Religion of the Founding Fathers

I'm sure most of my readers know this, but the Founding Fathers of this country weren't a buch of Christian fundamentalists. Most weren't even particularly Christian. Deism was the predominant religious philosophy among that group. Tristero on Hullabaloo reviews a book about the religious beliefs, and gives a nice definition of Deism:

What's Deism? Holmes quotes the immortal Tom Paine:

Its creed is pure and sublimely simple. It believes in God and there it rests. It honours Reason [and] it avoids all presumptuous beliefs and rejects, as the fabulous inventions of men, all books pretending to revelation.

In his comments elsewhere, Holmes explicitly states that Deism cannot be considered a Christian religion as it rejects too much that is explicitly Christian, including the divine authority of the Bible. In other words, Deism's pretty close to the bare minimum one can believe if one claims to be at all religious.

Pretty far from the creed of right-wing Christianity today. And a lot more palatable to me than the eschatological (end of the world) malarkey that gets taken seriously by an alarming number of television news commentators.