今、アメリカ歴史、１６０７～１８６５年。というクラスをとっています。
知っている人もいると思うのですが、アメリカの｢はじまり｣はピューリタン(Puritan)と言う｢過激派｣(割る意味ではなく）のキリスト教の人たちがヨーロッパから渡ってきたことからなのです。
アメリカに来た人たちは、大半が自分たちの｢キリスト教｣を自分たちがしたいように信じるために来ました。
なので、アメリカは今でもキリスト教の国です。
国のはじまりはキリスト教と神にあり、今でも大半は神を信じています（イスラム教もユダヤ教も神を信じてますし）。
なので、ずいぶんと長い間、キリスト教以外の宗教＆無宗教にはきつい国でした。
Freedom of Religionをもとに作られた国なのですが。。。
それで、今日の朝作文を提出したのですが、 Puritanism VS Unitarianism みたいな内容でした。
リサーチのために読んでいたエッセイにこのようなものがありました：
Few men suspect, perhaps no man comprehends, the extent of the support given by religion to the virtues of ordinary life. No man, perhaps, is aware how much our moral and social sentiments are fed from this fountain; how powerless conscience would become without the belief of a God; how palsied would be human benevolence, were there not the sense of a higher benevolence to quicken and sustain it; how suddenly the whole social fabric would quake, and with what a fearful crash it would sink into hopeless ruins, were the ideas of a Supreme Being, of accountableness, and of a future life, to be utterly erased from every mind. Once let men thoroughly believe that they are the work and sport of chance; that no superior intelligence concerns itself with human affairs; that all their improvements perish for ever at death; that the weak have no guardian and the injured no avenger; that there is no recompense for sacrifices to uprightness and the public good; that an oath is unheard in heaven; that secret crimes have no witness but the perpetrator; that human existence has no purpose, and human virtue no unfailing friends; that this belief life is everything to us, and death is total, everlasting extinction; -once let men thoroughly abandon religion, and who can conceive or describe the extent of the desolation which would follow? ... Erase all thought and fear of God from a community, and selfishness and sensuality would absorb the whole man. Appetite knowing no restraint, and poverty and suffering having no solace or hope, would trample in scorn on the restraints of human laws. Virtue, duty, principle, would be mocked and spurned as unmeaning sounds. A sordid self-interest would supplant every other feeling, and man would become in fact, what the theory of atheism declares him to be, a companion for brutes.
~William Ellery Channing Unitarian Christianity
今でもこういう偏見を持っている人が本当にいることは悲しいです。