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The Godless Constitution

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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.

It was the principle of individual rights — the sheer strength of it — that corrected the contradictions and the great injustices that were also once a part of the United States.

It was the principle of individual rights that successfully overthrew the barbaric institution of slavery:

It was the principle of individual rights that brought this country to civil war, and it was the principle of individual rights that won out.

Among many other things, individual rights mean 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.

Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.

Rights state explicitly the fact that no other person or institution has rightful jurisdiction over the person or property of another.

Rights are discoveries, not inventions.

One proof of this is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Whose permission?

Answering that question is where you’ll begin to glimpse the true nature of rights: if humans only act by permission, who gives permission to those whose permission the rest of us are acting under? And who gives permission to those above, and so on?

Answer: no one — because rights are inalienable in the literal sense: they are not granted, and they cannot be revoked or transferred.

The reason rights cannot survive a religious grounding is that religion, by definition, is built upon faith, whereas rights 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 absurdly unequipped to withstand the onslaught of secular attacks, as recent history has also 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: “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 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.

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What Is Government? (Political Cow: Episode 1)

From the College of Subversive Knowledge (SUBSCRIBE):



Using two cows as a metaphor for illustrating how various political systems function is a practice that’s been around since at least the 1930’s.

Here are a few of the better examples:

SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.

COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You give them to the government, and the government then gives you some milk.

FASCISM: You have two cows. You give them to the government, and the government then sells you some milk.

CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

NAZISM: You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.

And that, in essence, is what Political Cow is all about:







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Owned By Government And Loving Every Moment Of It

This is an instructive glimpse into the philosophy and basic mindset of the democrat, straight from the source:

(Hat tip Revealing Politics)

And it’s even more instructive when compared with the following:

“A government is like fire, a handy servant, but a dangerous master” (George Washington).

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master” (George Washington).

“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one” (Thomas Paine).





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Political Theory: Theory of Government

Political theory is the theory of government. It is a sub-branch of ethics, and economics, in turn, is a sub-branch of politics.

Ethics — the science of human action — precedes politics because politics is the science of human action in societies, and societies are composed only of individuals. For this reason, the individual has hierarchical primacy.

Capitalism, socialism, communism, anarchy — these are all a species of the genus ethics, as is any specific political theory.

Governments, properly defined, are the body politic that have the power to make and implement the laws of the land, and humans are the only species who possess them. But what ultimately gives rise to these political bodies, and do we really need them at all? If so, why?

Some 40,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens sapiens first emerged, we existed exclusively in bands and small tribes.

A band is the smallest of societies, consisting of five to seventy-five people, all of whom are related either by birth or marriage.

Tribes, the next size up, consist of hundreds of people, not all of whom are related, although everyone is known by everyone else.

It is for this reason that conflicts in band and tribal life are resolved without the need of government. Indeed, it’s a well-established fact among anthropologists that governments do not exist in societies of this size.

As Jared Diamond appositely explains it in his otherwise overrated Guns, Germs, and Steel:

“Those ties of relationships binding all tribal members make police, laws, and other conflict-resolving institutions of larger societies unnecessary, since any two villagers getting into an argument will share kin, who apply pressure on them to keep it from becoming violent.”

Homo sapiens lived for approximately 40,000 years in just such non-governmental societies.

Around 5,500 BC, however, chiefdoms arose.

Chiefdoms are one size up from tribes but still smaller than nations.

These societies have populations that number in the thousands or even tens of thousands, whereas nations consist of fifty thousand people or more.

It is at the stage of chiefdoms that the necessity of government begins; for when populations increase to this size, the potential for conflict and disorder increases proportionally.

And here we get a glimpse of government’s primary function: to protect against conflict.

As long as the potential for conflict exists among humans, the need for protection and adjudication exists as well.

“With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them…. Part of the solution to that problem was for one person, the chief, to exercise a monopoly on the right to use force” (Ibid, p. 273).

The legal use of force is the defining characteristic of government.

It is also the fundamental difference between governmental action and private action.

In the words of Auberon Herbert, speaking over 100 years ago:

Nobody has the moral right to seek his own advantage by force. That is the one unalterable, inviolable condition of a true society. Whether we are many, or whether we are few, we must learn only to use the weapons of reason, discussion, and persuasion…. As long as men are willing to make use of force for their own ends, or to make use of fraud, which is only force in disguise, wearing a mask, and evading our consent, just as force with violence openly disregards it – so long we must use force to restrain force. That is the one and only one right employment of force … force in the defense of the plain simple rights of property, public or private, in a world, of all the rights of self-ownership – force used defensively against force used aggressively (Auberon Herbert, The Principles of Voluntaryism, 1897).

Among individuals, the initiation of force is illegal, whether the force is directly used, as in rape, or indirectly used, as in extortion (a crucial distinction, incidentally, which Mr. Herbert notes in his fraud-is-force-in-disguise example above).

People can only infringe upon the rights of other people by means of (direct or indirect) force.

In this sense, government is an institution whose function is to protect the individual against the initiation of force.

In the words of Thomas Jefferson: “The legitimate functions of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others” (Notes on the State of Virginia).

Around the same time that Thomas Jefferson was writing those words, another articulate fellow by the name of Wilhelm von Humboldt independently came to an almost identical conclusion:

Any State interference in private affairs, where there is no reference to violence done to individual rights, should be absolutely condemned…. To provide for the security of its citizens, the state must prohibit or restrict such actions, relating directly to the agents only, as imply in their consequences the infringement of others’ rights, or encroach on their freedom of property without their consent or against their will…. Beyond this every limitation of personal freedom lies outside the limits of state action (Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, 1791).

What professor Jared Diamond incorrectly refers to as government’s “right to use force” (governments do not, strictly speaking, possess rights but only permissions) is a sentiment that has been stated more succinctly many times by Enlightenment thinkers, such as the best theoreticians among our Constitutional framers; but it was perhaps expressed most eloquently by the fiery political philosopher Isabel Paterson:

Government is solely an instrument or mechanism of appropriation, prohibition, compulsion, and extinction; in the nature of things it can be nothing else, and can operate to no other end…. Seen in this light, government is so horrific – and its actual operations in the past have been so horrible at times – that there is some excuse for a failure to realize its necessity (Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943).

If, however, government only becomes necessary when societies reach the size of chiefdoms or beyond, what precipitated this sudden population leap, when for 40,000 years — by far the majority of our short history — human growth had remained relatively static?

Why, in other words, do we not still exist in bands and tribes, without the need of government?

The answer, it turns out, is food.

“We have seen that large or dense populations arise only under conditions of food production.… All states nourish their citizens by means of food production” (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel).

When survival is made easier, populations increase. When populations increase, societies become more complex. When food production increases, mankind increases, societies become increasingly complex, and governments become necessary to maintain order. So it is with increased food production that the science of economics is born.

At root, economics is indeed the science of production and exchange.

Money, in the form of currency, is nothing more, or less, than a symbol of production — an invaluable one, to be sure, since money simplifies so drastically the process of exchange.

It also creates the possibility to store and save over long time periods and makes usury possible, which in turn creates more wealth. This is a crux because it illustrates the deep connection between politics and economics.

Thus, increased food production equals increased population equals increased production equals more people equals more societal complexity, and so on, reciprocally.

This is the process whereby societies develop the need for government.

This is why the fact of government is inescapable.

Whatever a society’s original size, smaller ones only make that initial leap to larger by producing more food.

(If they don’t make it, they are absorbed either by the actual use of force or by its mere threat, by the societies that do produce more food. For this reason, bands and tribes have become all but obsolete today, with a few Amazonian and New Guinean exceptions, most of which are also being swiftly amalgamated.)

Thereafter, in order for that society to flourish, it must now continue to produce food, but it must also efficiently manage its size increase, with all that ensuing complexity. Countless societies have foundered at this stage, as they still do today (see, for example, present day Yugoslavia, or Turkey, or Russia).

Advancements in irrigation, the domestication of animals, the introduction of fertilizers and pesticides, these things begin to make societies complex, because they increase food production. But with this added complexity come new challenges:

To thrive, these societies must sort out and solve a host of additional problems, ranging from mass uprisings, to increasing economic developments, to internecine warfare, to the threat of governmental takeovers, to crime and punishment, to many, many other things as well.

In the final analysis, then, we can say that governments are unique to humans because humans are the only conceptual species. We produce our food, we build our homes, we create our medicine, we extract our energy, and we deal with one another not as animals, by brute force, but as humans, by agreement.

Trade is the natural drive of the conceptual mind.

So that at this point, our world without government would collapse into chaos — until, that is, the strongest faction seized control, forcefully, you can be sure, and then laid down its own version of order (see present day Somalia).

Who would stop them?

Other warring factions?

In the end, however necessary government may be, please never forget this:

“In its best state, government is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one” (Thomas Paine, Common Sense).

“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force. Government is like fire, a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

Government, in short, is inherently dangerous because it holds exclusive power over the people.

The task, then, is not necessarily to do away with government altogether but rather to limit government in the extreme: to build a government which protects its citizens without, at the same time, creating oppression of any kind, including taxation to the point of plunder under that mythical guise of a “right” to redistribute your money – which is the symbol of your work.

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Godless Constitution

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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.