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Hand wavey?

The US was founded by entire colonies of people coming overseas to worship the Christian God freely. Many key founders were deeply religious; believing all forms of government are doomed without the help of the Christian God. The Christian God was a huge factor in government and repeatedly credited as the guiding force and inspiration for the entire endeavor.

Christian prayer and Bible reading was a public school item until the mid 1960s. Church and state separation was entirely redefined around then as well; it didn't mean back then what people think it means now. The ten commandments was in courthouses. There are people still alive today that were led in prayer to the Christian God every single day of public school (and required to read the Bible); they're everywhere.

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All with different interpretations of the Christian god (or not Christian, as in the Jewish diaspora). The Spanish who settled colonies in Florida and California, the French in Louisiana, the English, Polish, and German settlers in Jamestown would all struggle to agree on a common set of definitions or rituals except there was a bible in there somewhere.

I was led in prayer at public schools, and private - doesn’t mean I or most of the other students were religious, though some were. And that is a very recent thing. Most regions didn’t have public school bible reading then.

You seem to be making a statement that the US has some strong theocratic religious foundation, when it’s more of a ‘we’ve got too many competing groups that can’t get along with each other - we’ll just kinda stay out of it where we can’. Hence the hand waves part. Which is good, we’ve never had the religious wars where a specific group had to fight against another, which is how you end up with the state religions like in Europe (anglicans vs Catholics vs Protestants for instance).

The groups you’re pointing to were often refugees from those fights and came in as waves during the various periods of repression as tides turned, or different regions fell to famine.

How do you see it that way?

What if it were mathematicians from all over armed with the same Calculus book hand waving that everyone should ignore the idiosyncrasies of their alma mater or their professor's flavor of finding derivatives? What if the founding documents they wrote all spoke highly of Calculus; Calculus books in every classroom. To me it sounds like people weren't hand waving away God, but setting aside their idiosyncrasies to worship the same Christ.

You’re having a rather odd take on these words! I never said they were hand waving away God. I said they were hand waving all the important details of what religion they were referring to, and about the only thing anyone seemed to agree on is a God somewhere (Usually) and we won’t get into most of the details. Many prominent founding fathers were atheist or agnostic, but that wasn’t the majority.

The American approach is a ‘if we don’t look too hard, it’ll be ok’, since otherwise you end up with the literal large scale religious wars that pushed many of these groups here in the first place from Europe. Or society wide pogroms like Anglicans/Protestants/Catholics have done to each other constantly elsewhere.

And if you think Catholics/Protestants/Mormons/Baptists, etc are hanging out in the same church at any scale, we must hang out with very, very different crowds. They are not all deriving calculus from the same book - or all even agreeing that calculus exists.

A closer analogy would be a bunch of high school English teachers arguing that math exists, and one knows algebra one, another knows calculus, another knows trig, and another is doing arithmetic in base 16 while everyone else is using base 10. And they all think the other is wrong, but not completely so.

But there is no actual math teacher in sight.

> The US was founded by entire colonies of people coming overseas to worship the Christian God freely

That's the source of some of the colonies. There were many other reasons that people came.

Some were looking for economic benefit. Some were prisoners that their home countries were looking to get rid of.

> Christian prayer and Bible reading was a public school item until the mid 1960s

Until the 1960s, but starting in the 1940s or 1950s. Much of that public religiosity was a response to the Cold War, opposing the anti-theistic position of the USSR.

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