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Your heart is in the right place Alexander, but if you live your life trying to offend no one, you are in for a long, hard, pull. This lte will offend some...God bless.

Neocon,

I'm offended by the use of the word 'Indians'. The proper term is Native Americans.

I'm just kidding.

Good letter.

Or should we try to be more TOLERANT of each other? We're quickly reaching a point where political correctness is getting rediculous. I agree we should not intentionally offend others, and in your sixth grade world, it may be possible. But it's going to happen eventually.

Great letter, Mr. Jacobson. neocon is right when he says that it is difficult to never offend anyone, though. There are some people who will always find fault, regardless of how much you try to please them. Most people, however, will cut you some slack if they know that you sincerely respect them and their mindset. Just remember that they may not always respect your mindset and try to be compassionate and understanding even in the face of intolerance.

Kudos to the lte writers this week. This has been the best batch of letters we've had to discuss in recent memory.

Also, the level of discussion here has been really up there as well.

Have a great weekend!

Alexander, I love to see that you are interested in the hot topics of the nation today, and I love that you are open religiously. Just one thing, our founding fathers weren't exactly Christians...
First, a quote from our first president, George Washington, “Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the Christians so that their [not our?] religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society.” (Letter to Sir Edward Newenham, June 22, 1792). It cannot be proved otherwise that George Washington never received communion.

Another quote from our Nation’s second president John Adams written in the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified by the Senate and signed into law by John Adams on 10 June, 1797. “[T]he Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion…” Another from his letters to F.A. Vandercamp 1809-1816 , “How has it happened that millions of myths, fables, legends and tales have been blended with Jewish and Christian fables and myths and have made them the most bloody religion that has ever existed? Filled with the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud?” This is not the sentiment of a Christian..

I’ll move on to Thomas Jefferson, writer of our country’s constitution. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he said of this religion, "There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites" (quoted by newspaper columnist William Edelen, "Politics and Religious Illiteracy," Truth Seeker, Vol. 121, No.3, p.33.) It was rumored that Jefferson was a Deist, Deism was a philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution. Its major tenets included belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems and belief in a supreme deity who created the universe to operate solely by natural laws. The supreme God of the Deists removed himself entirely from the universe after creating it. They believed that he assumed no control over it, exerted no influence on natural phenomena, and gave no supernatural revelation to man. A necessary consequence of these beliefs was a rejection of many doctrines central to the Christian religion. Deists did not believe in the virgin birth, divinity, or resurrection of Jesus, the efficacy of prayer, the miracles of the Bible, or even the divine inspiration of the Bible. Another quote from Jefferson in a letter to Thomas Whittemore on June 5, 1822, “Christian creeds and doctrines, the clergy's own fatal inventions, through all the ages has made of Christendom a slaughterhouse, and divided it into sects of inextinguishable hatred for one another.”

...And Abraham Lincoln whose own wife Mary Todd Lincoln stated, “Mr. Loncoln was not a Chritian.”

James Madison, fourth president, was not religious in any conventional sense. "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise." Also, in a letter to William Bradford April 1, 1774, "During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."

I apologize for having to say this, but our country was not founded by Christians, but you probably won't learn truths like that until college.