Ryan's Obsession with a Founders' God

Jefferson the Deist

Paul Ryan criticized Democrats recently for having "purged" the word "God" from their official platform, calling the move "peculiar": "I think it's rather peculiar.  It's not in keeping with our founding documents, our founding vision, but I guess you'd have to ask the Obama administration why they purged all this language from their platform," Ryan said in an interview with Fox News.

An examination of the “founding documents” finds the following:

In the Declaration of Independence, “God” appears once and “Creator” once (“Nature's God” and “endowed by their Creator”).  In the U.S. Constitution, there is not one reference to either.  The word “Lord” appears in the phrase “Year of Our Lord”—not exactly a resounding affirmation of a Christian America.

The Founding Fathers were a product of the Enlightenment and, as such, viewed God as the Creator, yes, but a being not concerned with the mundane affairs of humankind.  In other words, He was seen as the entity that started it all but certainly not one with human characteristics.  They were deists who looked on organized religion with varying degrees of skepticism, especially those aspects that contained supernatural references.  For example, the Jefferson Bible stripped the supernatural from the New Testament and posited Jesus as a teacher (rabbi) of moral principles.

The only reason that Ryan brought up the subject was to play to his Christian Fundamentalist base.  It is time the lad grew up.