Typical ‘Giant Leaps’ for a Person of the Religious Right to Make
trying and failing to use logic to make that case
I was listening to a woman talk on the radio about the politics of this nation (the U.S.). She was making a case, as one often hears on such stations, that the U.S. was founded as (and to always be) a ‘Christian nation’.
She was not completely unreasonable. She made some valid points.
One point she made was in reference to those most famous words in our Declaration of Independence. Equality and “Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” are attributed there to “our Creator.”
Those words were of course written before Darwin formulated his famous theory — one with which at least some of the Founders would surely have agreed, in particular Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of that document. To a man, they were champions of the ‘scientific method’ that at that time was just starting to become widely accepted as a way of looking at life in all of its complexities.
It cannot be denied, though, that the presence of “our Creator” does give those words some religious flavoring. The woman talking on the radio made the giant leap to take the presence of that broadly religious element in that document to refer to the ‘Judeo-Christian’ God. It does not — much less a narrowly ‘Christian’ worldview.
Pretty much every distinct human culture that has ever existed has had a ‘Creator’ narrative included in it, a bit of anthropological knowledge already widely known at that time to intellectually interested people like those Founders. There is no way that including that word at that place in that philosophical argument is a reference to Christianity.
At the very end of her talk she was making the perfectly valid argument that moral sentiments inform all people’s participation in the political process and that Christian moral values are no less legitimate than any other. Immediately, however, she made the completely unsupported giant leap that “The Founders” of this nation “obviously” intended for it to be ruled by people espousing “Christian” moral values.
That conclusion is simply not supported by the evidence that woman was presenting. As a logical inference it has no starting point in reality. Yet, what she was saying is typical of the giant leaps over logic and reality that people on the religious right make while being completely convinced that they are making an infallibly logical argument.