America's Turn From Science, a Danger For Democracy

The whole U.S. is established on the idea of God and religion.

There's a fairly large body of evidence that despite the constant mentions of "God", the founding fathers were all secular.

The separation of Church and State is one of the founding principles. As well, religious freedom is specifically addressed by the Bill of Rights, and even prior to that when the second constutional congress thought it unnecessary to enumerate what rights the State may not violate because it was so obvious.

So no, the United States was not founded on religion specifically, though religious freedom was one cause of the breakaway from British--specifically English--rule.

All of the founding fathers, and other influential people at that time, were highly educated and equally understood and accepted the founding principles of freedom.

Religion's role in politics is largely an invention of the 20th century going into the 21st century. Prior to that, it was race, which cumulated in the civil rights movement of the 1960's. And before that was the issue of slavery, which resulted in the Civil War. Interesting digression: there never was division in the government about how to treat Native Americans. Anyway, you can say that the civil rights movement was finishing what the Civil War began.

If anything, this country was founded on extreme duality and compromises. Religion just happens to be the current subject of the duality, though even that could be argued to have grown out of the race and ultimately slavery issue. But once the religion issue is settled (if it ever does), there will be the next fad.

If you take a close look at U.S. history, the root cause of all the current spate of problems goes back to the slavery issue. Religion wasn't written into the Constitution, but slavery certainly was. And the hostility towards Obama has to do with those very same sentiments (and look at how the GOP treated Herman Cain). But since race is a taboo, the same bigoted elements switched to religion, only, said elements found religion to be a much more effective motivator, and much harder to make taboo.

The unfortunate side effect of religion being the subject of the duality is that education, specifically higher education subjects including math, science, engineering, and philosophy, gets thrown under the bus. But that's what taking extreme positions on religion does. Look at the Muslim world to see the results. Look at the dark ages for an example a little closer to home (considering that the U.S. started as an extension of Europe).

There are certainly other problems caused by other deep-rooted sentiments. E.g. current and past foreign policy is largely due to manifest destiny and the way Native Americans were treated. But the extreme duality of the country with regards to religion is not ultimately about religion itself, but about race and slavery.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/YHuldwv7lsU/americas-turn-from-science-a-danger-for-democracy

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