Friday, April 11, 2014

Bible the Official book

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/04/11/louisiana-bill-would-name-bible-as-official-state-book/

Since # foxnews has decided to block my comments, I am posting comments of someone else here

The separation of church and state is an issue that those in Washington debate just
like co-workers do around the water-cooler or familes around the dinner table. How much
religion, if any, should be involved in government? When the 2nd "red scare" happened in the
late 1940s until the late 1950s, Americans were scared that communism would overtake the country.
The greatest example of this was Republican Senator, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who drove home
the paranoia that not only would communism take over the United States, but that many Americans
were communist themselves. Of course this all proved to be false and forever known as "McCarthyism."
One of the ways the government wanted to show that they were somehow above communism was their
love for god. "In god we trust" was added to all paper currency in 1957 as well as adding "Under God"
to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.

Today, many conservative politicians and Christians around the country claim that the United States
was founded as a "Christian Nation." These claims, however, are not based on factual information.
While many of the Founding Fathers were Christians, others were not. Some believed in God, but held no
religious preference and others had no belief in anything supernatural. Here are twenty quotes from the
Founding Fathers and other great Americans that show that the United States was not founded as a "Christian Nation."

1. "Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man"- Thomas

Jefferson

2. "The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads,
had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs." -Thomas Jefferson

3. "It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic
mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet the one is not three, and the three
are not one- Thomas Jefferson

4. "And 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. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these
United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive
and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors."- Thomas Jefferson

5. "There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the
world fools, and the other half hypocrites."- Thomas Jefferson

6. "Lighthouses are more useful than churches."- Ben Franklin

.

7. "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."- Ben Franklin

8. "I looked around for God's judgments, but saw no signs of them."- Ben Franklin

9. "In the affairs of the world, men are saved not by faith, but by the lack of it."- Ben Franklin

10. "This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in

it"- John Adams

11. "The New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of the Old; if so, it
must follow the fate of its foundation.'- Thomas Paine

12. "Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst."- Thomas Paine

13. "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. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief;
and for my own part, I disbelieve them all."- Thomas Paine

14. "Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange
belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis
but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities,
or of downright lies."- Thomas Paine

15. "All national 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."- Thomas Paine

16. "It is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary
doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told,
is blasphemously obscene."- Thomas Paine

17. "Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds
than those which spring from any other cause. Of all the animosities which have existed among
mankind, those which are caused by the difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the
most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be depreciated. I was in hopes that the
enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled
Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes
carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society."- George Washington

18. "The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my profession."- Abraham Lincoln

19. "It may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of
separation between the rights of religion and the Civil authority with such distinctness as to
avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points. The tendency to unsurpastion on

one side or the other, or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them, will be best
guarded agst. by an entire abstinence of the Gov't from interfence in any way whatsoever,
beyond the necessity of preserving public order, and protecting each sect agst. trespasses
on its legal rights by others."- James Madison

20. "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."- James Madison

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