Yes, but in exalting virtue he is explicitly denying the right to exalt one's creed above others and requiring rendering honor to other creeds. This can only be done among followers of equal gods, but Christians do have the "arrogance" to believe we are following THE one and only God above them all, and we cannot say or do anything to imply otherwise. That always eventually puts us under persecution wherever the pagan gods are exalted.
Or when NO gods are. Like in our present day America.
Christians constantly feel persecuted here because they cannot exalt their god over any other or none.
They claim persecution when they cannot force other kids to pray or listen to their prayers.
They claim persecution when they cannot harass people of other religions or people who are gay.
Their religion mandates that they constantly harass people. That automatically pits their religion against the American Constitution.
It mandates that they be against the article in the OP.
That is unconstitutional. We have secular laws that allow for all forms of worship or none.
You can dredge up all of the maybes of personal opinion of the Founding Fathers, but the beauty of the Constitution is that the personal opinions of the individual authors didn't matter much.
The beauty of their thinking is that they realized that were fallible. They each realized that a government ruled by their own opinion would be a monarchy. They tried to institute (and quite successfully, despite the hiccups, IMO) a form of government that wasn't ruled by any one of their own opinions or religions, but one that would respect most of the people most of the time with rules in place to protect those who didn't have a great amount of power.
Faith, I would like you to read the whole letters that contain the quotes you have used in this debate. These men were more intelligent and less rigid than you have portrayed them to be.
"You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong--to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration." -
The Iron Heel by Jack London
"Hazards exist that are not marked" - some bar in Chelsea