I understand the importance of perspective in history. The founding fathers did not want a state dominated by a church as they had back in England, but that didn't mean that they wanted to create a government absent of God. As far as the enlightenment, some argue that religion and rational thought cannot coexist, that is not true. While there are religious fundamentalists who reject rational thought, the belief in God does not mean that said person is incapable of rational thinking, Sir Issac Newton for example. And as far as the American Revolution being based on the French Revolution, the French Revolution didn't start until 1789 and for that being based on rational thought, while some of the original revolutionaries based their ideas on the works of Voltaire and others, it wasn't very rational to put thousands of so-called royalists to the guilotine. Also the dark ages ended in about the year 1000 AD, so none of the founding fathers witnessed the end of it. Perspective is an important part of the study of history, but so is accuracy.

The US Census site reports 299,858,644 people in the US as of Sep 29, 2006.
http://www.census.gov/

Wikitravel is not Wikipedia, though "it was inspired by Wikipedia".
http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:About

"Public Law 94-521 prohibits us from asking a question on religious affiliation on a mandatory basis; therefore, the Bureau of the Census is not the source for information on religion."
http://www.census.gov/prod/www/religion.htm

Both the Wikitravela and Wikipedia articles on US religion quotes the ARIS report, which was "a private survey conducted in 2001 and mentioned in the Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United States".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States#Religion

"The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2001 was based on a random digit-dialed telephone survey of 50,281 American residential households in the continental U.S.A (48 states). Respondents were asked to describe themselves in terms of religion with an open-ended question. Interviewers did not prompt or offer a suggested list of potential answers. Moreover, the self-description of respondents was not based on whether established religious bodies, institutions, churches, mosques or synagogues considered them to be members. Quite the contrary, the survey sought to determine whether the respondents themselves regarded themselves as adherents of a religious community. Subjective rather than objective standards of religious identification were tapped by the surveys."
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/population/religion/

Facts are fun. ;)

"Wikipedia states that this country is 78% Christian"

Wikipedia is not a very reliable source all of the time since the articles can be written and/or edited by anyone

Wow, you just generalized hundreds of millions of people. What an intelligent comment.

Where did the founding fathers clearly state this? The first amendment states that Congress could not make laws establishing a religion, in other words the US would not follow the path of Britain with its Church of England. However, that doesn't mean that the founding fathers (at least the majority of them) weren't Christians and didn't operate on Christian principles. And the words "separation of church and state" do not appear anywhere in the constitution, they come from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to a group of Baptists who were afraid of losing thier freedom of religion. So this "wall of separation" was never a law or part of any official document, and the spirit of the statement had to do with protecting the church, rather than the state.

If you don't want evolution to be taught in schools because you believe it does not occur in nature, then I would say your crazy. People have seen evolution occur in their lifetime. Viruse DNA evolves to resist vaccines sometimes every year. It has been seen in bacteria. Bone structures of dinosaurs comared to birds. Dinosaur fossils have been found with feathers. Fish evolved into amphibians. Even birds have been seen to evolve in to different species on different islands from the same common ansestor.

I believe evolution should be taught as a theory just like the Big Bang. But it is begining to seem more like fact than a theory. There is evidence everywhere.

Just because someone believes in evolution that doesn't mean they can't be religious. I have had past Biology teachers who strongly believed evolution occured but believed in a god(s) also. It is possible to believe both but you have to know the difference between false stories, myths, and parables in your religion and what really happened or what is really being said.

Fact
Secular liberals have strived hard to paint a picture of Jesus Christ which is not faithful to the Person and message we encounter in the New Testament. The Jesus that they have attempted to present to the world is a weak, mortal man. A great moral teacher, but nothing more.

If one reads the New Testament, we encounter a Jesus who claims the authority to forgive sins; who claims equality with the Father; who claims that salvation is through Him and Him alone. True, He is a man. But He is also God. The great miracle of the Incarnation: Almighty God became a man.

Why have modernists so viciously attempted to eradicate this image of Jesus? Because if the biblical evidence is true, then it means we have a Judge whom we must one day give an account to. It means we must repent and change our lives from rebellion and disobedience to complete and total subjection to Jesus Christ.

It means we must admit the reality of moral absolutes; the existence of heaven and also hell; a judgment of works. No wonder modernists must attempt to present to us a purely mortal Jesus.

if you can accomplish your desired task, then humanity no longer has to worry about taking accountability for its sins and offenses against an All-Loving, All-Merciful God. We can all just live happily ever after in whatever sins we happen to desire without the promises of inheriting an eternal heavenly kingdom for believing in Christ and living in obedience to His will; and without the threat of suffering everlasting punishment in hell for willingly choosing to say “No” to Him.

What did the pagans say?
Pagan historians and writers who lived around the time of Christ clearly had things to say about Him.

lets Take Cornelius Tacitus for example. He was a Roman historian who lived from 55-120 AD. Some have considered him to be the greatest historian of ancient Rome. In his famous work Annals, written in 116 AD
he makes mention of the death of Jesus and to the existence of Christians in Rome.

What Tacitus reveals to us is that Jesus did in fact exist, and that He was sentenced to the Roman death penalty. He also reveals that the gospel of Jesus Christ had already spread to imperial Rome by the time of the early 2nd century. But there is more, as well. Though not conclusive, it seems probably that Tacitus even makes a possible reference to the Christian claim that Jesus had resurrected from the dead. Upon mentioning that Christ was crucified under Pilate, he writes, and I quote “But the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time, broke out again.” What superstition is he referring to? Many believe it is the claim of Jesus’ Bodily Resurrection.

Another pagan historian is Thallus, who wrote around the year 52 AD. This would be only a mere 20 some years since the death and resurrection of Christ. The histories written by Thallus have unfortunately faded with the passing of time; however, we do possess fragments of what he wrote thanks to the preservation of other writers. One of these is Julius Africanus, a Christian whose works are dated around 221 AD. Africanus quotes from Thallus’ work in his day. What is interesting to our current discussion is that Thallus makes reference to the darkness which occurred at the time of Jesus’ death. Thallus calls it a solar eclipse, noting that a darkness enveloped the land during the late afternoon hours when Jesus died on the cross, while Africanus points out that this would be an impossibility since eclipses do not happen on full moons. Either way, Jesus’ existence and death are stated as fact by Thallus. As read by Africanus, “Thallus, in the third book of his histories, explains away this darkness as an eclipse of the sun– unreasonably, as it seems to me (unreasonably, of course, because a solar eclipse could not take place at the time of the full moon, and it was at the season of the Paschal full moon that Christ died).”

Suetonius, a court official under Hadrian and annalist of the Imperial House, writing in 120 AD. In his work Life of Claudius, he notes, “As the Jews were making constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome.” This event is actually recorded by Luke in Acts 18:2, which historically took place in 49 AD. It is noteworthy to state that Suetonius was writing about events between the late 40s-60s AD. In his Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius makes mention of Christians, calling them “a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition.” Like we saw in Tacitus above, Suetonius is most likely referring to the claim of the Resurrection here, calling it a “new and mischievous superstition.”

Pliny also gives us a hint as to the worship of early Christians. He writes, “They affirmed, however, that the whole of their guilt, or their error, was, that they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verse a hymn to Christ as to a god, and bound themselves to a solemn oath, not to do any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft, adultery, never to falsify their word, not to deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up.” Notice that through all of these writings, the existence of Christ is assumed and never denied.

one of my favorites is
The letter of Mara Bar-Serapion, dated around 70 AD, which is in my opinion one of the strongest non-Christian, pagan proofs for the existence of Jesus emanating from the first century.Mara was certainly not a Christian (in fact, later in his letterwhih cwas written to his son from prison he indicates he is a polytheist), but he clearly did not question the existence of Jesus Christ.

In Conclusion
Whatever else you may want to believe about Christianity, the bottom line is that we can doubt this sure fact: Jesus Christ truly existed. There is no possible way to deal with all the facts just presented from pagan, Jewish, and Christian sources and to conclude that Jesus is just a myth. To do so is to commit historical murder. Those who hold to the erroneous idea that Jesus never existed do so not based on historical, factual evidence, but due to their own agendas, whatever those may be. Even if someone were to, for the sake of argument, say that Josephus could not be trusted due to possible Christian interpolation, what then of the Talmud, Tacitus, Lucian, Suetonius, Thallus, Mara, etc. etc. etc.? And even that assertion regarding Josephus is doubted by most serious scholars. The consensus of scholarly opinion is that Josephus’ account can be trusted as providing true historical information regarding the existence of Jesus Christ as a real human being.

So what now? With the wealth of historical information that we currently have access to, one must objectively admit at least this much: Jesus truly existed. The question now revolves around whether or not we are willing to accept His claim to deity, or if we wish to just shrug Him off as nothing more than just a mere mortal philosopher. We must make the crucial decision: either He was a liar, a lunatic, or He is Lord. Realize that we can not get to heaven on our power. We are sinners in need of a Savior. Jesus Christ hung on a cross 2,000 years ago, and the debt He paid was a debt that we’d never be able to pay ourselves.