Originally Posted by martinguerre

ugh...this stuff about the founders just seems so off topic to me. It's not about if they said the word God. Of course they did.

the issue is if this nation beleives in a secular compromise, where a certain amount of non-specific God language is used, but that the institutions of the nation are largly secular.

It's been called the deist minimum, a level of civil religion designed to be interfaith, surpassing denomination, and serving as a social signifier and legitimizing force for the civil order.

we had that...whatever the founders thought of it (and i think that's waht they intended fwiw...that's what we did. And it worked, more or less for a long time.

But in recent years, we have a very different kind of conversation. it's not about the "deist minimum" any more...we're moving to a point where majority rule may be the rule over certain areas of policy that were previously reserved for private belief. i think this nation is going to look very different if it continues this experiment.