On this Thanksgiving, I give thanks for Scott, who has provided a plethora of interesting stories and from whom I have learned what are the best websites for finding interesting news bits.

Last night, he pointed me to an excellent piece about what the Founding Fathers thought about religion ... and from Ms magazine, nonetheless! Whereas people like John Ashcroft assert that the Founding Fathers were very Christian people, that this was a Christian country, and that God is mentioned in the Constitution, Robin Morgan tells us that that's not really the case. A great majority of founders opposed religious language in the Constitution (and nowhere in that document is any deity mentioned; power is assumed to come from the people themselves by virtue of their being reasoning human beings). From the portrait of Benjamin Franklin as a rationalist who rejected his Calvinist upbringing to George Washington, a Deist who didn't believe in the practice of communion, this article demonstrates that the Founding Fathers were not fundamentalists.

The bottom line is that the Founding Fathers, however religious they may or may not have been, were skeptical of religion. As students of the 18th-century Englightenment, they held reason to be the best epistemology for operating a state. Religion, since it is based in faith, runs counter to reason: whereas reason requires the existence of empirical data, faith does not require it at all.

This Thanksgiving, we should be thankful that we live in a country where our laws are not based on our religious beliefs. Religion is a deeply personal affair and it is also a unifying one, but it can also be divisive. The Founding Fathers understood this and were wise enough to craft a government in which religion was not an issue; indeed, where religion was left outside the sphere of control or relevance so as to include as many people as possible in the new government.