor have I ever been a Deist.)

All kidding aside, check out the thought-provoking letter by Thomas Paine, a deist, near the 2nd half of this article. Paine puts forth one of the most rational arguments regarding the Bible and touches upon Intelligent Design.

http://www.deism.com/biblevotes.htm

Given Paine's arguments, I find it amusing that Intelligent Design is being promoted by Christians today.

Thomas Paine, like Ben Franklin and sixteen presidents of USA was a deist.

Here's a couple lists of famous people who were deists. Ones that might score some points with geeks include: Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Victor Hugo, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking.

http://www.deistnet.com/deismfam.htm
http://www.nndb.com/lists/461/000107140/

Unfortunately, the link is down, here's the Google Cache.

Your story is incomplete and slightly inaccurate. First, George Washington was probably not a Christian, but a Deist, and while there are spiritual overtones to that proclamation, he clearly avoided any Christian references.

While Washington did devote a day in November to Thanksgiving, it was not a continuing holiday. It was Lincoln who established Thanksgiving day as we know it.

While there is no language in the proclamation regarding the Pilgrims, the Pilgrims' had a day of thanks after their struggles, and when the day of thinksgiving was announced there was some discord among the colonies, with many feeling the hardships of a few Pilgrims did not warrant a national holiday. It is clear that Washington's proclamation was an echo of the Pilgrim's Thanksgiving. So your elementary school teacher was actually correct.

Read more about it here

A better link to deism would be:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism
Another interesting article on George Washington's deism is here.

You are badly misusing the term "Deist." It's pretty much the opposite of what you think it is. Deism is one of the most science-compatible religions out there, insofar as it could even be called a religion.

No one's suggesting that doctors pray instead of treat
No one?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
This took all of 1 minute in google to find.
Prehaps it would have been better said no one here has suggested.
Medicine and religion have a long history of bad blood and we would probably but a lot healthier without religion.

The Founding Fathers were openly religious. The practice of praying to God, and not just any God, the Christian God embraced by the Christian religions, in government has continued even today

• Thomas Jefferson : Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
• Ben Franklin: "I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works ... I mean real good works ... not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing ... or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity."
• Thomas Paine : The fable of Christ and his twelve apostles, which is a parody on the sun and the twelve signs of the zodiac, copied from the ancient religions of the eastern world, is the least hurtful part."
• James Madison: "Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
• John Adams: As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?

• http://www.ecis.com/~alizard/founding-fathers-xtia nity.html
• http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/extra/foundin g-fathers.html
• http://www.barefootsworld.net/founding.html

The Scouts are definitely not a Deist organization. Perhaps you meant theist?

This, by the way, is what the "Founding Fathers" actually were (for the most part). A Deist is not somebody who believes in a god, a Deist is someone who believes in a specific type of God, which differs substantially from the Christian Jehovah / Jewish Yaweh / Muslim Allah.

I'm glas you take your responsibility wrt guns seriously, the problem is too many gun owners don't.

Which is why we fail to meet the first part of the second A: a well regulated militia.

To accomplish this, the state should be able to require a minimum level of training culminating in a license for gun ownership. This would not infringe on the right to keep an bear so long as the licensing process was open to all and not unreasonably expensive nor difficult.

Wrt to your attempt to troll atheists, many of the founders were Deists, which is more similar to Atheism than it is to Christianity (both deny revealed religion).

Creationists have always struck me as being strident and inflexible. I believe in evolution. I also believe in creation to the extent that some higher being at one point installed the last "spark plug", if you will, in order to give humans that certain something extra that separates us from mere beasts. I really do hold that both beliefs can coexist in harmony.

That sounds like something a Deist might say. You should check them out.

"Theism" is the general word for belief in god(s). Naturally enough, that's the opposite of "atheism".

Deism specifically claims natural and logical evidence for an eternal creator but rejects miraculous tales in holy books. Many founders of the US were deists, whose quotes often leads to their being mistaken for christians.

> The founding fathers were deeply religious, and
> intended this as a Christian nation.

Um, incorrect. Whilst some of the authors of the Constitution were indeed Christian, there were also atheists and a large number of deists.

> Certainly they never intended this to be an
> atheistic or nontheistic nation.

No, but they did intend it to be a nation where you could be an atheist. Or a deist. Or whatever. They intended it to be a nation where no one was forced into any religion, and where church and state were separated. This partially came from their own beliefs (and the diversity therin), and partially from seeing the corruption that rose from the Church of England. Religion and government are both immensely powerful institutions, and are prone to corruption. Adding them together is like adding an oily rag to a bottle of gas, and thus we have a Molotov cocktail...and people get burned.

...back to work. (this comment brought to you by a summer US History I course ;)

You are aware that the 10 commandments are posted in the Supreme court building...

I know that, but there are congresspeople proposing to post the 10 commandments in lots of other places: local courts, government offices, public schools, etc. Just because they're in the Supreme Court doesn't mean that it's right.

There is a lot of christian influence in the creation of this country, reading the writings of the founders shows this. Maybe we should re-write history as it tends to offend some.

Actually, a number of the founding fathers (Jefferson, Paine, Franklin, Washington) were Deists, not Christians. There's a significant difference. Besides, the founding of this country doesn't disturb me. Evolutionarily speaking, man came from the most basic of elements, why should his past bother him. No, I'm concerned about the present, and what I want is to have the government be completely neutral wrt religion. I don't want the my tax dollars sponsoring or restricting it in any way, shape, or form.

Deism, although I believe I am agnostic... :)

Thats how some programmers are... I should know I almost lost a friend because he was being so stuborn when we were working on a project together. I knew how we should implement something, I explained it countless times, but he just wouldn't listen or understand, I even said I would do the coding, but he wanted to be boss of the project, and would not budge about it... The real question is who was being stubborn, there are times I thought back on it and thought he was being stubborn, but then there are times when I look back on it and think, if only I just cooperated, it could have been part of an update... the reality of it is though that we were both stubborn, so much so that we would rather the project collapse then work it out.... But the moral of the story is, chances are they were both significantly hurt, think about that for a moment, Rasterman is out a job, and Redhat was injured by his statement, both of these are recoverable, things seem pretty balanced to me, so lets be reasonable and think.

THINK