No offense, but your ideas deserve criticism, if not only for the overtones of hate on religion & God. (I say this as a Christian athiest.)
I have not seen this phrase before. Do you mean that you are culturally Christian, but don't believe in a higher power?
I say it from a point of indoctrination. I have felt "God", just as I was sure Santa existed. I can never rid myself of the past, where I thought the Christian God was the only truth.
and... yes, it is partly meant to be tongue in cheek. :)
and? Why should they have special protection over things? Why cannot some other made up, modified over the years stories be held in such high regard?
I was critcizing the hatred. The object of the hate is unimportant. Drop the emotion and share the logic. The OP's entire rant was an unfounded strawman attack on religion.
No it wasn't. That was a side point. The main point was that the constitution isn't Gospel -- we can change it and shouldn't treat it as perfect.
"Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically"
As for religion see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJM5mipwebw
You might really not like this part: the constitution was based on documents and governments predating it by thousands of years.
Scientific (and to a lesser degree, philosophical) understanding of these drivers has changed significantly, though. Further, the breadth of actions available has increased dramatically with technology, and as such it is reasonable to revisit some of the decisions made 200+ years ago from time to time.
We have neurology, neurochemistry, neuropsychology, etc. to help us understand human motivations and behaviors.
We have evolution to explain human origins, and evolutionary psychology, while very much in its early stages, to identify the origins of behaviors.
We have physics, materialism, and philosophy to suggest the lack of dualistic free will, which completely alters the way we should view crime and punishment.
And for the unknown unknowns, we have modern understandings of statistics and risk analysis coupled with the scientific method. Bayes' theorem was developed before the founding of the USA[0], and yet still, 250 years later, is not well incorporated into law and political strategy.
So maybe what really drives people hasn't changed, but our understanding thereof really, really has. A lot.
This is the dumbest thing that I have read today.