WHA' HOPPEN?

Sean Faircloth points out in his book, Attack of the Theocrats, that only 10 to 15 percent of Americans were church members in 1800. Those were the days of the great Enlightenment that had swept the world and the days during which thousands of colonists, or their immediate forefathers, had fled the religious oppression so rampant in Europe. Religion was suspect and people with sharp memories of the horrors their immediate ancestors had escaped weren't inclined to listen to the siren song of religious hucksters.

The scepticism declined slowly, but decline it did under the constant onslaught of circuit preachers and missionary zeal of every slant and type. The propaganda has been so insidiously effective that today, the average American is absolutely certain that our "founding fathers" were devout religious individuals who set out to establish a "Christian America."

Hogwash!

That's a total lie!

Thomas Jefferson stated: "Religions are all alike -- founded upon fables and mythologies." Again, "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." Yet again, "Christianity is 'our particular superstition.'" I particularly like his statement that the Christian clergy dreads "the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight." That's certainly representative of the dominant attitude throughout the "Bible Belt.

There was no "Bible Belt" in 1800! This country began as a nation of free thinking sceptics!

James Madison was just as pointed and incendiary in his statements. He pointedly stated, "In no instance have...the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people." We see ample demonstration of that in modern efforts to stifle and outlaw stem cell research, birth control, LGBT rights and freedoms and to impose religious indoctrination in our public schools.

Madison saw clearly that "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise." Also, that "Religion...has been oftener a motive to repression than a restraint from it."

Nothing has changed since he penned, "During almost 15 centuries has the legal extablishment of Christianity been on trial. What has 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."

Among our founders, the drive to separate the new union from the corrosive influence of religions was passionate. Now, we have descended to the point that W. A. Criswell who was selected by Ronald Reagan to deliver the benediction for the 1984 Republican National Convention stated that the separation of church and state "is the figment of some infidel's imagination."

Jefferson and Madison, not to mention Thomas Paine, Adams, Abraham Lincoln, and a host of other esteemed Americans, are now haughtily relegated to the category of "infidels!" And, nothing has improved since 1984.

It's gotten worse!

I could go on with many other foundational quotes from other great Americans, but this is getting to be a long blog. You can get them all by purchasing and reading Sean's eye-opening book and find many more with a simple online search of what our esteemed national leaders of the past have stated. Even as late as Barry Goldwater, the onslaught of religion was resisted and repudiated.

The point is that descendants of those esteemed men of the past have been hornswoggled into believing in the complete antithesis of what were the driving precepts and beliefs they held. For the most part, they completely rejected the haughty certitude of religious hucksters and prognosticators.

Their descendants feel alienated from society if they don't kowtow to some religious ism or other. They've even come to believe that they can't be a loyal, patriotic citizen unless they bow and scrape to some manufactured and totally ludicrous deity.

It's time for Americans to reawaken to the peril they face!

STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

The following article was first published on http://hwarmstrong.com/wordpress/ about a month ago.  Since it ties in perfectly with the subjects I present on this site, I am reproducing it here.

I am appalled!

I am flabbergasted!

A new poll is out, showing that close to half the population (40%) of the supposedly most advanced nation on earth believes in creationism! Not just general creationism with “God” as first cause to set evolution in motion, but totally stupid “God did it in the last few thousand years” creationism.

The question as to how dumb the American people can be was answered by the last (2010) election and this poll!

In the recent election, the American electorate gave overwhelming support to some of the most ignorant and totally dumb people like at no other time in our nation’s history. I just can’t believe that a total “dumb ass” incompetent like Sarah Palin can be a serious contender as a presidential nominee in less than two years.

It has been stated by several historians that nations get the leaders they deserve. If we’re really that dumb, then we have what we deserve in power right now and our position as the top nation of the world will soon be over.

I mean it! I totally believe that the USA is most likely doomed! Just like ancient Rome!

We have the same situation of treasure draining wars and occupations coupled with a predominantly super rich ruling class that basically buys elections. Serving the needs of the nation comes in a far second to promoting themselves and the interests of their millionaire and billionaire cronies.

Our “leaders” don’t have the understanding, moral principles or the gumption to take the steps necessary to turn things around. True education and true science continue to get “short shrift” and are often ridiculed by little minds with set-in-concrete pro-superstition attitudes in high places.

We have become an anti-science, pro-mythology bunch of under-educated, rap-spouting, superstition-championing idiots! We’re careening down a precipitous blind curve oblivious to what’s happening with our eyes glued to a “plastic Jesus” on the dashboard!

An additional 38% of Americans think that evolution was guided by their God. That is a little less insane but still shows an appalling lack of reasoning power or education in some basic facts of history, geology, paleontology, etc.

It also shows a total lack of any study of comparative religion. All these people know is what they have been fed and carelessly accepted without ever delving into facts like our founding fathers did.

I tremble for the fate of my descendants when I see the state of education in this country. I realize, as did James Madison when he wrote, “The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty,” that we are in dire straits when school boards dictate what can be in textbooks based on a religious bias and ban the dissemination of the knowledge of great men like Thomas Jefferson.

All people have to do is read Thomas Paine’s Age of reason or go online to look up the quotes of men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, regarding religion to see that this nation wasn’t founded by men who could be present-day adherents to the “Tea Party” or the ultra-conservative Republican right. Here are two sites to check out: http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/washington.htm and http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/jefferson.htm.

Benjamin Franklin is well known for his pithy sayings in Poor Richard’s Almanac. They have become so ubiquitous that many people believe a lot of them come from the Bible. Being a born diplomat, he was much less vocal about his feelings on religion. He was a staunch Deist. Read his very pointed comments that have been preserved at this website: http://articles.exchristian.net/2002/03/ben-franklin-quotes.php.f

Anyone can easily google any number of our founding fathers to see what they really felt on this and other vitally important topics.

Paine’s book is available right here on The Painful Truth website.

People have been lulled to sleep and told the same old nonsense over and over to the point that they just accept it. Hitler realized that if you tell people lies often enough and loudly enough, they will start to believe. It’s a feel-good thing. They can’t be bothered to question and they certainly don’t want to risk going to “hell” by asking some simple questions or reading something “satanic” like an uncensored textbook that teaches that horrible “evulooshin.” Rhymes with “Rooshin,” ya know.

All they think they need or want is their plastic Jesus. He’s gonna come and save them for sure. Viva la Rapture! Funny. I’ve been backward and forward through that Bible, and I have yet to read anything in there that uses that word in any such context.

Weren’t there a few million Jews in Aushwitz and Bergen-Belsen, etc. with similar expectations? Where was that “interventionist” god all the countless thousands of times innocent people have been brutalized and slaughtered time and again throughout history? Often in worship of another concept of that supposedly same god! There were a lot of devout Christians in the Waffen SS. The monsters who flew planes into the twin towers were very passionate worshipers of Allah.

I fear it is too late. Everywhere I look, I see decline. I see my nation basically bankrupt but unwilling to stop the party for the rich and powerful, and many states and local jurisdictions are about to fold under unmanageable budgets. Our greatness has been squandered and sabotaged from within and the “barbarians” without are getting stronger, richer, better educated and more determined.

And, they own us!

The time to call a halt was decades ago. But, we were mesmerized into thinking that we would always be at the top of the heap, so we could party on like drunken sailors. I remember the cliches well: “Use other people’s money,” “Trickle Down,” “Greed is good,” “Tap your equity,” etc., etc., ad nauseum.

We thought we were really clever. Turns out, we were and are abysmally stupid!