TC, you can find your old post by checking all past posts in your profile. I doubt sincerely that you settled the issue, but I'll be happy to go a round or two on it.
Lanakila: I can understand you taking offense at the thread, but there are some real questions over and above the tone. I was fairly specific in my response to the question about Christianity and the founding fathers. Your allusion to what the founding fathers meant it to be strikes me as a bit circular, and it only explains the free exercise clause. It is easy enough for you to say that America does not embrace freedom FROM religion, but that literally means that views such as my own can be banned. Just how much jail time should we heathen serve, or would it be until we convert? Don't play games now if we have no freedom from religion, then we do not have a right to reject religion. That is your position, and it legitimizes a host of provisions up to and including punishment for unbelief. And you might want to double check that bit about paying taxes to a state supported church. That is exactly what the Office of Faith-based charities will have us all doing.
On the anti-intellectualism of fundamentalism. There is a srteak of anti-intellectualism in modern fundamentalism. This is largely the result of fall-out after the Scopes-monkey trial. Before the 1920s, Fundamentalism was in fact a highly intellectual movement, but newspapers spun the trial as showing that William Jennings Bryan was an idiot and held him up as an example of what fundamentalism had to offer. Fundamentalists of course had their own spin (no less gratuitous), but in the wake of the case the intellectual credibility of fundamentalism was seriously undermined. The end result is that many who go into that movement express openly anti-intellectual sentiments, and the quality of Fundamentalist theory has itself declined over the years. This of course makes it easier for the rest of us to dismiss the intellectual substance of fundemantalism, but there are times when that just seems fair. The cutting edge quality of Fundemantalist theory WHICH WAS ONCE APPARENT is largely gone from the movement, and those who express openly anti-intellectual themes can justifyiably be called to account for the implications.
I think for example that much of creationist rhetoric is openly deceitful and downright stupid. That is why I think the original implication of the thread might be valid in some cases. If there are problems with contemporary evolution theory, I sincerely doubt that it is the creationists who will reveal them.
In any event, I regard this as one of many threads in the science forum expressing frustration at the other side. I would not have levelled the charge in the asbtract like that, and I would have been less cryptic in fielding the argument, but just the same, the charge is out there and it is perhaps worthy of debate.
On Jefferson and the Declaration. His references are to God, not the Deist version, and not the Theist version. I would suggest that this was a strategic ambiguity, albeit one that fell rather easily into place. Jefferson was a Deist, and so he would certainly have understood his references in that light, but he was a shrewd enough politician to ensure the document was appealing to Theists as well. With an upcoming war, I would suggest that debating the cosmological truths of the day was not really the point of the document. Remember two other things as well. It contains deliberate obfuscations inasmuch as it names King George as the prime culprit in the list of horribles, knowing full well that it was Parliament and its Prime Ministers that had been the source of the objectionable policies and laws. This is one more reason to take the cosmic loyalties Declaration with a grain of salt; it is full of propoganda. And I repeat; THE DECLARATION IS NOT THE PLAN OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT. The wording of the Declaration does not settle constitutional questions about the meaning of the religion clauses in the First Amendment. It is at best one small peice of evidence about how our fathers may have talked about God within the constraints of a specific historical context.
