​
https://www.newsintervention.com/silverman-jacobsen-4/ 
 
I agree with you that many eighteenth-century Deists might have been atheists had they been familiar with the work of Charles Darwin. However, Darwin’s theory of natural selection only explains that we have a variety of species, including human animals, because they adapted to their environment. Evolution says nothing about how life began. Many Deists would probably still have believed in a Creator who started the process, and then let nature take its course. Later scientific discoveries would probably have turned these Deists into atheists. We now know that our universe did not begin with a Creator, but with a “Big Bang” approximately 13.8 billion years ago. We still don’t know how life began, although abiogenesis is a reasonable hypothesis. This is the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. It’s interesting that Bible believers refuse to believe this hypothesis about life arising from non-life, though they believe that the first human was made from dirt and the second human from the rib of the first. Did God run out of dirt?

​https://www.newsintervention.com/philosophical-and-historical-foundations-of-american-secularism-3-idealism-above-realism-below/
 
The religious faith of our founders is irrelevant because they erected a wall of separation between religion and the government they created in our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. However, since you ask, and since there is curiosity about the personal beliefs of our founders, here are some interesting tidbits. Many of our founders were anti-Catholic. John Adams called Catholicism “nonsense, a delusion, and dangerous in society.” Thomas Jefferson called Catholicism “a retrograde step from lightness to darkness.” (I agree with these founders and would add, as Thomas Paine did, all the other religions.) John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, drafted language for the New York Constitution proposing tolerance for everyone except Catholics who refuse to renounce papal authority. At the time of the American revolution only about 1.6 percent of the population in the colonies were Catholic. It wasn’t until the immigration waves of the nineteenth century that Catholics began arriving in America in large numbers. This led to the aptly named “Know Nothing” party, formally called the American Party, an anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant party formed in 1850. I was raised in Philadelphia, home of the 1844 “Bible riots” where both Catholics and Protestants were clubbed to death over which version of the Lord’s Prayer should be recited in public school. Protestants won the political battle, and Catholics responded by forming Catholic schools nationwide by 1860.

https://www.newsintervention.com/silverman-jacobsen-2/
​Why do some Christian fundamentalists claim that our founders wanted America to be a Christian nation? Most efforts to connect the United States with Christianity rely on quotes and opinions from a few colonial-era statesmen who professed a belief in Christianity, but their statements of beliefs say nothing about Christianity as the source of the U.S. government. Patrick Henry proposed a tax to help sustain "some form of Christian worship" for the state of Virginia, but Thomas Jefferson and other statesmen did not agree. In 1779, Jefferson introduced a bill for the Statute for Religious Freedom which became Virginia law. Jefferson designed this law to completely separate religion from government. None of Patrick Henry's Christian views ever got introduced into law in Virginia or our national government. 
 

https://www.newsintervention.com/silverman-jacobsen-1/
 
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Herb, you made American history for the secular communities. This remains the fact of the matter. In the secular world, you exist as an icon and, in fact, a beloved one, as a mild-mannered liberal Jewish Yankee mathematician atheist who found his way, ironically, into the world of politics of Republican owned South Carolina. What is the feeling in the latter half of life in reflection of these facts, these achievements? When did American secularism start? What founding philosophy set this forth? Before America existed as a bounded geography, what Native American traditions seem to reflect secular ideals?
 
Thank you so much for your kind words. I don’t think of myself as an icon, just someone who stumbled into an unusual situation. When I learned in 1990 that our South Carolina Constitution prohibited atheists from holding public office, I spoke to a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union to see how this unconstitutional provision could be changed. He told me that an atheist would need to mount a legal challenge by running for governor, and he said that the very best candidate would be me. There was no competition, so after giving it some thought, I agreed to be the Candidate Without a Prayer. Finally, in 1997 the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled unanimously in my favor, nullifying the anti-atheist clause in the South Carolina Constitution. All the credit for my Supreme Court victory belongs to my lawyers. I was just having fun giving talks and writing about my experiences. I also learned about and became engaged with the secular movement, leading me to help organize what became the Secular Coalition for America.

My new book.

​https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07X7QTL37

​https://www.canadianatheist.com/2019/08/ask-herb-15-jacobsen/
Many secularists are uncomfortable with the word “atheist” because it describes what we don't believe, rather than what we dobelieve. After all, we don't go around calling ourselves A-Easter Bunnyists or A-Tooth Fairyists. Other labels atheists use include freethinker, humanist, secular humanist, agnostic, rationalist, naturalist, skeptic, ignostic, apatheist, and many more. If you don’t know what each word means, don’t worry. Even those who identify with such labels often disagree about their meanings. Parsing words might be a characteristic of folks engaged in the secular movement. Though there are fine distinctions, which many of us like to argue about, it often comes down more to a matter of taste or comfort level than deep theological or philosophical differences.(Here's an interesting distinction between Christians and secularists: Christians have the same unifying word, but fight over theology; secularists have the same unifying theology, but fight over words. At least our wars are only verbal.)
 

​https://medium.com/question-time/ask-dr-silverman-15-scribble-me-this-mathman-f85e9d9aebca
I think I speak for many atheists who, while browsing the religion section in bookstores and noticing a portion of books set aside for religious fiction, say to themselves, “Isn’t that redundant?” Apparently, authors can usually choose whether to call their books fiction or nonfiction. But we don’t always know the author’s true identity, as with most of the books contained in the Bible. We recognize that some of the biblical writers made up stories, some composed nice poetry, some described events that likely occurred, and some wrote “just so” stories to explain what they didn’t understand. I would classify nearly the entire Bible as fiction, especially the God stories. However, since many believe the Bible to be factual, bookstores won’t risk community outrage by filing it under “religious fiction.”

https://www.canadianatheist.com/2019/08/ask-herb-14-jacobsen/
 
Secularists often disagree about what we should be called. Many secularists are uncomfortable with the word “atheist” because it describes what we don't believe, rather than what we do believe. After all, we don't go around calling ourselves A-Easter Bunnyists or A-Tooth Fairyists. Other labels atheists use include humanist, secular humanist, freethinker, skeptic, rationalist, agnostic, ignostic, apatheist, and many more. If you don’t know what each word means, don’t worry. Even those who identify with such labels often disagree about their meanings. Parsing words might be a characteristic of folks engaged in the secular movement. Though there are fine distinctions, which many of us like to argue about, it often comes down more to a matter of taste or comfort level than deep theological or philosophical differences. I pretty much view “atheist” and “humanist” as two sides of a coin. I’m the same person whether I talk about what I don’t believe as an atheist or what I do believe as a humanist. Atheists and humanists try to be “good without any gods,” though humanists might focus more on “good” and atheists more on “without gods.” The word “atheist” gets more attention and “humanist” sounds more respectable to the general public. My "conversion" from agnostic to atheist was more definitional than theological. As a mathematician, I couldn’t prove there was no god, so I took the agnostic position, “I don’t know.” But when I learned that an atheist is simply someone without a belief in any gods, I also became an atheist.

​ 
https://www.canadianatheist.com/2019/08/ask-herb-13-jacobsen/
My engagement with secular activism turned out to be more of a “blessing” than a sacrifice. I first got engaged with the movement in 1990, by accident, when I learned that our South Carolina State Constitution prohibited atheists from holding public office. So I went to the ACLU to ask how this obviously unconstitutional provision could be changed. The legal director said an atheist plaintiff would need to run for governor in the current election year, and that I should become that Candidate Without A Prayer(later the title of one of my books). I ran and of course lost, so my case was ruled not ripe because I lost. However, in 1997 I won a similar case in the state Supreme Court because the state had not allowed me to become a notary public, and so atheists are now eligible to hold public office in South Carolina.
 

​https://medium.com/question-time/ask-dr-silverman-13-by-the-godless-integers-people-mathematicizing-secular-activism-5967952df538
The concept of separating church and state is often credited to the writings of English philosopher John Locke. According to his principle of the social contract, Locke argued that the government lacks authority in the realm of individual conscience, something rational people could not cede to the government. Locke’s views were influential in the drafting of the United States Constitution. Though the separation phrase is not explicitly in the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson used the metaphor of the “wall of separation between church and state” in an 1802 letter to the Baptist Association in Danbury, Connecticut. This phrase, as the Supreme Court noted, has come to be commonly accepted as an authoritative declaration of the scope and meaning of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Having seen the religious wars in Europe, our founders viewed religion as a private matter, without government involvement. The U.S. Constitution is a godless document, with no mention of any deities. It begins with the words “We the people,” not with “Thou the deity.” Secular government guarantees freedom to follow any religion or none. It allows people to explore religious questions according to individual conscience, but does not take sides itself. Those who wish to promote Christianity, other religions, or atheism, are free to do so—but without government assistance. All beliefs are protected, which is what guarantees religious freedom.