The Truth Hurts

Why is this nation allowing itself to fall into the very trap the founders tried to avoid by writing in the separation of Church and State? This is a secular nation and for good reason. Just because our current currency says "In God We Trust" does not mean that we are a religious nation with a religious government, or that our laws come from a "higher power". The founders clearly understood the danger of intertwining Church and State and the Evangelicals who are attempting to hijack our country would have you believe that this separation is "bigotry" or that it "persecutes" them. Bull fucking shit. It's security for the health of our nation.

So, who are you going to believe? George W. Bush? A devout Christian with a fundamentalist agenda?

"The United States is a Christian nation founded upon Christian principles and beliefs."


or George Washington?

"The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian doctrine."

Every man "ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience."



or Thomas Jefferson:

"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

"Question with boldness even the existence of a god."

"Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth."

“...an amendment was proposed by inserting the words, ‘Jesus Christ...the holy author of our religion,’ which was rejected ‘By a great majority in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindoo and the Infidel of every denomination.’”



or Thomas Paine:

"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind."



or John Adams:

"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and... foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity."

“Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.’”



or Benjamin Franklin:

"I believe in one God, Creator of the universe.... That the most acceptable service we can render Him is doing good to His other children.... As to Jesus ... I have ... some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble."

“My parents had given me betimes religious impressions, and I received from my infancy a pious education in the principles of Calvinism. But scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself.”

"When a Religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its Professors are obliged to call for help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."



or James Madison:

“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise....During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”



or Patrick Henry:

"That religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience."

If only this administration understood history as much as it claimed to understand the "word of god" we wouldn't have to be fighting this battle 228 years later.

It is war and that's why there are the Geneva Conventions. Because war is by definition a total absence of law, there needed to be guidelines set that all countries would abide by. Do they always? No. But by having those guidelines in place it becomes possible to prosecute people for war crimes and scream out in outrage when they're not followed.

I heard a story today about a German soldier who was going off to fight in WWII. His father told him that if all is lost then to surrender to Americans because in WWI Americans developed a reputation of treating their prisoners well. Whereas if they were fighting the Soviets they would fight to the death because the Soviets didn't treat POW's so well.

Now that's been destroyed and America has lost whatever shred of moral high ground it once held. And people like Senator McCain know, from his experience as a POW, that this is bad, very, very bad for our troops. If you support our soldiers, regardless of how you feel about the administration, you would be outraged by the abuses too.

Fuck Limbaugh, fuck Inhofe, fuck the Evangelical Christians who support Bush and holy war for Israel, fuck all the pathetic apologists and utopians who cling to this war while denying the practical facts on the ground.