Bearing false witness

The real defining battle with religious extremists isn't what they tell you it is and I'm afraid it isn't a battle we can win. I believe it's a battle that will, if we lose it, be the end of the American Dream.

It's tempting to think that the Christian supremacists, the evangelical horde are a fringe group that will be prevented by our firmly antiestblishmentarian constitution from ever being more than a nuisance or a local problem, but they are making gains, little by little and there is really no way to stop them. They are too well funded and we are too little educated.

It's easy to laugh at the idiotic attempts to squeeze references to the Ten Commandments into courthouses and for a lot of reasons. They really aren't part of Christianity and they command behavior that Christians assert they have been liberated from by their new covenant. Of course most of those commandments have nothing to do with civil law anyway and the three that do aren't unique to those commandments but rather descend from earlier Mesopotamian law codes. But we're talking about American tribalism here and none of that really matters. It's part of a much bigger strategy.

The myth of the Christian fathers and their quest to establish a Christian nation in the New World is of course a hoax and readers of Jefferson, Washington, Madison and Paine have a hard time crediting the sanity or honesty of the Christian Nation Crusaders, but those who would replace our constitution with a religious agenda as interpreted by a polyester priesthood of self proclaimed prophets have, quite literally, more money than God; enough money to make anything true. They have enough money to publish books carefully crafted from bits of redacted, illicitly inferred and blatantly confected fact that will prove to anyone willing to believe that old Tom Jefferson was a 21st century fundamentalist despite his well documented contempt for preachers, gospels, churches and the priests who buried the secular teachings of a secular morality teacher from Nazareth and twisted them into a false and freedom hating religion. Some day, said Tom, the divinity of Jesus would be as antique and unworthy of attention as the divinity of Isis or Jupiter. Religion itself was to be considered tyranny over the mind of man and its influence on government eternally to be opposed in our new land - so Christian was he.

"They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly"

Sure it's easy, particularly if you produce a huge, impenetrable volume and your audience is not only wholly ignorant but gleefully gullible, to argue that Washington was a Christian when he wasn't, or that old evasively agnostic Franklin and hysterically anti-Christian Jefferson were too or that Madison's endless anti-Christian polemics mean that the constitution was intended to be interpreted as a Christian document for a Christian nation with an official Christian, gay bashing, Jew baiting, heathen hating, anti-abortion religion.

"Be afraid ACLU. Be very afraid. Morris packs The Christian Life and Character with page after page of original source material making the case that America was founded as a Christian nation. The evidence is unanswerable and irrefutable. This 1000-page book will astound you and send enemies of Christianity into shock."

Bearing false witness, of course, is the foundation of all preaching and the people who sent me an e-mail advertising two books designed for the Consternation of the ACLU and other devils are as false in this attempt as they are in their attempts to prove that science is just conjecture and conjecture is God's word, but it works and it is working and it will continue to work as we allow our country to be dumbed down, debased, mislead and proselytized into oblivion; the home of religious crazies led by madmen, crooks, liars tyrants and thieves where free thought makes one an "enemy of Christianity."