A Christian Nation?

Joseph Farrah sounds just like a member of the Taliban talking about Islam in his article, "Why Atheists can't be real Americans", where he said,

"If you want to live in the freest nation on earth, understand why it has been that way for 230-plus years. It’s because of the principles of self-governance that only work in a society of responsible, moral people accountable to the teachings of the One True Creator God found in the Bible."

What an idiot!

He was responding to a sermen by Chuck Hagee where Hagee said America was built for christians, not for non-christians, and if non-christians don't like living in a theocracy, we should leave the country.

These people prey on the ignorance of others in order to use their religion to control people.

Here's the truth quoted from The Thinking Atheist

• The United States was actually founded by people seeking escape from religious oppression. Many of our founding fathers were non-believers or, at the very least, did not hold to the Abrahamic god (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, etc). 

• The United States protects the freedom of religion, but its government is not based on religion, and it declares this in the First Amendment of its Constitution: "Congress shall make NO law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

• The United States was most definitely not founded on the protestant faith. In 1796, this was clearly stated in The Treaty of Tripoli, a documented submitted to the senate by John Adams, ratified by the U.S. senate and declared the law of the land shortly thereafter.

• To be a citizen of the United States, no one "must believe" in a deity. I refer you again to points #1, #2 and #3.

• "In God We Trust" wasn't added to the money by our founders, but much later - on coins shortly after the Civil War, and on paper currency in 1956.

• "Under God" wasn't in the original Pledge of Allegiance, but was added in 1954 during a time of religious fervor and amid the desire to distinguish the USA from the "godless," communist Soviet Union. In other words, it was added by politicians proclaiming moral superiority against an enemy nation.

• Nobody seeks to take the freedom to pray away from students. In this country, students (and teachers) can personally pray without persecution or fear. What they CAN'T do is instigate or promote school-endorsed prayer or use taxpayer-funded institutions of education to promote their own personal religious agenda. (And it is a personal agenda. Ask a Christian teacher at a Texas public school how he/she feels about the freedom to have Muslim prayers in the classroom, and you'll see how narrow the "Keep Prayer In Schools" argument truly is.)

• Atheism isn't ruining this great nation. Or any nation. In fact, according to the recent Global Peace Index (which attempts to measure national health based on factors like internal wars, external wars, criminal activity, political instability, human rights issues, terrorist actions, prison population and more), the three most peaceful nations on the planet are largely non-religious: New Zealand, Iceland and Japan, respectively. The highly-religious United States ranks at a dismal #88.

"Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives along side the twentieth century, the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms... Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius
wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves of darkness, ignorance, and savagery!" - Leon Trotsky