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PRESENT DAY 72: The Founding Fathers Were Secular Humanists
Image 1: American Secular Humanists
Top: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson
Bottom: Ben Franklin, John Jay, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton
Secular humanism is a philosophy, belief system, or life stance that embraces human reason, logic, secular ethics, and philosophical naturalism, while specifically rejecting religious dogma, supernaturalism, and superstition as the basis of morality and decision-making.
This definition comes from Wikipedia. It’s the first paragraph from the entry on “secular humanism” but it comports with other definitions. The gist of secular humanism is that “decision-making” is derived from human reason and logic, not from superstitions based on faith. That means any established faith based organization from western religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam to eastern philosophies like Hinduism, Buddhism and Shinto to less respected religious sects like voodooism, t.v. evangelism, scientology and the Trump MAGA cult. The founding fathers rejected all of this superstition as a basis for government. Christian nationalists like the three “justices” recently installed by the most corrupt president ever to hold the office, namely Coney Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, like to argue that since the Founders were all Christian, they meant for the United States to be a Christian country. The fallacy of such an argument could not be more obvious, which, of course, only makes their lie all the more egregious. If the founders had wanted the United States to be a Christian country, they would simply have cut and pasted the Bible into a document titled “U.S. Constitution” and would have been done with it. Instead they spent years of research, scholarship, study and debate hammering out a constitution based on “human reason and logic.” One of them was even a scientist in the process of discovering electricity and its myriad uses. It was, after all, the age of enlightenment. The U.S. Constitution rejects the idea of framing a government on religious precepts known to have no basis in anything other than faith. Instead it sets up a system of man made laws based on the secular ideas of human equality and earthly justice. The fundamental value is the idea that everyone has a right (wherever that may come from) to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Images 2-8: American Secular Humanists George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Jay, James Madison,
That phrase, of course, comes right out of the American Declaration of Independence, one of the documents we hold most dear, though calling it “sacred” would go against the intentions of the founders. Calling it sacred would, in fact, be sacrilegious in Christian terms. It is not, after all, the word of God. It’s decidedly the word of man and a decidedly flawed man at that, namely Thomas Jefferson, the father of Sally Hemings’ six or more children. (Maybe Jefferson’s consciousness of guilt regarding the sinful nature of that relationship had something to do with his turning to secularism in order to form a government.) The founders knew exactly what they were doing and exactly how radical it was. In rejecting the idea of a king, they were rejecting millennia of non-secular, i.e., superstition-based governance. The European feudal hierarchy was based on the “great chain of being” which took a western god as its pinnacle. All social systems hung from that imaginary being with the king being the ruler appointed by this imaginary being. The founders most likely believed this imaginary being to be real but rejected the idea that systems of governance had to be based on him or had to spring from it. They decided that while their Christian god had his place in heaven, wherever they may have imagined that to be, he had no place at their earthly table, so to speak, when it came to designing a system of government that put the power in the hands of the people rather than in the hands of a single individual (dictator, king, emperor, tyrant, etc.) which in turn was somehow justified by superstitious religious belief, and superstitious they certainly they knew religious belief to be whether they admitted it or not since they were deliberately and consciously designing an alternative to that based on human reason and logic. How can you consciously and deliberately design a system of government that runs contrary to anything you believe to be divine? Either you don't really believe it to be divine or you think that the divine can be separated from the non-divine - human, that is. Whichever it was, the result was a system of government based not on religious superstition but on human reason and logic, a secular system of government, in other words, which by definition makes the founders secular humanists. If you “create” a secular system of government, which the U.S. Constitution inarguably is, then you are secular humanists. Whatever your particular religious beliefs, whatever superstitions you choose to believe, whatever injustices you choose to ignore, you are a secular humanist in act and deed and as they say, actions speak louder than beliefs. The actions of the founders say very loudly that they were secular humanists first, Christians (and whatever else) second.
Images 9-11: 18th Century American Secular Humanists