What made America better off as a nation?

Innovatia <dennis@innovatia.com> writes:
>We are better off because of the past history of righteousness and
>upholding of Jesus as Lord in America
.

ED: What would a "righteous Jesus Lordly America" be like by the way? How
different from Calvin's Geneva at the height of it's intolerance? Or how
different from an Early American Puritan town (the Puritans got to
American only to start anathematizing each other and splintering into
different denominations, banishing those with different views, and hanging
others). Or how different from a Wahabist Muslim state like Iran?

By the way, the Southern States in the U.S. were the more "Christian" ones
during the Civil War, they even rewrote their Constitution to invoke
"God," and preachers declared the South the "new chosen nation of God,"
and they cried the loudest for secession. Apparently God couldn't hold
that new "God-invoking" nation together.

I think America and the world are better off for a wide variety of
reasons:

One major one being that America was a pristine land with plenty of
eastern waterways to run mills. We stole patents and ideas from Britain.
We imported slaves until the cotton gin was invented and the Civil War
ended slavery.

And if not for a host of scientists who happened to be either lapsed
churchgoers, unorthodox Christians, heretics, apostates, infidels,
freethinkers, agnostics, or atheists, and their successes in the fields of
agricultural and medical science, hundreds of millions would have starved
to death or suffered innumerable diseases this past century. Those
agricultural and medical scientists “multiplied more loaves of bread” and
“prevented/healed more diseases” in the past hundred years than
Christianity has in the past two thousand.

Also, it has not always been the most orthodox of Christians who have
changed the face of charity worldwide for the better. Florence Nightingale
(the lady who helped make nursing a legitimate profession, and taught that
no one should be refused admittance to a hospital based on their religious
affiliation, and no patient should be proselytized in a hospital, but
instead they should be allowed to see whichever clergyperson they
preferred) was not an orthodox Christian, but instead a freethinking
universalist Christian. (Ms. Nightingale also wrote some steamy letters
that suggest she may have been bi-sexual or a lesbian.)

The founder of the International Red Cross (now called the International
Red Cross and Red Crescent), Andre Dunant, was gay.

Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, was another freethinking
universalist Christian.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who spend years in Africa as a doctor and helped to
publicize the plight of suffering Africans, was a liberal Christian and
author of the The Search of the Historical Jesus in which he concluded
that Jesus was a man who preached that the world was going to end soon.

And, Helen Keller (the woman who lost her sight and hearing to a bout with
Scarlet Fever when she was very young, but who learned how to communicate
via touch, and who proved an inspiration to several generations of folks
suffering from severe disabilities) was both a Swedenborgian, and a member
of the American Humanist Society.

America also benefited from the shrewd insights of the founding fathers
who were well aware of the wars of religion in Europe, notably the Thirty
Years' War, perhaps the worst war Europe ever saw, Christians killing
Christians, and they all believed in creationism, the Trinity, and Jesus'
divinity.

So I think we're better off because of the founders of the original
Constitution who placed the first amendment, "Freedom of religion," above
the first commandment "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." In
fact, the founding fathers at the Constitutional Convention voted whether
to pray before meetings and whether to mention God in the constitution,
and voted against both suggestions.

Which reminds me of something that Dr. Albert Schweitzer (the liberal
Christian theologian who focused on "reverence for life," and who worked
as a medical missionary in Africa for decades) pointed out: "For centuries
Christianity treasured the great commandment of love and mercy as
traditional truth without recognizing it as a reason for opposing slavery,
witch burning and all the other ancient and medieval forms of inhumanity.
It was only when Christianity experienced the influence of the thinking of
the Age of Enlightenment that it was stirred into entering the struggle
for humanity. The remembrance of this ought to preserve it forever from
assuming any air of superiority in comparison with thought." Also in the
same book, Schweitzer cautioned against "the crooked and fragile thinking
of Christian apologetics." [Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought:
An Autobiography (New York: The New American Library, 1963)]

>
>
Received on Fri Oct 8 21:52:57 2004