"I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another."
Source: Letter of Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 1799.
Source: Letter of Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 1799.
Our Constitution is about liberty, not dogma, and that's why there's no mention of the Bible.
Who is the god that the Tea baggers want running this country? The god they want in our schools? This train wreck of a deity who tortures people in Hell? This is the god that gives us our validation says glennbeck!! A leap of faith, or reason?
In an essay from Time Magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich explains the reason for the separation of Church and State. "The government that the Founding Fathers designed could levy taxes and raise an army, but it could not do these or any other things in the name of a higher power. By stripping government of supernatural authority, the Founding Fathers created a zone of freedom around each individual human conscience. They demystified government and reduced it to something within reach of human comprehension, protest and change” BE
Men have always been men and I can’t imagine many of them willingly going to church, arm in arm with the silly preachers. Therefore, Religion held an iron grip wherever they could, even requiring mandatory attendance in the early days of the colonies, but let’s face it, these were tough pioneers who weren’t big on kissing up to these pesky preachers. This country was built with an ax and not a Bible and many were loath to give their hard earned income to the machinations of clergy.
This is why fear has worked so well for 1600 years, fear was how to break the resolve of the peasant. If you saw your church father stringing up Quakers in 1650, you sure as hell wouldn’t be the one that was going to challenge him. By the 1720's, when hanging Quakers and witches became illegal, the religious right stridetly scared people with Hellfire and doom during the era called "The Great Awakening", to hold onto their fraudulent authority.
Were most people cowering wimps who had to pray as much as possible to keep demons away back in those days? Richard Hofstadter wrote a book, 'America at 1750', and here he quotes someone who wrote about those days, "Hector St. John de Crevecour, after observing sects in the middle American colonies, and the feeble religious instruction of the children, thought this a world of waning zeal,” de Crevecour writing, "religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other…persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction, are the food of what the world commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here.’” The Bibble had become irrelevant by 1776.
Were most people cowering wimps who had to pray as much as possible to keep demons away back in those days? Richard Hofstadter wrote a book, 'America at 1750', and here he quotes someone who wrote about those days, "Hector St. John de Crevecour, after observing sects in the middle American colonies, and the feeble religious instruction of the children, thought this a world of waning zeal,” de Crevecour writing, "religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other…persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction, are the food of what the world commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here.’” The Bibble had become irrelevant by 1776.
The Germans and Scots were hard working farmers who pushed the boundaries of the colonies hard westward and they were reluctant to give their hard earned profits to some lazy ass preacher who was only out to scare their children. This is how they talked, it wasn’t Little House on the Prairie. Real men love Jesus sure, (you've seen the bumper sticker)but Jesus only puts food on the table in their imagination.
Let me go get my bible and randomly pick something, it must
be time to bring out the good book again, maybe a commentary or
analysis relevant to this discussion. That's the fun of the Bible;
close your eyes and point to a random verse, kind of like
astrology, and make the quote something to live by.
Or like Tarot and the 10th card of a Celtic Cross spread, the summation of all the cards or an end result, does it please the goddess?
be time to bring out the good book again, maybe a commentary or
analysis relevant to this discussion. That's the fun of the Bible;
close your eyes and point to a random verse, kind of like
astrology, and make the quote something to live by.
Or like Tarot and the 10th card of a Celtic Cross spread, the summation of all the cards or an end result, does it please the goddess?
Well here goes, Proverbs 5:9-11, “Give your honor to others and your years to the merciless. Let strangers take the fill of your strength and your labors go to the house of an alien; and at the end of your life you groan when your flesh and body are consumed and you say ‘how I hated discipline.” What this verse says to me is that if you put your hopes in the dogma and the unknown, you will regret it.
But verse 6 continues with the solution to our woes, stating how the meek will someday overcome the evil lying Republicans and their era of greed, 1981 to 2011. Verse 6:12-15 states, "A wicked man goes about with crooked speech (Sean'half-truth' Hannity), winks with his eyes, (Sarah Palin) scrapes with his feet(Santorum), points with his finger (Nitt Romney) and with perverted heart devises evil, (Newt G),continually sowing discord: (Pat Robertson):therefore calamity will come upon him suddenly; in a moment he will be broken beyond healing.”
Glenn Beck is sadly rewriting history, brainwashing the population and people are bobbing their heads thinking he is such a history expert, but compared to Hofstadter he’s not much more than a rhetorician and …well…a rodeo clown. I intend to fight this misology, zealotry and bigotry with another way to look at our history to give people a more fair and balanced outlook. I’m here for ya baby! I research so you don’t have to.
It’s very frustrating to christians that they can’t kill those who disagree with them anymore and now there are so many books there never will be enough time to burn them all. Instead, they have embedded themselves in the political system. Reject these religious notions that the afterlife is one horror after another if you don't believe what the clergy may say.
Life is not some made up game with a puzzling rule book (bible). For instance, people are gambling with their eternal salvation when they don’t go to church. “Missing church is a mortal sin,” my mother would say. “Your soul becomes all black and you don’t get to go to heaven.” The truth is that The Great Architect created souls so s/he could share the joy of being alive...... Sharing joy and creating life, that's more like it. That's a god I can like. There is no hell and to believe this fairy tale is nonsense.
People who say this is a Christian nation are bearing false witness; most Christians therefore break the 9th commandment. Spreading lies, half-truths, and defying the spirit of the 9th commandment while they pass out NObama stickers at Bob Evans.
Then there's the fear of Islam, but the Moslems at the ground zero mosque are Dhervishes I found out recently. The Dhervishes are the most opened minded and reasonable sect of Islam and Dhervishes appreciate the freedom of religion our country offers. Christian preachers are no longer legally able to gather up a mob to carry torches and pitchforks to terrify a social adversary, such as these Moslems.
The difference is that today the pitchforks are psychological, and the scars are on the inside. There are Chritians targeting people for harassment as we speak, or typing to somebody encouraging them to keep buying as many bullets as they can, because fighting for gods honor is going to take a lot of ammunition.
There are dangerous people with too many guns in my estimation, but I optimistically predict that a general rising tide of enlightenment will drown the meanness, prejudice and hate of the mislabeled greatest generation, sinking the whole mess into the fetid mud of the bigoted and hateful authoritarian despots that they bow down to. But it will be a photo finish and I truly fear Christian violence.
You’ve been so very much lied to and so have your ancestors throughout history. The people that wrote down the history were the only ones that knew how to write and as people began t0 learn to read they were only allowed to read the Bible. Histories of all the conquered peoples were burned and destroyed. You need to fully understand that there is a point of light leading away from the darkness. The light of the Statue of Liberty. The lamp of Libertas.
Like Orwell’s 1984, Big brother has been here all along with christianity and islam. Now in 2011 it is still here. Christians and Islamos---they have their eye on you and if we allow heretics to be harassed, it’s over. There is no hell and to Satan I say “In your eye with a custard pie.” Satan is a lie and there is no hell my friends, Kiss my ass Satan. We cannot base public policy on 'the devil'and the machinations of evil. There is enough evil right here on this sphere of reality.
I’m going to quote conservative historian Richard Hofstadter from his book, ‘America in 1750‘ about the original Great Awakening to start educating you about it.
Richard Hofstadter, “With the end of religious wars and extreme persecution, the rise of mercantile cosmopolitanism and a more affluent and luxurious life, had taken some of the terror out of existence. In America, it had not been long since (slaveholder and witch executioner Cotton) Mather had seen the Protestant Vanguard as leading a direct assault on Satan’s wilderness bastion, the cooling of religion could be felt, and men, even clergymen, leaned unmistakably to Enlightenment heresies. A society that was beginning to produce deistical leaders would soon affect the solid middle class, whose members wanted the best and latest of everything, including freedom of thought.”
Freedom of thought is One of those pagan virtues that was enshrined in our constitution. Our founding fathers were conservative but didn’t allow religious bugaboo to cloud the clarity of thought. This is what right wing Christian conservatives aren’t getting, the founding fathers were masons, and the rigors of intellectual elasticity and natural curiousty allowed them to perceive that there was a reason there were so many goddesses in Greek mythology.
Here is Richard Hofstadter describing the conditions of the 13 colonies at the time of the Great Awakening, a dangerous time. “New England pastors, growing desperate, would even hope at times that a smallpox or diphtheria epidemic or perhaps an earthquake would prod the people into a revival.” Americans continue to become more logical and educated but still we have to live with this Christian fantasy of a great battle between good and evil. All the other religions are not talking about war but Dharma, Harmony, Community, and maybe we need to give them a listen. They have miracles all the time too ya know. Even Atheists are experiencing miracles, except they call them, random designated realities fluctuating somewhere between the glass half empty and the glass half full.
