The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were not and never claimed to be Old Testament prophets. They were smart Enlightenment Age men, finite, fallible, time-bound and 100% lacking divine magical powers to foretell the future and to lay down eternally valid algorithmic laws of conduct.

So, let’s stop turning our Founding Fathers into cheap copies of Moses, Isaiah and Ezekiel. This sort of nationalistic piety is specially inexcusable among “objectivist” libertarians who claim to be atheists, or at least hard-nosed secularists, but who run around like holy-rollers spewing Jefferson and Franklin.

I imagine the Founding Fathers would have seen all this patriotic fundamentalism as a symptom of decadence and a warning sign of decline. But to put it more patriotically (in a specifically American sense of the word): according to my own perceptions and judgment this appears to be the case, and to further intensify this patriotic performance, I invite your opinion on this matter — because perhaps you disagree with me, and we have something to learn from one another by duking it out. Conflicts are opportunities to deliberate and actualize our nation.

If Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Washington were alive I’d love to get them involved, too, but they’re dead. Further, having been dead and out of the loop for centuries, they are all woefully uninformed on what’s going on in our times, and entirely unable to comment on what to do in a world where a single suitcase bomb can take out half a city, where electronic surveillance makes it more and more possible to efficiently spy on billions of individuals, where a single well-placed disturbance can collapse a fragile electronically-mediated global economy, where people do business with people on the other side of the Earth everyday, often anonymously or in vast aggregate, where an identity can be stolen and used… etc., etc., etc.

It is up to those of us who are still alive to follow the example of those who came before to take responsibility for shaping our future. And also to not follow them. We should always be re-founding. While we’re at it, I think we could benefit from some Founding Mothers. (I nominate Elizabeth Warren.)

To summarize: The USA not a cult. We’re a tradition founded on reason and sustained by the exercise of individual judgment.