“The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.”

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

The Treaty of Tripoli was ratified by the US Senate without dissenting vote and was signed by President John Adams on June 10, 1797. It states in part: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion…..”

A few years ago Rep Graves made some wild claims about the founders and religion in an OKC paper. I corrected him in print in the same paper.

Yes, the word God appears in the Declaration of Independence four times.
However it appears in the U.S. Constitution not once.

There is a reason that the word God does not appear in the Constitution.
That reason being that the Constitution, not the Declaration of Independence, is the law of the land and as such the founding fathers wished to separate religion from government and government from religion.

Every citizen of the United States of America has the right to their religious beliefs. Not a single one of them has the right to impose their religious beliefs upon another. The founding fathers made this very clear by leaving their religious beliefs or lack thereof out of the US Constitution.

Unfortunately, the bubbaworld editorial had some misinformation in it regarding the First Amendment. Please post this:

To believe that the Constitution requires a total separation of church and state is to believe a lie. Nowhere in the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or any other founding documents of this nation will one find the phrase so often used today, “separation of church and state.”

Significantly, the phrase “separation of church and state” is not even mentioned in the Congressional Record from June 7 to September 25, 1789, the period that documents the months of discussions and debates of the 90 men who framed the First Amendment. Had separation been the intent of the First Amendment, it seems logical that the phrase would have been mentioned at least once.

Unfortunately, some people have long been trying to re-write the Constitution by making the First Amendment say something it doesn’t.

In contrast, the Declaration of Independence contains four references to God: God as the Creator and the source of liberty (“all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights”), God the law giver (“law of nature and of nature’s God”), God the ultimate judge (“the Supreme Judge of the World”), and God as the king above all earthly rulers, as the Sovereign (“Divine Providence”).

I just think that all side of a story should be represented, and accuracy prevail.