Thanks for your response, and I completely agree with your concerns. But I hope that you won’t remain sad. Take heart, the Enlightenment is not over yet! While it’s true that the documents that constitute the American government—perhaps the greatest advance in the cause of humanism—were written a long time ago, and the practice (or even understanding) of it’s principles have worn a bit thin of late, there is no reason to fear.

Our founding fathers knew that the work of maturing the human species sufficiently as to cause it to reject the fear of the supernatural would be the work of generations. It is after all, a trait that may have served us well in our own defense, during the infancy of our species. It may help to realize that the Catholic Inquisition lasted over 400 years. It has only been about that long since, and here we unbelievers are sharing our ideas with the world without fear. You can’t say we haven’t seen progress.

When you worry about religion in politics, remember, Obama got elected not because the Muslim myth had been successfully debunked, but despite it.

Remember the attempts during the primaries to get the candidates to say on stage that they thought the earth was 6000 years old? They didn’t dare do it, did they? Yes, Obama failed to shut down the “Faith Based Initiatives,” but he did slip some secular organizations into its organization. There are a number of other indications you can find on the web that show that people are responding to the abuses of the Bush years.

So be of good cheer, and keep spreading the message “Thank you for not littering your mind”. (Google that phrase if you haven’t seen the associated image.)

The founding fathers tried to separate religion and state and in their times they were more or less successful. But those times are long gone. When George W. was in the office he made it clear that he is listening to God (more then to the people or common sense one might add). He claimed that he was doing God’s work (according to his interpretation) and people loved him for it and voted for him because of it. And if Obama’s election campaign is any indication of what to expect, America will continue to listen to God and act accordingly. And that’s the world we live in.

But it was not that. One cannot help but notice that you mixed a lot of your personal agenda into it. Your desire for “one nation under God” is clear, and misguided. As long as any notion of religious faith is respected as a reason for nations to do anything, there will be injustice. You cannot rightfully judge any man for the “sins” of a faith he does not hold, and to suggest that nations should take this right upon themselves is wrong. Any attempt to build a nation on such ideas is doomed to failure.

It’s all very well to have faith in divinity, but wrong to require others to do the same. If the tenets of faith are correct, is it not better to leave God the task of sorting the sinners from the righteous?

Thank you for this creative and insightful post. I have a question and a comment for you. First, in the last paragraph you refer to “America’s golden age,” and I’m wondering what time period you would designate the “golden age” for the U.S.? Second, you play a lot in the essay with dualities, especially light and darkness. I recognize that this dualism is deeply and historically present in the ideology of “Western” and other cultures, and perhaps this is your reason for emphasizing it. But continuing to use that metaphor of light vs. dark to describe good vs. evil (or some variation) unwittingly reinforces the ideology that portrays black people as bad/evil and white people as good/righteous. I mean, the metaphor has cultural resonance and so it communicates well, but I think your points would be stronger if you could somehow deconstruct the duality of light vs. dark.