Iowa Caucuses '08

[Lemur]

The American system has nothing to do with Atheists in a similar way that it has nothing to do with fascists. Incompatible concepts.

In order to accommodate either, a re-write of the foundations and wording of the entire system would be necessary.

I'm not quite sure how you arrive at that conclusion. The words "God," "Almighty" and "Lord" appear only obliquely in the founding documents. In the Constitution the Lord shows up thusly:

Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven.

God, the Almighty and Jesus don't even get a mention.

In the Declaration of Independence God shows up, but only in a weird quasi-Rousseau kinda way:

... the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them ...

The fact of the matter is that our Founding Fathers were fresh from Europe's Wars of Religion, had Cromwell's puritan paradise fresh in their minds, and wanted nothing to do with creating any sort of Judeo-Christian anything.

The Founders were, by and large, Deists and Pantheists. The modern attempt to re-imagine them as a bunch of Christian fundamentalists is worrisome.

Could America have occurred without Christianity? No way. But it's much more pertinent to ask whether America could have happened without the Enlightenment.

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I guess no such discussion would be complete without dragging Jefferson into it. Here's what he had to say about the role of religion in the public life: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Rather different from what we hear today, no?

-edit of the edit-

Then there's the Treaty of Tripoli, signed in 1796, approved by then-President Adams, which has this bit of trivia:

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 tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan 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.

As the accompanying article states:

Official records show that after President John Adams sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification in May 1797, the entire treaty was read aloud on the Senate floor, including the famous words in Article 11, and copies were printed for every Senator. A committee considered the treaty and recommended ratification, and the treaty was ratified by a unanimous vote of all 23 Senators. It was the 339th time a recorded vote was taken in the Senate and only the third time a unanimous result was obtained. The treaty was reprinted in full in three newspapers, two in Philadelphia and one in New York City. There is no record of any public outcry or complaint in subsequent editions of the papers.

Make of that what you will.