The Religious Right ain’t so Right!

Despite one of the most common
beliefs that Americans hold dear, the United States’ Founding Fathers were not
born-again Christians. They were Deists. While they acknowledged the existence
of God, they denied the possibility of miraculous and supernatural occurrences
in the natural world. From their perspective, they thought God to be like a
clockmaker. According to the teachings of Deists, as a clockmaker creates a clock
and leaves the clock to tick, God created the world only to leave it to
function via the laws of science.

Aside from science, Deism also stresses the importance of the intellectual strength of humans. In fact, it was influenced by the Enlightenment, a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries that favored reason and individualism over religious faith. Not to mention, a Deist would usually dismiss the Bible stories containing miracles as nothing more than myths. In fact, Deists considered…