Second Coming

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

-Yeats- The Second Coming

So, another Florida sunny Sunday and the letters to the editor are dark, dark, dark amidst the blaze of noon.

How about the barbarian who insists that the idea of the separation of Church and State as used by Jefferson meant only that no Christian sect shall have no preference over another Christian sect and that since we have graciously allowed others to live here, they should shut up about Christian supremacy or “return to the nation of their own belief(s)?”

We’re denying the intent of our Founding fathers, it seems, by not recognizing as Adolph Hitler also opined “our national history.”

I guess we’re seeing another soldier in Jerry Foulsmell’s campaign to make you think there’s a war on Christmas.

“Our founding Fathers had a covenant with the Lord God” says the anonymous writer no doubt lisping from the fork in his tongue and the sulfur encrusting his lips. Jerry didn’t remind him that Jefferson’s autobiography answered the question of Christian heritage by envisioning a government that had:

“. . . within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”


Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
-Notes on Virginia, 1782

Covenant with the Lord who?

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 Minerve in the brain of Jupiter.
-Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

As to the role of the clergy in government, he said:

They believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

-Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Sept. 23, 1800

The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine.
- letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

Question with boldness even the existence of a god.
-Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.

- Letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814

I’m starting to agree with Crankyboy that it’s all lost, there is no fighting this monster and that the ancient evil our founding fathers sought to bury; that rough beast, its hour come round at last, is slouching toward Washington to be born.