Our neighbors live only next door to us Toro, and still they can't do what they preach to us: It is hard to understand another nation, its culture so you should NOT be presumptuous in saying you know it.
And joe canadian picked a quote from a straw man who got it wrong anyway, so it was easy to knock it down.
The references to the forefathers of America are usually partial, usually out of context, usually incomplete.
There is much more nuance in what the forefathers thought than understood by the blunt reactions on this forum.
Most of the forefathers believed in religious freedom, not the absence of it.
In fact most of them felt religion gave the moral underpinnings to a society for without it, all laws would be hollow and ultimately unenforceable and ultimately would lead to endless finetuning of more laws and more laws that would never accomplish what culture only can do.
Ben Franklin paid for Jewish parade in Philly. Thomas Jefferson rewrote the New Testament sans all the Jesus miracles.
But even they would not throw the baby out with the bathwater, and so "...congress may make no law establishing a religion (the article "a' meaning a specific religion); nor prohibit the free excercise thereof."
The ultimate irony for all western nations that had a dominant christian heritage that informed many of our secular ideas, is that we use a calendar, and that calendar tells you how many days and years ago they imagined Jesus was born.
If you're going to go all the way folks, then this establishment of religion stares at you in all your "daily planners", in all of your calendars your appointments are scribbled in.
Let's get consistently stupid, and go all of the way and get rid of every public reference to "a" religion, or learn to see the subtlety, the nuance and eclectic nature of the truth on this subject.
