To the editor:

I’m exhausted from hearing religious revisionists screaming “there is no separation of church and state clause” in the documents upon which our nation was founded. While true, these people ignore volumes of writings by the creators of those documents, many of them Christians, most of them deists or Unitarians, who felt government must be a secular institution to protect the rights of all its citizens.

The claim that we are “well on the path to establishing secular humanism” is quite correct, for we were placed on that path by the wise scholars whose Enlightenment influences led them to the (at the time, uniquely American) principles of the natural rights of man. They cast off the religiously derived powers of the British monarchy and strode forward on the wholly original idea that a government should be secular or, as would later be cited, “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

While the basis of British Common Law was heavily influenced by the Ten Commandments, most of the U.S. Bill of Rights was written to unhitch American laws from that ancient system. Studying the Ten Commandments in comparison with the 10 amendments, this becomes clear. I think Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson put it best: “The day this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion; except for the sect that can win political power.”

In other words, this country is now and will remain “on the path to secular humanism.” If you want a country that denies secular humanism for submission to God, move to Iran.

Robert Richardson,

Lawrence