The Constitution and Separation of Church and State

If you could boil the constitution down to just one idea. The main principle, The point. It would have to be that the power of the government to govern comes from the people. We the people.

The rest is who gets what power and how many of this and that and then the bill of rights. We created a government that gets its power from the governed.  Not an anointed King but and elected representative of the people.

So it angers me when people say there isn't or shouldn't be a separation of church and state.

The Founding Fathers saw that there had to be.

There are Governments out there that believe that their ruler was chosen by God to rule, that they have divine birthright to rule. but thats not who we are.

To say that there should not be a separation of church and state is to unravel the brilliance, the strength of the constitution.  And it strikes me a power grab from an already dominate power.

I hear all the time that "this is a christian nation" usually followed by "if you don't like it leave"

But is it?  Most of our Founding Fathers were deists. They believed the there was a God but that he did not/could not intervene in the ongoings of the universe.

When Thomas Jefferson was running for president the churches at the time called him an atheist. Its says something that they now wish to claim him as one of their own.

John Q. Adams swore his oath of presidency on a Law book and not the Bible.

Even Abraham lincoln (I know he is not a founding father) railed against christianity.

This however did not stop them from recognizing that most of the country was religious and christian so you do find religious undertones in their speeches and their public writings, they knew their audience.

The Treaty of Tripoli spells it out pretty plainly.  (emphasis added)

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

This treaty was submitted to congress and received unanimous approval before it was signed into law by John Adams. on June 10th 1797.

But even If none of that stuff was true. If all the founding Fathers we christian, that just makes it more impressive that they saw the need to separate the church fro the government.

The important fact of the matter is that the President and the Congress, the Judges and the representatives. All the Governing bodies that make up our government get their power from the people and not from God. 

The minute someone starts to believe that God has given them the power to rule is the minute when they believe that the people no longer have the power to remove them.