yupididit said:
In reply to 1988RedT2 :
So it's part of being a Christian to try to bring people to Christ?
Why are some so aggressive about it and why do some seem not to care or try?
Yes, Christianity is a missionary religion. The gospel of Mark in chapter 10 speaks specifically of (paraphrasing) Man didn't come to be served, but so that he may serve and give his life for the benefit of (or 'to serve as ransom for) many" Matthew ch28 says "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." The scriptures are pretty clear about making everyone believers.
Some are aggressive about it and some aren't in the same way that some salespeople give the hard pitch while others are like "here it is if you want it." I think it's just a personality thing. Back when I was a Christian, I just basically kept my ears open. If someone asked me specifically about my faith I would talk it up, but I never engaged in "selling" anyone on the faith.
My only problem is that a certain percentage of believers in the U.S. (specifically of the Christian faith) interpret that "freedom of religion" means "freedom to impose religious laws that apply to everyone but based on the Christian faith." I've never known a Jewish lawmaker try to ban pork for everyone, nor have I ever seen a Muslim legislator try to make every man grow a beard and cover their heads. The first words of the first amendment to the constitution are Congress shall make no law with regard to an establishment of religion. George Washington originally drafted his version which read "freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion."
The rest of this is long drivel from an essay I wrote many moons ago (10 years to be exact). It highlights just how staunchly our founding fathers were not Christian and tried their hardest to NOT have it be anywhere in our government. In fact, Christianity as we know it wasn't a popular religion in the United States until the mid 1800s. In Colonial America, most of the churches were of a general God-preaching community, not specifically of any Christian denomination. Catholic missions were cropping up on the Mission Trail in the south and southwest, but it wasn't until things like the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the Spanish American war in the late 1800s that those "converted" areas became part of what we now know as the United States. During the Civil War, some of the Catholic, Anglican, and Episcopalian influences began trickling in as Pastors brought last rites to dying Civil War soldiers, but prior to that Christianity in the US was nebulous at best.
Read the following... or don't. But it is heavily researched from biographies, first-hand accounts, written records, and historical documents. It might give you some insight into how much the US is NOT a Christian nation.
1) Thomas Payne (more accurately spelled Paine) was a pamphleteer (basically an early editorialist or lobbyist) who was credited at the time with being the "Father of the Revolution." His philosophical grasp on humanity (and subsequent authoring of "Common Sense" was said to have set the stage for the Founding Fathers' decision to declare independence. He was quoted in his own publications as saying, "I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of...Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all."
2) George Washington was the first President of the United States. He was a declared agnostic. Upon appointing a military Chaplain who did not believe in the existence of Hell and who was not Ordained, many of the religious enlisted men called for dismissal of the Chaplain. Washington appointed him anyway. Washington originally wanted the First Amendment to read, "freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion." From Biography.com
3) John Adams, the second president. He began studies in law, but was threatened by his father to become Clergy. From The Character of John Adams by Peter Shaw: "He wrote that he found among the lawyers 'noble and gallant achievments" but among the clergy, the 'pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces'. Late in life he wrote: 'Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!" It was during Adam's administration that the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states in Article XI that "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion," publicly declaring to the world our separation of church and state.
4) Thomas Jefferson, the main author of the Declaration of Independence and our third president. Jefferson was abhorrently against organized religion. He fully supported individual rights to express their own beliefs, but was himself quoted as saying, "The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained." Jefferson also referred to the Book of Revelations as "...the ravings of a maniac." From: Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate History by Fawn M. Brodie
5) James Madison, the fourth President, and the man who suggested the Declaration of Independence be written. Madison was quoted as saying, "During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution." Source: The Madisons by Virginia Moore.
6) Ethan Allen, a farmer, businessman, land speculator, philosopher, and writer. He was an American Revolutionary War patriot and is best known as one of the founders of the U.S. state of Vermont, and for the capture of Fort Ticonderoga early in the American Revolutionary War. From Religion of the American Enlightenment by G. Adolph Koch, Allan is quoted, "That Jesus Christ was not God is evidence from his own words... I am no Christian." When [Ethan] Allen married Fanny Buchanan, he stopped his own wedding ceremony when the judge asked him if he promised "to live with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to the laws of God." Allen refused to answer until the judge agreed that the God referred to was the God of Nature, and the laws those "written in the great book of nature."
7) Benjamin Franklin, Delegate of the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention. Franklin was labeled a Deist, although his writings suggest a more Agnostic sponsor. Franklin was quoted (one month before his death): "As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion...has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon.... and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble."
Furthermore, the words "In God We Trust" did not appear on American currency as a mandatory inclusion until 1956. The phrase was suggested as early as 1861 by Rev. M. R. Watkinson. An act which allowed the phrase to be used on currency was passed on April 22, 1864. The motto on US currency prior to that change read "E pluribus unum," which translates as "from many, one."
I have to clarify that these words are in no way an indictment of religion, it's simply to point out why I clench my fists and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when someone says "America is a Christian nation." It is not, it never was, and the founding fathers went to extreme lengths in the first words of the first amendment of the Constitution to ensure that it never would be.
Secondly, we are not "America." No other country on the North or South American continents refers to the USA as America. If you go to, for instance, Costa Rica and someone asks you where you are from, please do not answer "America." You will get looks ranging from "no E36 M3, which country in America," to "you arrogant asswipe, you're not all that and a bag of chips." In Canada, we are "the states." In most of Latin America (Mexico, Central, and Southern America) we are "Estados Unidos." But nowhere else are we called "America." Leonard Bernstein caught a TON of flack from Puerto Rican people with his West Side Story tune which included the lyrics, "I want to live in America." Puerto Ricans consider themselves American, even before PR was annexed as a US island. When Bernstein wrote those lyrics, the response from Puerto Ricans was, "I don't get it, I'm already in America."
