I like this. See below. I suspect that Churchill would have
prayed without obeisance.

I think (speculate) that prayer is natural or even automatic even if
there isn't any specific addressee.

Yes. And consider that a guided visualization to improve your
health is truly a kind of prayer.

and extremely practical people who simply took nothing as
fact/truth without corroboration.

That is impossible. All day long you have to take in data that you
cannot check, and very often you'd have to take rather big decisions
that way.

All decisions are filtered through the screen of our experience.
Children of the Enlightenment tended to not take things on faith.
Their belief systems were built on questioning. The answers they
received for these questions, built their experience and thereby
their filter for decisions.

True, you sometimes make decisions quickly but they are still
filtered through your intellect.

Someone once wrote that intuition is nothing more than speeded up
logic. Your experience gives you the facility to intuit something
without the need to give it much thought.

This is what I am trying to say about decision making and your
experience.

The principle of not taking anything without corroboration might even
be contradictory to the basic democratic principle of the presumption
of innocence

Presumption of innocence is not a basic democratic principle.

It is an English Common Law and thereby American Common Law
principle. Code Napoleon

does not recognize this. Code Napoleon
is the basis for law in the American state of Louisiana and
operates differently from the rest of the 49.

Some "New Age" stuff is
quite frightening as you say, but but some of what can be
described as such seems to be really good and effective and
practical.

As for early 19th century writers (and up through our civil
war), I think the main focus was removal of superstition and
dependence on religion, which, even with our words in the
Bill of Rights, still were contained in many state laws.

well, I think even big agnostic lawyers would still debate whether law
and religion can be completely separated from each other

Law is a civil contract. While it is true many seemingly religious
principles are involved, what is really happening is that laws
reflect the views of the people who pass them. If these people
are religious, the laws will have a religious bent. If not, they
won't.

This is reflected in the US by the difference between laws in
the South and other "Bible Belt" areas which clearly show
religious thought expressed and the northeast which is quite
liberal. In the northeast, even if you are religious and
"God fearing" you tend to keep it to yourself. This is a big
difference between politicians from the north and from the
south. In the south you are expected to make a big deal of
your religious convictions. In the north you are not.

China has laws. Chinese people are not particularly religious. Are
the laws written from a religious point of view? I don't think so.

I would have thought that religion was not first a superstition, but a
path towards legislation

My best guess is that religion, as we know it today, is a
product of class structure brought about by wealth and its
opposite poverty. Originally invented to keep the poor happy
and working for the rich with the promise of something better
in the future.

Shamanism and creation/origin myths are not religion as we
know it. These are practical pursuits to maintain the health,
cohesiveness and sometimes homogeneousness of a group.

There were, of course, writers in the romantic vein, who did
indeed "worship nature". Longfellow comes to mind with
"Hiawatha" but most of those writers were English, like
Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, etc.

If it were not for our writers who had a Unitarian viewpoint

(I will look "unitarian" up this week end.)

I've started your search, see below.

and non-sectarian philosophy, the US would not be as free
religiously as we are and probably Europe wouldn't be either.
New Age stuff doesn't scare me half as much as the Religious
Right (or Wreligious Wrong as I've seen it written).

The "Religious Right" is something that cannot be understood from here.
I think it simply does not exist here. There is noisy atheism and lots
of resigned low profile Catholicism.

Actually in Europe you are beginning to see religious
fundamentalism. Only it's in the Moslem neighborhoods.

There is not really much difference between fundies of
Christian, Moslem or Jewish stripe. They are mostly
promoted by by angry little men. They are mostly accepted
by people who in some way feel disenfranchised. These
disadvantaged people can then be persuaded to act and
think in ways that are actually at odds with their own
self-interest.

Religion used to be public and ritualistic here, not a matter of
thought.

Yes, I've been to Spain, where many of the people act as
if there is no religion, but there is still religious
processions through the streets at frequent intervals.

There is a strain of highly conservative Christianity in America.
A lot of it is evolved from Calvin (Calvin? Geneva?) through the
Congregational (Puritan) church or the Presbyterian (Lowland Scots)
church. There is also a strain of very liberal religious though
from two sources.

The first is a grass-roots movement which came to be known as
Universalism, in which we are all saved by Christ's life and death
and therefore the purpose of religion is to celebrate and give
thanks for this gift. This was not a particularly organized bunch
and its base was mainly New England and the northern part of the
country. These people were certainly Christians and probably for
the most part trinitarians.

There were certainly traveling religion salesmen of the conservative
mold in early America, but many of them were these Universalists
who preached quite the opposite of the hellfire and brimstone you'd
expect from a traveling preacher. They brought (IMO) truly "good
news" for believers.

After a visit from one of these "good news" bearers, you will find
congregations voting to become Universalist and rejecting their
Calvinist beginnings. You will also find parts of some congregations
becoming Universalists and moving down the street and building
a new church. You will see churches that look like Congregational
churches (yes there was a New England style for churches) but have
signs out front proclaiming them as Universalist.

Look up Universalism, John Murray, Hosea Ballou. These will lead you
to other references.

The second is an outgrowth of Deist thought and the Enlightenment.
This was academic and cerebral. Harvard University was the center
of the Unitarian Movement in America. Emerson, Thoreau, and a
host of others were associated.

You will be amazed to find out how many of our (American) founding
fathers and early 19th century leaders were associated with the
Unitarian movement and/or had Unitarian sentiments.

Both of these movements existed side by side for almost 200 years
with the Unitarians holding forth in the cities and the Universalists
being mainly country folk.

When the United Church of Christ was formed of mainly Congregational
churches and adopted a fairly universalist theology, the
Universalist church, which was always small, saw the handwriting

and
somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, joined with the
Unitarians to become the Unitarian Universalist Association.

I mentioned Harvard? The home of the UUA is Beacon Hill in Boston.
This sticks in the craw of may formerly Universalist churches, but
it is beginning to be forgiven. I think the UUA has recently or will
shortly, have an annual meeting in Boston. This was always avoided
to alleviate any tension between the senior (Unitarian) group from a
slightly junior partner.

Our polity

is Congregational in that we are all independent and call
and settle our own ministers, maintain our own churches and finances,
pay dues to the association for their support and assistance as needed,
and pretty much keep to ourselves. We don't proselytize because we
don't believe that our way is any better than anyone else's way. Our
"mission statement" if you will, begins with an affirmation of the
worth and dignity of all human beings. If it weren't for the church
atmosphere, we'd certainly be labeled secular humanists.

Some of us are truly Christian in the old Universalist mode. Some are
Jews who have married non-jews. Some are recovering Catholics (me).
Some are outright Pagans who have rejected anything Judeo-Christian.
And we get along just fine.

All groups have their "origin myths" and so do we. Unitarians like to
trace their roots to Arius, through John Sigismund (a king of Hungary)
to Michael Servetus (who was executed in Geneva by John Calvin for his
beliefs) up through Emerson and the American Unitarians.

Universalists like to think Origen was one of them. The first supposed
Universalist sermon in America was preached by John Murray. He was
supposedly invited to do so by a farmer in New Jersey who had similar
leanings. Hosea Ballou was an early writer as was his son Aidan Ballou.

There are two theological colleges that prepare UU's for the ministry.
They are Harvard and Meadville Lombard in Chicago. You can always tell
the difference. The Harvard guys (and gals) are always in the old
Unitarian, too much in the head mold and the Meadville folks are much
more like the old Universalists (happy, lots of music, etc.). The
latter is much like our church, except that our minister can deliver
a sermon that would do the Harvard guys proud.