I suppose you know that your ideas, the ones that run in background that you so take for granted you barely need to think of them, were all invented by someone and that you just act on them.
John Maynard Keynes, whose theories on the usefulness of deficit spending by government so influenced Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt who used them during the Depression to fund projects such as the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps to put jobless men back to work to eliminate despair and restore hope by putting food on the family table, noted this phenomenon in the world of economics when he said what has been smoothed down to this:
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
If you say you believe in America, or democracy, or God, you are saying that you put your faith in ideas invented by someone, some human being you may be aware of, forgot, or never knew. When you say you believe in God, you are probably talking about the god invented in the Middle East some millenia ago, unless, if you descend from the Inca, you are talking about a different one invented in South America. See A History of God, The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, by Karen Armstrong (Random House, 1993).
American democracy is fairly traceable back to our Revolution of 1776 and the Constitutional Conventions that followed. Our founding fathers, the framers of the Constitution, such as Madison and Jefferson, drew their ideas on religious toleration from John Locke. Locke had taken refuge in in Holland because he got in trouble with the king over the long religious (Protestant v. Catholic) civil war that had been raging in England since Henry VIII broke with Rome, expropriated the monasteries, and established the Church of England, the Anglican or as it is known here Episcopalian Church.
Locke is believed to have become familiar with the ideas of his contemporary in the Netherlands, Baruch Spinoza, the former member of a congregation of Portuguese Jews forced
to flee Portugal even though some of them had been converted to Christianity several generations earlier in Spain. The Spanish were not going to let the Jews off that easily, however, especially when the forced converts, called New Christians or swine ("Marranos") began out-competing Old Christians for jobs in government and the Catholic Church hierarchy, now that they had removed the taint of Judaism, supposedly.
The Spanish Inquisition was established to ferret out secret Judaizers who kept the ancient rites beginning at sundown on the Friday evening Sabbath, such as by putting fresh linen on the table and refusing to work on the holy evening or on Saturday. Cervantes has Sancho Panza describe himself as a 'cristiano viejo,' an Old Christian, thus a person beyond the taint of a doubt.
The Spanish came to believe in the notion of "Once a Jew, always a Jew," as though the blood itself were tainted thus, some argue, introducing the notion of tainted blood that Hitler used to eradicate millions of Jews. Don't laugh, we practiced the same belief here in regard to belief with the so-called 'one-drop' rule of determining 'who's a black.' If one of your ancestors was black, no matter how far back, if this fact were known, you were black. Hitler drew the line on one Jewish grandparent, which was enough to get you fired from your government or university job. "Jewish physics" is how Hitler & Co. regarded the works of Albert Einstein and other Jewish scientists.
They say the Dark Ages was a long time ago. Others say that no bad idea ever really goes away.
Spinoza got himself thrown out of his congregation for applying reason to religious beliefs, proving once again that reason and religion only go so far together, and not ever to questioning the roots of the latter.
Of course we like to do that anyway, some of us, and so we will, trusting that the Lord who gave us brains will forgive us for trying to use them to show that there's a lot of make-believe in religion. Any God worth his salt will allow this, of course, even if some of his followers will not, perhaps because they feel threatened with removal of power and influence if it turns out they're selling humbug, not that they would do that.
An Op-Ed in the New York Times today marks the 350th anniversary of the excommunication of Spinoza, teacher of Locke, Jefferson, and perhaps, you.