A demonstration of the type of misinformation perpetrated by Fundamentalists

Here is a piece of fantasy writing about the religious inclinations of George Washington, written and posted as part of the wallbuilders.com site:

"Was George Washington a Christian? This is a question often asked today, and it arises from the efforts of those who seek to impeach Washington's character by portraying him as irreligious. Interestingly, Washington's own contemporaries did not question his Christianity but were thoroughly convinced of his devout faith."

In contrast to this unsubstantiated fabrication we have the written testimony of Thomas Jefferson:

Dr. Rush tells me that he had it from Asa Green that when the clergy addressed Genl. Washington on his departure from the govmt, it was observed in their consultation that he had never on any occasion said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Xn religion and they thot they should so pen their address as to force him at length to declare publicly whether he was a Christian or not. They did so. However he observed the old fox was too cunning for them. He answered every article of their address particularly except that, which he passed over without notice. Rush observes he never did say a word on the subject in any of his public papers except in his valedictory letter to the Governors of the states when he resigned his commission in the army, wherein he speaks of "the benign influence of the Christian religion".

I know that Gouverneur Morris, who pretended to be in his secrets & believed himself to be so, has often told me that Genl. Washington believed no more of that system than he himself did.

Thomas Jefferson, personal journal entry, February 1, 1800.

The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford (Federal Edition) (New York and London, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904-05). 12 vols -- VOLUME I: THE ANAS (1791-1806) AND VARIOUS CONVERSATIONS WITH THE PRESIDENT

The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages ...By Thomas Jefferson, Published 1859, H. W. Derby. (Pg. 198)

In the above piece we can clearly assess that Thomas Jefferson was under the impression that George Washington was not a Christian, as was Gouverneur Morris, Dr. Benjamin Rush and possibly Asa Green, along with the Clergy serving the region near the Capital.

This is in blatant contrast to the lie we previously read, "Interestingly, Washington's own contemporaries did not question his Christianity but were thoroughly convinced of his devout faith." Obviously, many of them did question it and many were convinced of his lack of Christian faith, and the writer of the Wallbuilders piece is well aware of this fact, but more than willing to lie about it.

Thomas Jefferson served as our first Secretary of State under George Washington and had known the man for many years.

Gouverneur Morris served with Washington as a Congressional (Continental Congress) envoy to Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War and remained friends with him thereafter. Morris wrote much of the Preamble to the Constitution, served as Ambassador to France under Washington and he himself was not a Christian.

Dr. Rush was possibly a moderate Christian with Unitarian and Deist sentiment, but he was no Fundamentalist, and he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He was known to be an associate of Jefferson and Adams, two other Founding Fathers with little respect for the clergy or Fundamentalist Christian doctrine.

Asa Green was the first Chaplain to serve Congress, a position that the Founding Fathers fought over as many of them did not want clergy involved at all.

To completely dismiss the writings of Thomas Jefferson and others who knew Washington and were there in order to create this fantasy of a Christian Nation which these men fought so hard against is ridiculous.

Notes on the Founding Fathers and the Separation of Church and State

Some Christians are currently arguing that the concept of separating church and state was not in the minds of the founding fathers, and that it is a recent and pernicious doctrine that is the result of Supreme Court decisions in the 1950's and 60s.

This simply isn't true.

Separation of church and state is not something the Supreme Court invented in the 1950's and 60's. The phrase itself appears in a letter from President Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, on Jan 1, 1802.

The Baptist Association had written to President Jefferson regarding a "rumor that a particular denomination was soon to be recognized as the national denomination." Jefferson responded to calm their fears by assuring them that the federal government would not establish any single denomination of Christianity as the National denomination. He wrote: "The First Amendment has erected a wall of separation between Church and State."

Notice the phrasing in the U.S. Constitution, Article VI, paragraph 3:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Read the rest of the article at Theology.edu

Despite popular belief, founding fathers were not all Christians

Was the United States founded on Christianity? Were our most respected and revered founding fathers devout Christians? The answer, despite the protestations of the religious right, is "no."

John Adams, our second president, explained that our country was "founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery." It's also worth mentioning that the U.S. Constitution, the legal foundation of our nation, is an entirely secular document; there is absolutely no mention of God, Jesus or Christianity.

The Treaty of Tripoli, written during the administration of George Washington, clearly indicates how uncontroversial our secular status was during the period of our founding. The treaty states unequivocally: "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." That ought to be clear enough for even a raving, evolution-denying theocrat to understand. Read aloud on the floor of the Senate, the treaty was unanimously ratified, without debate or dissension, and signed into law in 1797 by President John Adams.

The Rev. Bird Wilson, an Episcopal minister and historian, lamented in an 1831 sermon, "The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels." Wilson's hyperbole aside, many of our best-known founders were highly influenced by the Enlightenment, and were Deists, not traditional Christians. In fact, several founders had contempt for central myths of Christianity, and many shared a profound concern about the tendency of organized religion to become tyrannical and malevolent.

Founding father Thomas Jefferson, our third and arguably most brilliant president, made his overall opinion of Christianity clear in a letter to John Adams: "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 classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" (the Goddess Minerva sprang forth, fully grown, from Jupiter's brain).

Jefferson considered the supernatural aspects of Christianity (trinity, virgin birth, resurrection, etc.) as equivalent to the ridiculous and primitive beliefs of ancient mythology, and was offended by the rampant absurdity within the New Testament. He was, however, impressed by the moral philosophy of Jesus. Jefferson wrote of the gospels, "I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism." This conflict drove Jefferson to the pinnacle of blasphemy; he gutted the Bible. Jefferson sought to distill the agreeable moral insights of Jesus by "abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried," separating the "diamond from the dunghill."

With razor blade and paste, Jefferson crafted a version of the Bible that wasn't abhorrent to his rational mind. Consequently, the "Jefferson Bible" contains no reference to divinity, angels, miracles or virgin birth; it ends without any mention of resurrection.

Another founding father, Thomas Paine, a radical pamphleteer who greatly influenced and aided the American Revolution with his potent writing, was a harsh and outspoken critic of Christianity.

The State News - www.statenews.com

Our Godless Constitution

(The Nation) This column from The Nation was written by Brooke Allen.

"It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best -- and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him -- is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration's current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.

Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of Alexander Hamilton's flippant responses when asked about it: According to one account, he said that the new nation was not in need of "foreign aid"; according to another, he simply said "we forgot." But as Hamilton's biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot anything important.

In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in the "only Heaven knows" sense). In the Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," and the famous line about men being "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." More blatant official references to a deity date from long after the founding period: "In God We Trust" did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and "under God" was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton, "The Battle Over the Pledge," April 5, 2004].

In 1797 our government concluded a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli, or Barbary," now known simply as the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 of the treaty contains these words:

"As the Government of the United States... is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion -- as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen -- and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification; the vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was the 339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was only the third unanimous vote in the Senate's history. There is no record of debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers, but there were no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.

The Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to erect, in Thomas Jefferson's words, "a wall of separation between church and state." John Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal measures, Puritans -- the fundamentalists of their day -- would "whip and crop, and pillory and roast." The historical epoch had afforded these men ample opportunity to observe the corruption to which established priesthoods were liable, as well as "the impious presumption of legislators and rulers," as Jefferson wrote, "civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time."

If we define a Christian as a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ, then it is safe to say that some of the key Founding Fathers were not Christians at all. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine were deists -- that is, they believed in one Supreme Being but rejected revelation and all the supernatural elements of the Christian Church; the word of the Creator, they believed, could best be read in Nature. John Adams was a professed liberal Unitarian, but he, too, in his private correspondence seems more deist than Christian.

George Washington and James Madison also leaned toward deism, although neither took much interest in religious matters. Madison believed that "religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize." He spoke of the "almost fifteen centuries" during which Christianity had been on trial: "What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution." If Washington mentioned the Almighty in a public address, as he occasionally did, he was careful to refer to Him not as "God" but with some nondenominational moniker like "Great Author" or "Almighty Being." It is interesting to note that the Father of our Country spoke no words of a religious nature on his deathbed, although fully aware that he was dying, and did not ask for a man of God to be present; his last act was to take his own pulse, the consummate gesture of a creature of the age of scientific rationalism.

Tom Paine, a polemicist rather than a politician, could afford to be perfectly honest about his religious beliefs, which were baldly deist in the tradition of Voltaire: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.... 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. My own mind is my own church." This is how he opened The Age of Reason, his virulent attack on Christianity. In it he railed against the "obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness" of the Old Testament, "a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind." The New Testament is less brutalizing but more absurd, the story of Christ's divine genesis a "fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by any thing that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients." He held the idea of the Resurrection in especial ridicule: Indeed, "the wretched contrivance with which this latter part is told, exceeds every thing that went before it." Paine was careful to contrast the tortuous twists of theology with the pure clarity of deism. "The true deist has but one Deity; and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in every thing moral, scientifical, and mechanical."

Paine's rhetoric was so fervent that he was inevitably branded an atheist. Men like Franklin, Adams and Jefferson could not risk being tarred with that brush, and in fact Jefferson got into a good deal of trouble for continuing his friendship with Paine and entertaining him at Monticello. These statesmen had to be far more circumspect than the turbulent Paine, yet if we examine their beliefs it is all but impossible to see just how theirs differed from his."

Read the entire article at CBSNews.com