Ray Harvey

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was founded in 1919 and abolished in 1945. It came into full power under Adolph Hitler in 1933, and proceeded at that time to slaughter a spectacular number of people in a relatively short span of years.

Socialists today are of course universally agreed that Nazism was many things, but socialistic was not one of them.

Indeed, socialists are most emphatic that you understand this point — and for a very good reason: Nazism exposes socialism for what it actually is: a horrific philosophy in which humans are slaves to a ruling elite.

In fact Nazism was pure socialism.

As we’ve pointed out many times before — and can never point out enough — socialism is fundamentally defined by the abolition of private property.

Private property, or private ownership, is, in the language of the law, Not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth. The right and interest which a man has in lands and chattels to the exclusion of others. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner as he pleases, provided he makes no use of them prohibited by law. [Property] is a claim by a person or persons to exclusive utilization, consumption, or transfer of some category of goods. The right of property is the right to use and discard (Lectric Law Library).

It was by means of the Food Estate guild, the Estate of Trade and Industry guild, and the Labor Front guild that the Nazis were able to take control of every group of producer and consumer in Germany.

German socialism, so-called, assumed complete control of the means of production, while maintaining the facade of a market economy. The crucial point here, however, which one must never overlook, is the fact that prices and wages were all ‘fixed by the central authority.’ Thus, they were only ostensibly prices and wages — meaning: in actual fact, prices and wages were determined by order of the socialist German government, not the free-market. In this way, Nazism masqueraded as a system of free-enterprise, but in reality it was socialist up to its gills.

The difference between National Socialism (Nazism) and communistic socialism is purely a question of form: the Nazis, unlike the Marxists, did not advocate public or governmental ownership of the means of production. Nazism, rather, openly demanded that government oversee and regulate the nation’s economy. The issue of ‘legal’ ownership, explained Adolph Hitler, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control.

“Under Nazism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under Marxist socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold title to the property, but merely the right to use it — at least until the next purge” (George ReismanCapitalism).

Both are variations on the same theme, and that theme is collectivism.

Collectivism is the political theory which believes that “the collective” has primacy over the individual.

“The collective” refers to “the society” “the group” “the gang” “the tribe” “the proletariat” “the superior race” “the environment” “the common good” “labor” and many other things as well. The specifics do not matter because the principles are the same.

What really matters is that the individual is subordinate to the named collective.

This system of de facto socialism, carried out under the outward guise and appearance of capitalism, in which the legal forms of private ownership are maintained, has been aptly characterized by Ludwig von Mises as socialism on the German pattern. The Germans under Ludendorf and Hindenburg in World War I, and later under Hitler, were the foremost practitioners of this type of socialism. (The more familiar variant of socialism, in which government openly nationalizes the means of production and establishes socialism de jure as well as de facto, von Mises calls socialism on the Russian or Bolshevik pattern.)

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that Nazi Germany was a socialist country and that the Nazis were right to call themselves National Socialists. This is something everyone should know; yet it appears to have been overlooked or ignored by practically all writers but von Mises and Hayek.

In Nazi Germany, the government controlled all prices and wages and determined what each firm was to produce, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to turn over its products. There was no fundamental difference between the Nazis and other socialists (ibid).

“Basically, National Socialism and Marxism are the same,” said Adolph Hitler.

“Profit is the source of all evils,” said Goebbles, whose hatred of capitalism was stupendous.

“We believe that the scourge of pollution, depletion of resources and degradation of our natural environment is primarily the result of the reckless policies of profit-driven capitalism,” says a present-day environmental group called Socialist Action, who also add:

“We believe that under socialism – through a rational, democratically controlled planned economy – we will be able to make decisions that can stop and reverse the destruction of the environment.”

The following is from a present-day environmentalist named Roger Field:

“In fact, there are a number of environmentalisms in this country: wilderness preservation, animal rights and the like. But it is in the rich, class-based struggle to control the excesses of unrestrained industrialism where environmentalism and socialism can most easily be seen to meet.”

From Canada dot com:

“Saving the planet, like fighting wealth and privilege, is a moral proposition. It supersedes factual argument…. Environmentalism is neither religion nor science. It is a political mission, every bit as unquestioning as socialism in its heyday, and offering the same giddy promise to followers: The delicious prospect of being in the right, and better still, running things.”

“Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good. There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself. This is socialism — not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them then own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers. All that, you see, is unessential. Our socialism goes far deeper,” said Adolph Hitler.

“Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective,” says Harvey Ruvin, of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, in Dade County Florida.

From a book by the Sierra Club, entitled Call to Action, Handbook for Ecology, Peace and Justice: “The political and economic system that destroys the Earth is the same system that exploits workers” – i.e. capitalism.

The head of the 1992 Earth Summit asks in all seriousness: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

“The state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture. This basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call — to distinguish it from egoism and selflessness — idealism. By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.”

Said Adolph Hitler.

Epistemology is the science of knowledge. The word derives from the Greek episteme, which means knowledge.

Epistemology proper didn’t actually begin until Rene Descartes (1596-1650), but the stuff of epistemology — logic, reason, deduction, induction, et cetera — has been with us since the Ancient Greeks.

Epistemology is an extraordinarily complicated discipline that starts with three simple words:

Consciousness is awareness.

That is an epistemological axiom which cannot be refuted or denied: any theory of knowledge that purports to refute that consciousness is awareness must rely on the awareness of his consciousness to refute it.

First there exists the external world, and then there exists the awareness of it.

These two things are separate, but not equal: by definition, the external comes first, before there can be an awareness of it.

In the words of the philosopher Douglas B. Rasmussen:

“Consciousness is ultimately of or about something other than itself — it is ultimately relational.”

The argument that one cannot prove anything beyond one’s own consciousness was, contrary to what you may have heard, refuted long ago, and thoroughly so, by Thomas Aquinas, when he wrote the following:

“No one perceives that he understands except from this, that he understands something: because he must first know something before he knows that he knows.”

This insight was explicated upon by the neo-Thomist priest Celestine Bittle, in his 1945 textbook The Whole Man:

“Consciousness,” says Father Bittle, “is irreducible [because] consciousness can’t be reduced to other facts or broken into component parts.”

Father Bittle goes on to describe consciousness as “an ultimate datum of experience … at the very root of all mental activity.”

This is called by neo-Thomists “the reflexive nature of consciousness,” which means that consciousness, by its very definition — by nature of what it is — cannot be conscious of only itself since consciousness is awareness, which by definition means that it must first be aware of some thing.

In other words, “I’m only aware of my faculty of awareness” is a meaningless statement.

Why?

Quoting another erudite neo-Thomist epistemologist, Jacques Maritain:

“The first thing thought about is being independent of the mind…. We do not eat what has been eaten; we eat bread. To separate object from thing is to violate the nature of intellect” (Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, 1938).

The ramifications of all this may be summed up thus:

The existence of the external world (i.e. reality) and the awareness of it (which is to say, consciousness) form the very underpinnings of all knowledge.

Whether scientists know it or not and whether scientists like it or not, every field of every scientific endeavor, and every part of every field of every scientific endeavor, no matter how postmodernistic the curriculum, and no matter how relativistic the agenda, assumes the following:

There exists an external universe, which human consciousness does not in any way create but rather apprehends and measures.

That is the proper starting point of any philosophy of science, as well as the rest of learning.

He is not nor was he ever regarded as a saint by the Catholic Church, and the St. before his name refers to his putative homeland.

No one knows where the enigmatic Comte de Saint Germain came from, and no one knows for sure where he went. He vanished into time without any trace.

The Count of St. Germain (purported death: February 27, 1784) was, among other things, a violinist, pianist, composer, inventor, traveler, courtier, adventurer, armchair scientist and alchemist, writer, wit, self-mythologizer, and brilliant conversationalist.

He was known by some as Der Wundermann (The Wonderman).

Because of his genius and because of his mysterious provenance, he’s been embraced by occultists of virtually every stripe — most particularly those of a theosophic variety. Guy Ballard, founder of the “I AM” Activity (a theosophic school of occultism), claims that St. Germain dictated books to him.

Here are some of the other speculations about who St. Germain really was:

* The son of Francis II Rákóczi, the Prince of Transylvania.
* The illegitimate son of Maria Anna of Pfalz-Neuburg, widow of Charles II of Spain.
* The son of the King John V of Portugal.
* And, most famously, from Dr. Raymond Bernard (The Great Secret – St. Germain), Sir Francis Bacon, true heir to the Throne of England, born to Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley. The idea is that St. Germain was given to the Bacon family, who raised him and kept their secret under wraps.

None of these theories, however, hold up to close scrutiny.

In 1795, the Gothic writer Horace Walpole wrote the following letter in which he mentions a Count St. Germain:

The other day they seized an odd man, who goes by the name of Count St. Germain. He has been here these two years, and will not tell who he is, or whence, but professes [two wonderful things, the first] that he does not go by his right name; [and the second that he never had any dealings with any woman - nay, nor with any succedaneum (this was censored by Walpole's editors until 1954)] He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman. The Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain. However, nothing has been made out against him; he is released; and, what convinces me that he is not a gentleman, stays here, and talks of his being taken up for a spy (Letter to Sir Horace Mann, December 9, 1745, available on Project Gutenberg).

And Giacomo Casanova — that is, the Casanova — a brilliant and inscrutable fellow in his own right, talks tantalizingly in his memoirs of his meetings with St. Germain, that “celebrated and learned impostor.” Of their first meeting (Paris 1757), Casanova writes:

The most enjoyable dinner I had was with Madame de Gergi, who came with the famous adventurer, known by the name of the Count de St. Germain. This individual, instead of eating, talked from the beginning of the meal to the end, and I followed his example in one respect as I did not eat, but listened to him with the greatest attention. It may safely be said that as a conversationalist he was unequalled.

St. Germain gave himself out for a marvel and always aimed at exciting amazement, which he often succeeded in doing. He was scholar, linguist, musician, and chemist, good-looking, and a perfect ladies’ man. For awhile he gave them paints and cosmetics; he flattered them, not that he would make them young again (which he modestly confessed was beyond him) but that their beauty would be preserved by means of a wash which, he said, cost him a lot of money, but which he gave away freely.

He had contrived to gain the favour of Madame de Pompadour, who had spoken about him to the king, for whom he had made a laboratory, in which the monarch – a martyr to boredom – tried to find a little pleasure or distraction, at all events, by making dyes. The king had given him a suite of rooms at Chambord, and a hundred thousand francs for the construction of a laboratory, and according to St. Germain the dyes discovered by the king would have a materially beneficial influence on the quality of French fabrics.

This extraordinary man, intended by nature to be the king of impostors and quacks, would say in an easy, assured manner that he was three hundred years old, that he knew the secret of the Universal Medicine, that he possessed a mastery over nature, that he could melt diamonds, professing himself capable of forming, out of ten or twelve small diamonds, one large one of the finest water without any loss of weight. All this, he said, was a mere trifle to him. Notwithstanding his boastings, his bare-faced lies, and his manifold eccentricities, I cannot say I thought him offensive. In spite of my knowledge of what he was and in spite of my own feelings, I thought him an astonishing man as he was always astonishing me (The Project Gutenberg, The Memoires of Casanova, Complete, by Jacques Casanova de Seingalt).

So obsessed have people become with the shadowy figure of St. Germain that in more recent times, a number of people have claimed to actually be him. Yet his life and death remain a delicious mystery.

It’s high time we dispel once and for all the absurd myth that Ronald Reagan was somehow for deregulation.

Statistically speaking, the size of bureaucracy, in terms of sheer civilian manpower, increased dramatically under Reagan, so that by the time he was finished, there were well over 200,000 more government workers than in 1980, when he took office.

In fact, the size of government under Ronald Reagan grew astronomically in virtually every way. To wit:

At the end of the first quarter of 1988, government spending had increased to 28.7 percent of the national income (“national income” refers to the private money generated by the hard-working citizens of this country). To put that into better perspective, this figure is even higher than Jimmy Carter’s outrageous numbers: in his final year as president, Carter maxed out at staggering 27.9 percent. Indeed, both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter cut government spending far more efficiently than Ronald Reagan. Here are some of those numbers, which don’t lie:

Under Reagan, Social Security spending went from 179 billion in 1981 to 269 billion.

Farm programs skyrocketed: 21 billion to 51 billion.

Medicare jumped from 43 billion in 1981 to 80 billion in 1987.

During the Reagan era, federal entitlements alone rose from 197 billion to 477 billion.

Reagan promised the people that he would “abolish” the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He did no such thing. On the contrary, these budgets more than doubled under Reagan. In his own words: “We’re not attempting to cut either spending or taxing levels below that which we presently have.”

In addition to not cutting, however, Reagan also upped the spending a few notches, thus: the Gross Federal Debt went from 900 billion to 2.7 trillion. Ford and Carter simply doubled it; Reagan tripled it.

Spending habits (which are a better gauge of government size than are taxes) increased under Reagan’s leadership in almost every way. But in any case, Reagan hardly cut taxes: by the end of 1987, government revenues, a good indicator of taxes and tax cuts, were nearly identical to those of Carter.

Reagan’s Economic Recovery Act, so-called, was negated a year or two later by his Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA).

He furthermore placed a five-cent-per-gallon tax on gas.

He hiked up taxes on the trucking industry.

He succeeded in increasing the Social Security tax – to the tune of 165 billion. In terms of foreign trade, Reagan was the most mercantilistic since Herbert Hoover: import restriction doubled under Reagan, and quotas were placed on countless products.

Foreign aid went from 10 billion to 22 billion.

Reagan also supported seatbelt laws and federal airbag laws.

Reagan increased regulation of the auto industry by not opposing that monstrous thing known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ).

In the final analysis, Reagan, like all the other bureaucrats, was just another interventionist. So please don’t be fooled.

If the mark of a minimal government is a government which, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “extends only to such acts as are injurious to others” (i.e. which limits itself to protection against the initiation of force), then Reagan was about as far from that as any President ever, right or left.

That is, until now.

A reader writes:

Dear Ray Harvey: What is your opinion of Noam Chomsky? I ask because, like everyone else in academia, I think he’s about the smartest man in the world.

Best,

D

Dear D: Which Noam Chomsky are you referring to?

The one who openly supports Hezbollah?

Or do you mean the one with proven neo-Nazi ties?

Perhaps you’re referring to Avram Noam Chomsky, so-called sage of MIT, who several times propagandized for Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge?

Perhaps you’re thinking of the hypocritical Noam Chomsky, who’s sanctioned many of the world’s other most murderous regimes?

Or perhaps you mean the Noam Chomsky who repeatedly distorts and falsifies his sources?

Do you by any chance mean the Noam Chomsky who’s simply another Marxist, telling a group, in December of 1967, that in Communist China “one finds many things that are really quite admirable” — stating furthermore:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The Noam Chomsky who then goes on to explicitly endorse Chairman Mao the murderer, calling Mao’s blood-red China a “relatively livable” and “just society,” speaking, not coincidentally, five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst famine in all of human history?

Well, perhaps this particular Noam Chomsky wasn’t aware that the sort of collectivization he supports, inherent to Marxism of any brand, was the principal cause of that horrific famine, which killed over 30 million.

Maybe, maybe.

And yet, quoting Chomsky’s own words:

I don’t accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to take a moral position on this – and I think we should – we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.

I suppose that in the end, whichever Noam Chomsky you’re referring to, D, it makes little difference. A Marxist by any other name is still a Marxist — and that means this:

Chomsky is a devoted and lifelong advocate of authoritarianism and collectivism. He is for this reason an absolute enemy of individual rights and the freedom of each. And that, sir, is what I think of Noam Chomsky.

There is, among rightwingers predominantly, though not exclusively, a rather persistent misconception that the United States is at its roots a religious nation.

This is demonstrably false, and rather easy to verify, as we shall see in a moment, but first let us note that the subject is significant (and becoming more so) not because of any particular issue I or anyone else may have with religion in the capacity of religion, but rather because the true founding premise of this country cannot survive upon a religious base.

That founding premise is the principle of individual rights.

The United States, as we’ve noted before (and can never note enough), is the only country in the history of the world founded explicitly upon individual rights.

This means that if you choose to worship a Christian God, you are free to do so.

It means that if you choose to worship a Pagan God, you are free to do so.

It means that if you choose to worship no God at all, you are free to do so.

In this country, you are free to do anything you wish, provided you do not infringe upon the equal rights of any other person.

Your rights stop where another’s begin. In this way, rights are compossible — i.e. they do not and cannot conflict.

Such is the nature of individual rights.

The reason rights cannot survive a religious grounding is that religion, by definition, is built upon faith, whereas rights, as I discuss in my book, are the exact opposite: they are demonstrably rooted in the human quiddity — namely, the faculty of volition, moral agency, and human individuation.

From a philosophical perspective, a religious defense of rights is woefully unequipped to withstand the onslaught of secular attacks, as recent history has proven, and indeed it is this as much as anything else that has eroded the principle of rights down to virtual non-existence:

The most prominent defenders of rights have sought to defend rights from a religious rather than philosophic premise, and rights have suffered immeasurably from it.

So much so, in fact, that the concept of individual rights is understood by only the slimmest minority of people, and that is why the subject of rights has all but vanished from political discourse today.

Religion must be separated from rights if rights are to survive.

It is a fact that neither the word “God” nor the word “Christ” appears anywhere in the United States Constitution. When asked why, Alexander Hamilton replied wryly: “We forgot.”

The Jeffersonian “wall of separation” was actually originated by a Baptist minister named Roger Williams, who fought mightily to remove religion from government and vice-versa. Thomas Jefferson fully sanctioned this idea — all rightwing propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding — when, in 1801, he wrote the following in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Church:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God; that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship; that the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore man to all of his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

Please note the First Amendment echoes there. The First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

And Article VI, Section 3 of the Constitution: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust of the United States.”

Note also in Jefferson’s native state of Virginia, the 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which he and his friend James Madison helped draft, read, in part:

“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions of belief….”

John Adams: “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion” (Article 11, Treaty of Tripoli).

James Madison: “Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”

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” (Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments).

In a letter from 1819, James Madison wrote that “the number, the industry and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church and state.”

In an undated essay, Madison also wrote the following: “Strongly guarded is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States.”

Benjamin Franklin: “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 Revelation itself” (p. 66 of Ben Franklin’s autobiography).

Thomas Paine: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and of my own part, I disbelieve them all” (The Age of Reason, p. 89).

Thomas Paine: “All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit…. The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this think called revelation, or revealed religion…. What is it the Bible teaches us? Rapine, cruelty, and murder…. Loving of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has beside no meaning. Those who preach the doctrine of loving their enemies are in general prosecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches” (The Age of Reason).

George Washington: “I oppose the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution…. [Every American should] worship according to the dictates of his own heart.”

In 1783, George Washington rejoiced that in this country “the light of truth and reason had triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition.”

John Adams: “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’” (Letter to Charles Cushing, October 19, 1756).

In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams wrote: “I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved — the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!”

Also from John Adams: “The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity…. Thirteen governments [referring to the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without pretence [sic] of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.”

Reverend Jedidiah Champion, closing his Sunday service with a prayer in 1797, said this: “O, Lord: wilt Thou bestow upon the Vice President [Thomas Jefferson] a double portion of They grace, for Thou knowest he needs it.”

Reverend Timothy Dwight, 1798, said: “Why should the religious support the philosophers, the atheists, like Thomas Jefferson?”

Reverend William Linn opposed Thomas Jefferson in print for “his disbelief of the Holy Scriptures; or in other words his rejection of the Christian Religion …”

“And if,” continues the God-fearing Reverend, “this opposer of Christianity [were to become President it would] destroy religion, introduce immorality and loosen all the bonds of society.”

New York clergyman, Dr. John Mason publicly referred to Thomas Jefferson as “a confirmed infidel and lacks so much as a decent respect for the faith and worship of Christians.”

New England Palladium (a popular newspaper): “Should the infidel Jefferson be elected to the Presidency, the seal of death is that moment set on our holy religion, our churches will be prostrated, and some infamous prostitute, under the title of Reason, will preside in the sanctuaries now devoted to worship of the Most High.”

The Christian Federalist: “Can serious and reflecting men look about them and doubt that if Jefferson is elected president, those morals which protect our lives from the knife of the assassin — which guard the chastity of our wives and daughters from seduction and violence — defend our property from plunder and devastation, and shield our religion from contempt and profanation, will not be trampled upon and exploded?”

Thomas Jefferson was repeatedly called by clergymen “a howling atheist,” and even accused of “libel against Christ.”

Ask yourself: if he was devoutly religious, why was he slandered so? And why did he edit out all the miracles in his copy of the New Testament?

Thomas Jefferson: “An amendment was proposed by inserting the words ‘Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion’ but 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 Hindu and the Infidel of every denomination” (From Thomas Jefferson’s biography; please mark well those last words: “Infidel” meant “unbeliever,” which in turn meant “atheist”).

Thomas Jefferson: “Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions…. The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no harm for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” (Notes on the State of Virginia).

Thomas Jefferson: “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 classes with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter” (From the margins of Jefferson’s Bible).

Thomas Jefferson: “They [the clergy who denounced him] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition of their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the alter of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” (i.e. any faith forced upon us).

Thomas Jefferson: “I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Christianity [has become] the most perverted system that ever shone on man. Rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and importers led by Paul, the first great corrupter …”

Thomas Jefferson giving advice to his nephew: “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than the blindfolded fear…. If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue on the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Our rights have no dependence on religious opinions.”

Faith and force are the antithesis of reason and rights. Rights do not depend upon religion or God or gods but just the opposite: rights are an inherent part of the human faculty of rationality. Rights are how we survive here and now, on this earth, and they exist without any reference whatsoever to a religious ideology.

Until that principle is fully grasped, rights are every bit as endangered by conservatives as they are by liberals — and that’s saying a lot.