Rational Rant

Dubious Documents: The Case of the Fractured Founders pt 1

2008-07-08T11:13:00.002-07:00

There is a document circulating about the intertubes that purports to recover the suppressed truth of America's history. What is this suppressed truth? It is nothing less than a claim that the Founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation. Googling various phrases from the piece shows that there may well be some ten thousand copies circulating, and casual comparison suggests that no two of them are alike. (Some of them must be, just like snowflakes, but there is a great deal of variation among them.) The text, to use the jargon of textual criticism, is wild. Individual editors seem to feel free to modify it at their pleasure—to add material, alter it, or take it away at whim. There are at least two major branches, easily distinguishable by the presence or absence of the George Washington material (among other variations). It goes by many titles, but for my purposes I'll call it "America's Christian Roots". The author is unknown—though as much of it is made up of purported quotations of American founders, it might be more accurate to describe the originator as an editor or assembler.

The shorter recension is characterized by two large lacunae in the material. There is evidence that both of them are omissions from the longer text, rather than additions made to the shorter text. (For the convenience of the reader I have provided a copy of "America's Christian Roots" here; the lacunae in the shorter recension are given there in blue.) The first lacuna begins at the end of a Thomas Jefferson quotation, and includes material attributed to George Washington, John Adams, and John Jay. The text resumes with a note to the effect that "He" was also chairman of the American Bible Society. In the shorter recension "He" is Thomas Jefferson; in the longer "He" is John Quincy Adams. Hypothetically this should provide strong evidence on the subject. If Thomas Jefferson had in fact been chairman of the American Bible Society and John Quincy Adams not been, that would argue in favor of the shorter recension, in that the notice would have been accidentally displaced by the insertion of new material. Conversely, if John Quincy Adams had been chairman and not Thomas Jefferson, the longer recension would be more likely the original, the notice having been displaced by the omission of material.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Neither man was ever chairman of the American Bible Society. Which leaves us back where we started.

Or does it? One of the men mentioned in the longer recension, John Jay, actually was elected president of the American Bible Society in 1821. One possibility is that the notice originally applied to him, became detached with the insertion of the John Quincy Adams item, and then became detached yet again with the omission of the larger block of material. It's a bit convoluted, but it does make sense of the situation, and is a slight argument in favor of the longer recension.

Also in favor of the longer recension is the fact that the end of the Jefferson quotation is authentic (though the quotation itself is a bit of a fake); the simplest explanation is that it was originally included in the document and then accidentally omitted (favoring the longer recension), rather than that the quotation was originally shortened and then the ending restored (in the case that the shorter recension was original).

As far as the second lacuna is concerned, the evidence is decisively in favor of the longer recension. Where the longer recension correctly quotes the Harvard handbook as saying "and therefore to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning", the shorter recension has "and therefore to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation for our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments." Where did this gibberish come from? Comparison of the two recension shows that the words "our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments" is the conclusion of a comment by the assembler of the document on a Supreme Court decision: "Is it not a permissible objective to allow our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments?" The two have become joined by the omission of the intervening material, which means that the longer recension in this case is certainly more original.

Why was the shorter recension created? What purpose do these omissions serve? The short answer seems to be—none. The omissions significantly damage the sense of the document, and seem utterly purposeless. They look, well, accidental. If this were a document from the paper age I would suggest that maybe a couple of leaves were accidentally lost or somehow not copied. This being the computer age, it is also possible that an ancestral file became somehow corrupted. A casual examination of internet examples suggests that the shorter recension is the more common of the two; it was the first that came to my attention at the very least.

For this discussion I examined four of the many versions available—two from the shorter recension, and two from the longer. These are (1) J. Vitello, "America's Christian Roots," in The Christian Journal (February 2005) (PDF); (2) Ed Brayton, "Answering a 'Christian Nation' E-mail," Dispatches from the Culture Wars, 7 December 2003 (this one is derived from a version published in World Net Daily that I couldn't find and may no longer be available); (3) Paul Ciniraj, "Bible and Prayer in the History of America," Free Republic, 13 January 2005; and (4) Kenn McDermott, "Forsaken Roots," Kenn McDermott's Home Page, 28 June 2008. Kenn McDermott and Ed Brayton both present the piece as anonymous, and both make critiques available to the reader; J. Vitello and Paul Ciniraj are both listed as authors of their respective versions. The Vitello and McDermott versions belong to the longer rescension; the Brayton and Ciniraj versions to the shorter—though Ciniraj extends his version with numerous interpolations, either his own or derived from some other source, making it longer than the longer recension.

"America's Christian Roots" contains many mini-documents, excerpts from letters and speeches that are supposed to support its thesis. Each of these has its own history before it came to lodge in this conglomerate. That history is often obscure and convoluted, so bear with me as we cut through the underbrush. To begin:

The U.S. Constitution was founded on Biblical principles, and it was the intention of the authors for this to be a Christian nation.

This is the Ciniraj version; the Brayton version puts it baldly "We are a Christian nation" and the two longer recension versions omit this preamble altogether. Stated or not, this is the thesis of the document in all its forms. In many cases the document simply begins

Did you know that 52 of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence were orthodox, deeply committed Christians? The other three all believed in the bible as the divine truth, the God of Scripture, and His personal intervention.

Only Brayton's version omits this item, though there are minor variations in the others. The Ciniraj version for example adds (anachronistically) the word "evangelical" to the "deeply committed" of the other two. A major oddity is the statement that there were fifty-five signers of the Declaration of Independence; in fact there were fifty-six. (Some recent versions have changed this item accordingly, though none of the three I examined had yet done so.) How many of them were "deeply committed Christians" is unknown; some of them were members of mainline churches, and others weren't. Personally, having myself tried to run down the data on some figures of the time, I'm skeptical of any claim that purports to give hard statistics. Here is a chart by somebody who has actually attempted to determine the formal religious affiliations of the signers of the Declaration, and here is a blog entry covering the religion of the founders in a more general way.

In any case it is irrelevant to the thesis of the document, which is that the founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation. As Ben Abbot aptly observed in a comment on the blog entry I just mentioned, "Even if *all* the framers/founders were Trinitarian Christians, it would *not* mean that our Nation was intended by them to be a sectarian one. Further, even if all were Deists, it would not mean that they intended to banish the inspiration of organized religions from its borders." It's easy to see why Brayton's source omitted this item.

At this point comes one of the Ciniraj interpolations; I'll give it for flavor:

The founding fathers understood that for a country to stand it must have a solid foundation; the Bible was the source of this foundation. They believed that God's ways were much higher than Man's ways and held firmly that the Bible was the absolute standard of truth and used the Bible as a source to form the government.

Of course no source is given for these unlikely statements. They appear to function as a kind of commentary on the text, rather than being a part of the text themselves. Moving right along

It is the same Congress that formed the American Bible Society.

This is found only in two of the four versions: the Ciniraj (shorter recension) and the McDermott (longer recension), but it almost certainly appeared in the ancestor of the other two versions. (The Brayton version [short recension] simply omits the item, but the Vitello version [long recension] retains the phrase "the same Congress" while omitting its essence.) Why did these two versions, presumably independently, omit it? Probably because it isn't true. Sure, that doesn't stop them from retaining other items, but in this case it is extremely easy to check; the American Bible Society was founded in 1816, years after the Continental Congress ceased to exist. And oh yeah, Congress had no part in its founding.

How did this come to be here? My guess is that this item is a distorted reflection of an account such as that in W. P. Strickland's 1849 History of the American Bible Society from its Organization to the Present Time (see my piece on the Bible of the Revolution). Strickland wrote "the first Congress of the States assumed all the rights and performed all the duties of a Bible Society"; it would be easy to turn this into the misstatement that the Continental Congress actually did found a Bible Society. Onward.

Immediately after creating the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress voted to purchase and import 20,000 copies of Scripture for the people of this nation.

Three of the versions have this word for word, and the Vitello version has it with minor variations caused by its awkward elimination of the American Bible Society item. This item by contrast is true, or at any rate mostly true. It was actually a year later, rather than "immediately", and the Continental Congress never finalized the resolution, so that no Bibles were ever imported, but other than that, it is fairly accurate. It doesn't really support the Christian Nation thesis: the point of Congress being involved was to prevent price gouging, and the money loaned against the purchase would have been paid back by the sale of the books. It certainly provides no precedent for any present-day action by the government; this took place during the pre-Constitutional period, when the First Amendment had yet to be written, and it was not yet clear what sort of entity the new nation was to be.

The Ciniraj version has another lengthy interpolation here, which I will skip, and move on to the next item that is an integral part of the document:

Patrick Henry, who is called the firebrand of the American Revolution, is still remembered for his words, "Give me liberty or give me death"; but in current textbooks, the context of these words is omitted. Here is what he actually said: "An appeal to arms and the God of hosts is all that is left us. But we shall not fight our battle alone. There is a just God that presides over the destinies of nations. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone. Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death."

This appears virtually word-for-word in all four versions (the two longer-recension versions omit "actually" before "said"). Now this speech has its own problems, not the least of which is that there is no actual evidence that Patrick Henry ever said it or anything approximating it, but that aside, I'm curious—is it true that this speech has been "erased" from modern textbooks? William Benson, in his critique, suggests otherwise. "Here again is an error in fact and an error in implication," he wrote. "The error in fact is that this famous Patrick Henry speech has not been erased from public school text books; at least it hasn't been erased from the history textbook used by the Los Gatos Union School District schools in California. Their history textbook is entitled The Americans a History and is published by McDougal Little/Houghton Mifflin. The full and unedited text of Henry's speech appears on page 125 of this textbook" Benson went on to note, "The error in implication is that Henry's speech was stricken from public school textbooks because it makes references to God. But our courts have never ruled that public schools cannot recognize the impact that religion and the belief in a God or gods has had in the history of the world. Teaching about the role religion has played in history is not a violation of the Establishment Clause whereas teaching denominational religious dogma is."

These sentences have been erased from our textbooks. Was Patrick Henry a Christian? The following year, 1776, he wrote this: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great Nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For that reason alone, people of other faiths have been afforded freedom of worship here."

The is part of all four texts examined here, except that the first two sentences were omitted in the Ciniraj text. The quotation, as I showed in an earlier entry, is a fake, having actually been written in 1956. One peculiarity of this piece is that while the quotation really has no bearing on the question asked—was Patrick Henry a Christian?—since a non-Christian might well reach the (erroneous) conclusion that the United States was "founded…on the Gospel of Jesus Christ", it is at least germane to the central thesis of the article. The author clearly believed in the Christian Nation hypothesis. But even if the author had been Patrick Henry, would it have really helped?

Both Benson and Brayton in their critiques of the document answer no. Benson somehow gets himself lost in a jungle of confusion over whether "establishment" is a noun (of course it is, no matter in which sense it is used), so Brayton is more on point here. He wrote "…remember that when the time came to frame the Constitution, Patrick Henry was opposed to the passage of the first amendment establishment clause. … When the constitution was passed, Patrick Henry opposed it specifically because it was a 'godless document' and he preached long and hard that because the constitution did not establish the US as an officially Christian nation, it would bring down the wrath of God upon us all. In other words, he was on the losing end of history on this issue and … in point of fact, citing his views on church and state proves the opposite of what the author intends—it shows that those who pushed for theocracy were in the minority."

[This commentary will continue in one or more future installments, Allah willing.]

Another Old Racist Dies

2008-07-04T11:31:00.002-07:00

Arch-racist Jesse Helms, also noted for his anti-gay and other anti-American policies, died today at the age of 81. He will not be missed.

Stop the Presses: Long Time McCain Supporter Supports McCain

2008-06-30T09:52:00.004-07:00

Fox News recently had a piece about Darragh Murphy, a McCain supporter since 2000, when she donated to his primary campaign. It appears that in 2008 she is going to support--surprise!--John McCain for president.

What is their excuse for running this non-story?

Well, it's simple, really. Fox paints Darragh Murphy as a former Clinton supporter who now intends to support McCain instead of Obama--part of a story claiming that the Democrats are in disarray. Pretty shabby, Fox. How about rounding up some actual news for a change?

[Sources: Rumproast, PumaPAC, Pandagon, and Fox News (at Youtube).]

Quotation of the Day

2008-06-23T07:45:00.003-07:00

It is often observed that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean everyone isn't out to get you. It is equally true that when everyone insists you are wrong about something it doesn't necessarily mean they're engaged in an elaborate conspiracy. You could just be wrong.
John Moore, "Science Is Not Philosophy"

The Twonky

2008-06-22T09:56:00.005-07:00

I read in the news that China is blocking still more websites in honor of the Olympics, and I see that ERV is still at war with the semicolon, so nothing much has changed. My brother's macaw has quit squawking now that I figured out that she wanted food in her dish, which quiets things down some here. I spent the time today I would have written something trying to figure out where much of the internet had gone. I tried to check out CNN--nothing. I tried to read something in National Review--gone. Yahoo was still operating, and most of the blogs seemed to be up and functioning, but virtually all news sources (except FOX, for some reason, if that counts) had disappeared.

Being me I quickly jumped to the conclusion that right-wing terrorist militias had taken over the news outfits of the world and that from now on we would be forced to rely on government handouts for our alleged information. It wasn't at all reassuring to find that Comcast appeared to be broadcasting a news show where CNN Headline News was supposed to be on the TV. One of my nephews, however, suggested that I should try accessing CNN through an internet proxy, and sure enough, that worked. CNN was still there; I just couldn't get to it from my usual point of departure.

Feeling a little like a character in that recent episode of South Park--the one where the internet disappeared--I sent my nephew down the street to his father's house to see whether they still had the internet up there. (This is my other brother's house--not the one who left his macaw here with me for the week; he's in Pendleton for an aerobatics competition. This is the brother who keeps fish, brews beer, and cooks the most amazing Chinese food.) A few minutes later my nephew returned, reporting that there was still internet a mere three blocks away, so whatever was keeping us from CNN et al was only targeting us, seemingly. (Okay, that's generalizing from very selected instances, but still--it's a straw in the wind, an augury of the cosmic powers.)

"It's got to be the router," my nephew explained, launching into a short dissertation that conveyed to me little except that apparently tiny demons live in our router and one of them had got lazy and was refusing to do his job. A high-ranking demon, apparently, or there wouldn't be so much of the damn internet missing. A few minutes and a couple of resets later the internet was back up and running again, and I was back at my keyboard launching data into cyberspace.

So I guess there were no terrorist right-wing militias clamping down on my news--this time, anyway. And it wasn't an evil corporate plot to destroy the internet either. Still, I've got used to living my childhood fantasy of having all the news of the world brought to my doorstep and available at my command--The Guardian, the Times of India, The Podunk Gazette and Cross-Time Wanderer--and it's downright unnerving to have it taken away from me at the whim of some internet demon. What if next time it's my ISP making decisions about what I should or should not be reading or listening to over the magic intertubes? Or some anonymous functionary in the depths of the great bureaucracy that passes for the free enterprise system here? The Department of Appropriate Content has decided that your choice of information is not acceptable by the community standards established by Free Information Act of 2007 and from now on you will abide by the Decency Provision (Subsection 3A, Paragraph 72) as determined by a committee of your peers....

A million years or so ago, in the golden age of sf, a fellow named Henry Kuttner wrote about a futuristic record player that took it upon itself to censor its owner's choice in music, books, and--well, everything. It ended badly. The day that the machines that bring us content, whether it be food, music, or news, start telling us what to eat, listen to, or read, is not yet. Still--

I can't help wondering, what the hell is it like to live in China?

More Fake History from David Barton

2008-06-21T06:02:00.003-07:00

Sorry I have been slow about blogging recently; I have some posts in preparation that should be ready soon, Allah willing. In the meantime, however, check out this post at American Creation, an actual historical site devoted to "the religious aspects of America's founding". It takes David Barton apart on such subjects as the Mayflower Compact and "In God We Trust". It's brief, but definitely worth reading.

Quotation of the Day

2008-06-20T10:51:00.002-07:00

Politics in this country is just embarrassing when we can actually be debating a 800-year-old human right.
Mark Hoofnagle

Forward Into The Past

2008-06-08T17:07:00.004-07:00

A new Egyptian law on children's rights abolishes some common abuses. It:

Sets 18 as the minimum age for marriage for both men and women
Allows children to be registered under their mother's name
Forbids the practice of female genital mutilation
Forbids parents from harming their children

Predictably, Krazy Kultural Konservatives are up in arms over the bill. These are ideas imported from the West, shrieked the Muslim Brotherhood. They "are trying to transfer Western culture to the Islamic world" according to the Islamic Research Institute. "No to imported legislation" said a sign carried in a protest organized by a conservative member of Parliament.

Do we see a theme here?

What on earth is so objectionable about these measures? Some of them (at least) seem way overdue. Well, let's take them one by one.

Marriage at 18

None of the reports explain what exactly is involved here; presumably the point is to prohibit forced marriages when at least one of the partners is too young. This however goes against sharia, according to some:

...Islamic scholars ... say shariah encourages early marriages. Early marriages are also common in rural areas, and raising the marriage age could lead villagers to resort to urfi marriages (common-law marriages without a contract), with all its negative repercussions.

Mohamed Ra'fat Osman, of the Islamic Research Institute agrees: "Islam allows marriage at any suitable age, provided the person seeking marriage has the means and his circumstances enable him to form a family."

Another problem was pointed out by Hussein Ibrahim, a Brotherhood spokesman:

Why are they increasing the marriage age for girls when we have more than nine million unmarried youths? This is the problem that they should concentrate on solving, not adding to it.

He predicted that the law would cause misery and destroy the Egyptian family.

Children Registered Under Mother's Name

Under the previous law, "illegitimate"children--children whose father refused to recognize them for whatever reason--could not obtain a birth certificate, and so were denied health care, education, and other "benefits". Under the new law birth certificates can be issued in their mother's name, thus clearing this idiotic bureaucratic hurdle. Obviously no sane person could object to this. But wait a minute:

Mohamed Mukhtar al-Mahdi, chairman of the Sharia Associations, which runs many Egyptian mosques, said naming children after their mothers was unacceptable because it was in direct contravention of a Koranic verse.

The verse reads: "Call them by (the names of) their fathers: that is juster in the sight of God." It continues: "But if you do know not their father's names, then they are your brothers in faith." [Source]

Ismail El Deftar, a professor of Hadith at Al Azhar University, countered this claim by noting that that some of the Prophet’s companions--el Zubair Bin Safia, for example--were named after their mothers.

Another complaint is that allowing benefits to "illegitimate" children might encourage sex outside marriage. [source]

Female Genital Mutilation

This cultural practice--involving slicing off a girl's external sexual organs--is both ancient and widespread in Africa and the near East. It is still widely practiced today, despite the documented negative health and emotional effects on the victims, with Egypt as one of the worst offenders. It has been illegal there for some time, and the new law strengthens penalties for its commission. Still, there are supporters of the practice--and the law still has a medical necessity exception.

Of course you'd expect the religious types to be at the forefront of the defense of this atrocity, and you would not be disappointed. Saad al-Katatni, president (no less) of the Muslim Brotherhood, proclaims "Nothing in Islam forbids circumcision [Muslim-speak for female genital mutilation]." But by the same token there is nothing in Islam mandating female genital mutilation, according to Abdel Moaty Bayoumi of the Islamic Research Center, and now that the downside of the practice is known, it falls under the Islamic doctrine that whatever inflicts harm is haram--religiously prohibited. And according to the BBC both "[t]he Grand Mufti and the head of the Coptic Church said female circumcision had no basis either in the Koran or in the Bible." But

Nagy El Shahabi, head of the El Geil Party, said that female circumcision is a deeply-rooted tradition in Egypt’s villages. “People shouldn’t be punished for practicing their customs and traditions,” he said.

“If we apply the prison sentence, all people in Upper Egypt will end up in prison.”

In response, Council Speaker Safwat El Sherif said that if the society wants to develop it has to change its habits.

However Krazy Kultural Konservatives have an answer:

Those who supported the practice argued it was appropriate when female genitals protruded too much, adding that it was needed to preserve the woman's virtue.

Against such arguments there is no rational reply. (I would note that our own Kultural Konservatives oppose a vaccine against cervical cancer for similar reasons.)

Prohibition of Harm to Children

I'm not clear on what this actually prohibits, but it does apparently forbid corporal punishment--which could put them ahead of the United States in this respect. Of course religious nuts have a problem with this. If parents are forbidden to beat their children it will lead to the breakdown of the Egyptian family or some such nonsense. Abdullah Samak, described as "scholar and teacher", is opposed to any law that prohibits parents from beating their children. The law would give parents who harm their children up to six months in prison.

On the other hand:

Ismail El Deftar, a member of the Shoura Council and a professor of Hadith at Al Azhar University, refuted claims that the law contradicts with Islamic teachings. He said that shariah calls upon parents to raise their children wisely without inflicting harm or beating them.

Bayoumi agrees. He says that beating hurts children physically and emotionally. The Prophet Mohamed, he added, called for a kind of reprimand that does not inflict harm or cause psychological damage.

In agreement, Refaat El Saied said that some would say they will beat their children in spite of the law. “I tell them ‘beat them so they would become retarded as you.’”

[Thanks to Aardvarchaeology for this story.]

So Soon We Forget

2008-06-07T20:52:00.003-07:00

I mentioned the other day that the "nation not founded by religionists but by Christians" quotation attributed to Patrick Henry actually first appeared in 1956 in a short-lived segregationist magazine. Dead Racists Society has another wonderful quotation coming from the same gang of idiots in that same year: a burlesque of the Declaration of Independence, beginning:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, sling shots and knives.

We hold these truths to be self evident that all whites are created equal with certain human rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.

The words were also part of a speech given by Democratic Senator James Eastland to the White Citizens Council. Christian Nationites might want to ask themselves--is a well this foul one they really want to drink from?

Patrick Henry Redux

2008-06-03T02:28:00.005-07:00

My scanner is working again, thanks to my nephew's efforts, so I can upload that page from the American Mercury of September 1956 containing the original version of the "religionists" quotation so often falsely attributed to Patrick Henry:

Once again let me point out that the burden of proof is on anybody claiming that a quotation is genuine. This alleged Patrick Henry quotation fails the test in all possible ways.

Quotation of the Day

2008-05-29T15:53:00.002-07:00

There's a lot to be said for being a lizard.
Mike O'Risal

Should a class focusing on the Bible be taught in public school?

2008-05-28T00:32:00.005-07:00

The Roanoke Times asks this question in an online "poll" to which, as asked, the only correct answer is "no". Why do I say that--I, who am an advocate of teaching the Bible as one of the great classics of western civilization? I who believe that all our classics are being sadly neglected in an educational system intent on supplying factory workers for the gigantic assembly lines of yesteryear? Especially when the class in question is to be taught by a "20-year veteran, properly licensed, one of our most praised and most valued faculty members," according to school board chairman James Stephens. "She has the good judgment to make sure she does not get into proselytizing and keep it in an academic format," he claims.

The answer: This class is based on the course put out by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, a known purveyor of fake history. Check out their website. Try the Founding Fathers page, for example. What do we find there? Well, first there's the bizarre assertion that "The Bible was the foundation and blueprint for our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, our educational system, and our entire history until the last 20 to 30 years." This is at the very least a considerable overstatement; in point of fact the Bible was neither the foundation or the blueprint for any of those things, ever. Not in the last twenty to thirty years, not in the last century, not at all. This is crazy talk--but not just crazy talk. It is far worse than that. It is Christian Nation talk.

Next we have a quotation attributed to Patrick Henry. No, it isn't the one I trashed the other day; this is a different one. "The Bible is a book worth more than all the other books that were ever printed," said Patrick Henry, according to this site. Well, not exactly. What Patrick Henry allegedly said of the Bible--and what we have is only a third-hand report--"Here is a book worth more than all the other books that were ever printed : yet it is my misfortune never to have found time to read it, with the proper attention and feeling, till lately. I trust in the mercy of Heaven, that it is not yet too late." This anecdote first appeared in William Wirt's Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (1818; p. 402); his source, apparently, was a letter from George Dabney. In other words what we have here is not something actually written by Patrick Henry, but only something that somebody else said he said--and lacking the letter, we don't even know if Dabney heard this himself, or only reported what somebody else had told him.

After this we come to a quotation attributed to, of all people, Horace Greeley. Apparently it has somehow escaped the NCBCPS's notice that Horace Greeley was not one of the Founding Fathers. He was a newspaper editor who belonged to the Civil War generation, an anti-slavery advocate, a contemporary of Lincoln, the Let The Erring Sisters Go Their Ways guy. Still, what is he supposed to have said? "It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom." Is this a genuine quotation? No source is given, either here, or in any of the other works quoting this that I could run down. It sounds like the sort of thing Greeley might have written. He liked the word groundwork and the expression human freedom. He was a Bible-reader from way back, having learned to read from it at the age of four. He was no doubt aware of the way the story of Moses was read by the slaves as a metaphor for their own liberation, and could well have had this in mind. But I couldn't find it, in spite of going through a number of Greeley's works. The oldest source I could locate (and this thanks to Google search) was an 1889 volume entitled Vital Questions: The Discussions of the General Christian Conference Held in Montreal, Que., Canada, October 22nd to 28th, 1888. On pp. 197-98 we read:

And so of our own and all other lands. Romish dogma we know to be a source of religious, social, and national peril. "But it is impossible," said one of the great leaders of public thought in America, " to mentally and socially enslave a Bible-reading people, for the principles of the Bible are the ground-work of human freedom."

The "great leader of public thought in America" isn't named, but Greeley would certainly qualify. However, neither this nor any other work that gave this alleged quotation gave any source, beyond attributing it to Horace Greeley. The burden of proof, remember, is on the person who would claim this as genuine.

Moving on, we have "I have always said, and will always say, that studious perusal of the sacred volume will make us better citizens." This is attributed to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, at least, actually was a Founding Father, but the quotation isn't much to boast of. In this case the source is known, thanks to Chris Rodda, and it is both misquoted (surprise) and second-hand. It appears in a letter written by Daniel Webster describing a conversation he had had with Jefferson a quarter of a century earlier. Supposedly Jefferson told him, "I have always said, and always will say, that the studious perusal of the sacred volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands." Unfortunately, that same letter shows Jefferson's opinion of church-state relations: he said that "Sunday schools ... presented the only legitimate means, under the constitution, of avoiding the rock upon which the French republic was wrecked." Not public schools, if you please, but Sunday schools.

Finally we have a few random assertions.

While President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was elected the first president of the Washington, D.C. public school board, which used the Bible as a reading text in the classroom.

I'll let Chris Rodda handle this one:

This myth about Jefferson and the Washington D.C. schools was created by combining two things. One is that, in 1805, Jefferson was elected president of the Washington City school board. The other is an 1813 report by the teacher of one of the city's early public schools, showing that the Bible and Watts's Hymns were used as reading texts in that school. The problem with the story is that the school that these books were used in didn't exist until several years after Jefferson left Washington and the school board.

In other words, this one is just a plain, or garden, lie. Next.

There was a secular study done by the American Political Science Review on the political documents of the Founding era, which was 1760-1805.

This study found that 94% of the documents that went into the Founding ERA were based on the Bible, and of that 34% of the contents were direct quotations from the Bible.

Why people pay attention to preposterous statistics would probably make a fascinating study for somebody to undertake, but I'm not going to worry about it right now. Ninety-four percent of Founding era documents are based on the Bible? Come on...that's just not credible. The fact is that the study says nothing about ninety-four percent of Founding Era documents being based on the Bible--nothing. What the study actually says is that thirty-four percent of the citations in Founding Era documents are from the Bible. The study also says that three quarters of these citations are from printed sermons; if we leave these out of the picture, then the figure for Biblical citations drops to eight and a half percent.

The thing is, why should we trust a curriculum designed by people who use dubious quotations (and then can't even get them right), who think that Horace Greeley was one of the Founding Fathers, who get even simple facts wrong, and who cite preposterous (and bogus) statistics without any sense of shame? These people are either blitheringly incompetent, or shameless liars. Either way they have no business putting together a course on anything whatsoever, and no teacher, no matter how well-intentioned, ought to have to use such a steaming pile of horse manure. Selah.

Crazy People Got No Reason To Live

2008-05-26T21:11:00.003-07:00

At least, that's the opinion apparently entertained by one Kristin Butler, a proud graduate of Duke University. Duke of course is known mainly for its outstanding work in the field of parapsychology, the science of matter over mind. According to Kristin Butler a "mentally unstable" person--or "loony" as she apparently prefers--has no business receiving a diploma, whether she has completed the requirements or not. This is an interesting attitude, and I would really like to know exactly why having bipolar disorder--that's the lunacy in question--disbars a student from receiving a degree. I got a degree, in spite of having undergone treatment for depression, and in spite of suffering from unreasonable fears and compulsions. And frankly, I take that kind of crack personally. I have a cousin with bipolar disorder, and while she's never received a degree from a prestigious university like Duke, she is in fact one of the most outstanding researchers I've ever met. I personally have respect for people who make it in spite of drawbacks and disadvantages over which they do not have control, and I am very much unimpressed when some scatter-brained young know-it-all sounds off with a moronic screed like Summa cum loony. Grow up, Kristin Butler.

[Thanks to Chronicle Column Damages NCCU/Duke Relations and "Summa cum loony" - the Duke lacrosse case lives on for alerting to this garbage.]

This Great Nation Was Founded Not By Religionists

2008-05-21T20:47:00.006-07:00

There are few people that I personally despise more than canonical critics, but Christian Nationites are almost certainly among them. David Barton and his gang of loony liars have done more than a small part in undermining American values and destroying the fabric of this once great nation--and continue to today, thanks to the National Council On Bible Curriculum In Public Schools, the late D. James Kennedy, and other unscrupulous types more concerned about making a buck off the gullible than about the survival of the nation that brought them up. One of the tricks of their nefarious trade is the invention of fake quotations from the Founding Fathers designed to make them look like modern Christian Nationites. Many of them have been discredited; others lurk in the limbo of the unknown.

It is not always appreciated that the Founding Fathers were a diverse lot with differing opinions on exactly how the new nation ought to be put together. Some of them favored having a state religion, as all respectable nations had in their time. Others--Jefferson, Washington, Madison, for example--favored keeping religion out of government altogether. This was the winning faction.

Among the famous Founding Fathers on the wrong side of that particular issue was Patrick Henry, slave-owner and the reputed author of the words "Give me liberty, or give me death." He undoubtedly did write some pretty crazy stuff about church-state relations, but--did he say, as the Christian Nationites claim:

It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ!

Okay, it's tripe, but that's not really the point. Some people are obviously impressed with it. A quick check of Google Books reveals its popularity. One book is listed as having this quotation in 1994, another in 1996, and still one more in 2000. Starting with 2002, however, it begins to take off. Three books quote it in 2002, four in 2003, six in 2004, and seventeen in 2005. While that was a high point, ten books quote it in 2006, eleven in 2007, and two this year.

Well, you can't argue with success, right? If so many authors use it, well, then Patrick Henry must have said it. The market has spoken, as Stephen Colbert would say.

Still, there is one oddity at least. Nobody seems to have heard of this saying before 1994. Now Google books is a neat little tool, but it is far from infallible. However, if Patrick Henry had really said, or written, or muttered this little piece of garbage, you'd think it would show up somewhere. And in fact Patrick Henry scholars have searched his recorded words, and found--nothing.

Even though it doesn't show up in the Google books search, the saying apparently first appeared (at least as Patrick Henry's) in The Myth of Separation by David Barton in 1988. Barton himself has since repudiated it, describing it as "unconfirmed" in his WallBuilder's website. He does hold out hope that it will turn out to be genuine, however, citing some absolutely irrelevant quotations by and about Patrick Henry, a cheesy trick that used to be exploited by the brave Cold War liars who promulgated fake quotations attributed to Lenin, Stalin, and other Communist leaders. (Anybody else remember Stormer's None Dare Call It Treason?) Humorously Barton goes on to make the suggestion (without giving the slightest evidence to support it) that "there is a possibility that the unconfirmed quote came from Henry's uncle, the Reverend Patrick Henry. We find no record of the Reverend's letters or writings. Therefore," he suggests, "until more definitive documentation can be presented, please avoid the words in question."

Need I remind the Myth of Separation author that the burden of proof is always on the person who puts forth a quotation as genuine? Cite your source, damn it--cite it. That's all you have to do. The works of the Founding Fathers are not even that hard come by, for the most part. You usually can find them in multi-volume sets of speeches and letters and publications and all like that there. If you got took by a bum secondary source--well, them are the breaks. At least if you've cited it, people will know who to blame.

In this case, however, it should have been clear that something was off in the brew. The word "religionists"--it ain't right. The word's been around since the seventeenth century, and our patriot could have used it--but not in the sense it's used here. That's pure twentieth-century, not Patrick Henry's era in the least. In his time a religionist was a fanatic, somebody obsessed with religion. The author of this quotation, however, is using it in a strange generic sense, meaning apparently people of different religions joined together, or something of that sort.

Of course the answer to this riddle is simple--these words were not written or spoken by Patrick Henry. Nor did they come from Patrick Henry's uncle (a ridiculous idea, by the way). Here is the quotation in context:

"I have now disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more I wish I could give them, and that is the Christian Religion. If they had that and I had not given them one shilling they would have been rich; and if they had not that and I had given them all the world, they would be poor."
Patrick Henry, Virginia,
His Will

"There is an insidious campaign of false propaganda being waged today, to the effect that our country is not a Christian country but a religious one--that it was not founded on Christianity but on freedom of religion.

"It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by 'religionists' but by Christians--not on religion but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here.

"In the spoken and written words of our noble founders and forefathers, we find symbolic expressions of their Christian faith. The above quotation from the will of Patrick Henry is a notable example."

I got this from the September 1956 issue of The American Mercury (p. 134) where it appears as a page filler. Their source: the April 1956 issue of The Virginian, a short-lived segregationist rag.

So dig this, all you dupes and pawns who mindlessly copied the crap that David Barton fed you. These jejune and insipid words you have enshrined in your books and on your websites are not pearls of great price delivered by one of America's patriots. They were written by some anonymous racist hack, the dregs of the era of McCarthy and George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan. Enjoy the feast--and I hope you choke on it.

Quotation of the Day

2008-05-20T11:29:00.001-07:00

Teaching children bogus science isn't education, it's called lying.
Mike the Mad Biologist

Letters to the Editor

2008-05-18T11:13:00.002-07:00

My attention was caught by an exchange printed in the Naples Daily News. On the one hand, Ed Weilhoefer, possibly a retired professor of mathematics, wrote a letter to the editor criticizing the creationist propaganda film Expelled. On the other hand we have a "Guest Commentary" by V.J. Falcone, "an adjunct professor at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut," complaining that "Ed Weilhoefer’s letter the other day was beyond the pale". Adjunct Professor Falcone poses as the voice of reason and moderation, but--

Ed Weilhoefer wrote:

The fact of the matter is that “Expelled” is a propaganda film, produced under false pretenses by a radical front for creationism. Joseph Goebbels’ ghost must be gleeful that his villainous art is alive and flourishing in the United States.

V. J. Falcone's response:

Finally, after some unsubstantiated statements which he calls "the fact of the matter," he claims that "Joseph Goebbels’ ghost must be gleeful that his villainous art is alive and well in the United States." Have you counted the number of letter writers who inject the Nazis into their essays? It’s de rigueur: If you disagree with me you are a Nazi, Nazi-like, Nazi-leaning, Nazi-wannabe.

Please. No more Nazi comparisons except when dealing with political issues that justify the allusion.

Nice evasion, Adjunct Professor Falcone, but what about dealing with the actual issue? or is it possible that you really don't know exactly who Joseph Goebbels was? I see that you "[lecture] graduate students in education on the U.S. Constitution, teaching controversial issues, morals and values, and 'thinking about thinking,'" so you certainly ought to know. In case you don't, however, let me inform you that Herr Goebbels is generally regarded as the gold standard for propaganda efforts, whether fake documentaries, fake academic studies, or fake histories. (Although in my opinion, having actually seen some of Goebbels' efforts, they are crude hack-work compared to the work of the Discovery Institute, or other think-tanks I could mention.) If you really didn't know this, you should be ashamed of yourself. Ed Weilhoefer's use does indeed deal with a political issue that justifies the allusion. If you do know, then you, Adjunct Professor Falcone, have gone way beyond the pale in misrepresenting what Ed Weilhoefer actually wrote.

Ed Weilhoefer goes on to refer to the deceptive tactics used by the film-makers to get interviews, and notes that "[t]he film is a diatribe against the American university system and an attempt to undermine science." To this V. J. Falcone has nothing to say. Then comes this passage:

Let’s face it: Americans trail far behind other Western nations in science education and that is one reason why we have so many weird religious beliefs inconsistent with basic science.

Here V. J. Falcone has at least half a point. "Any first-year logic student" he writes, "would know that statement is a post hoc fallacy." The United States of course does in fact trail behind many other Western nations in science education and it does indeed have many weird religious beliefs incompatible with the most basic science, but which is cause, and which is effect--who knows? The American tradition of anti-intellectualism probably has a lot to do with both, actually, but the two certainly feed on one another. Anyone who's been involved with one of the brushfires of ignorance breaking out through the country when religious fanatics try to dictate what gets taught in science classes is aware of the negative effect that "weird religious beliefs" have on science education in this country. And most of us who have been through what pass for science courses in the United States know just how bad this alleged education can be and how much that contributes to the craziness of the American religious scene.

Unfortunately V. J. Falcone doesn't stop with that. He goes on to write "By the way, we are behind in math, engineering and a myriad of other disciplines which I think is the result of teaching for 'self esteem' rather than for understanding." That line was old in the fifties, and has virtually nothing to recommend it. Bromides are not a substitute for thought.

Ed Weilhoefer continues:

It is laughable but very sad that Americans believe that the age of our planet is somewhere around 10,000 years.

It is indeed. Recent polls show that Americans do indeed believe this, and in large numbers. This really sets V. J. Falcone off: "I have taught thousands of students," he claims, and "know hundreds of academics and have not met one human being that believes what Mr. Weilhoefer states as fact." I can only suppose that Adjunct Professor Falcone travels in very rarefied circles; perhaps he needs to mix more with ordinary Americans. I've never had any problem running into people who believe exactly that, more's the pity, and to be honest, I really don't believe V. J. Falcone's claim. Maybe he hasn't inquired all that deeply into the beliefs of those thousands of students. Or maybe he's been very lucky in his classes. Back to the original letter:

Creationism or intelligent design is a Christian fundamentalist doctrine.

It's difficult to see how anybody could take exception to this statement, but V. J. Falcone does:

Not so. Intelligent design has been debated from antiquity to the present day.

Plato and Aristotle thought that it was a valid doctrine. Plato calls that power, not God, but an artificer "which causes things to exist, not previously existing ..., not some spontaneous and unintelligent cause."

I, personally, don’t know how life began, and I don’t think anyone else knows to an absolute certainty either.

All this jibber-jabber is beneath contempt. If the adjunct professor has a point, he has concealed it to perfection. Plato and Aristotle were pre-scientific thinkers and have absolutely nothing to do with the modern Intelligent Design™ movement, which is a pseudo-scientific disguise for fundamentalist theology. Shifting definitions in mid-stream is an old rhetorical trick, as I'm sure he knows quite well. Oh, yeah, and by the way, the only people who claim to know to a certainty how life began are Creationists, or Intelligent Design Proponents, or whatever they want to call themselves today.

Why the Naples Daily News thought this sub-par composition was worth publishing is beyond me.

New Frontiers in Bureaucracy

2008-05-17T18:25:00.002-07:00

Hurricane evacuations will be delayed in the future for Federal authorities to make sure that all evacuees have their papers in order, border agents announced in McAllen, Texas. Immigration officials will be stationed at evacuation hubs in the Rio Grande Valley to prevent people without appropriate documentation from boarding buses.

A spokeswoman for the governor pointed out, "If there is any significant delay in having people move from harm's way, then that could run the risk of endangering lives." The governor wants the border patrol to put public safety first during an emergency.

A representative for the border patrol shrugged off such concerns. "Our local policy is checkpoints will not close, we will check for immigration status," he said. "We have to do our jobs." [Source]

This Just In

2008-05-14T14:17:00.002-07:00

On CNN I hear that John Edwards is endorsing Senator Obama in the Democratic race for President.

And (for anyone who's interested) I still have no idea who I'm going write in for the Republican candidate; even though McCain's a done deal, I'm not voting for him.

Horror of the Day

2008-05-12T08:44:00.003-07:00

I got this one from PZ Myers at Pharyngula (True Monsters): Abdel-Qader Ali, 46, vaguely described as a "government employee," a resident of Basra in Iraq, brutally killed his daughter, Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, a university student. He crushed her windpipe with his boot, strangled her, and then stabbed her, assisted by his two sons. His excuse for this unnatural act: she had become enamored of a British soldier. His punishment: he will flee to Jordan for a month or two to give himself some time for the news to die down. Oh, yes, also his wife left him. He broke her arm after she protested the killing of their daughter.

Quotation of the Day

2008-05-06T07:36:00.002-07:00

Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.
Mildred Loving (1939-2008)

So What Else is New?

2008-04-30T10:17:00.002-07:00

I don't get this furore over Dr. Jeremiah Wright. The headline: Pastor of Church Once Attended by Presidential Candidate Talks Crazy. And, I may add, the sun rose this morning. Is this news? Really? Pastor says crazy stuff? What about Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or Billy Graham, for god's sake? Preachers have been saying really crazy stuff for as long as I can remember, certainly for as long as I have been listening to them. The new morality is really the old immorality. Nixon (of all people) is appointed by God to lead America. Don't understand the Bible--believe it. Herpes, or AIDS, or the flu, are God's punishment for sin. Homosexuals caused nine eleven. And snakes once walked upright.

See, what we who weren't raised in an unhealthy atmosphere of religiosity don't get is what is the difference between one crazy and another? Religious parents stand idly by and watch their eleven year old daughter die an excruciating (and entirely preventable) death and this is supposed to be okay somehow? How is this different from the mother who locked her kids in a car and pushed them in a lake to drown? At least she had the excuse of postpartum depression or something of the sort--what on earth is these idiots' justification? Or what about those muslims in Pakistan who beat a co-worker to death in front of the police, and then excused it by claiming that the dead man (a Hindu, by the way) was a blasphemer. Forgive me, but as far as I can tell the overly religious will do anything, so long as it is utterly vile and absolutely insane.

So tell me again, why should I be upset about something some pastor said? I don't care who attended his church--the guy is a religious nut. Of course he talks crazy. That's his job.

Happy Birthday Duke Ellington

2008-04-29T11:11:00.003-07:00

Duke Ellington is 109 today, and still going strong. It was probably in 1960, not long after we had moved to Vancouver Washington, that my father dragged me out of bed down to the record player to hear an album he had just brought home. I recognized the piece--but it wasn't the same, somehow. It was the overture to the Nutcracker, but being played by a jazz band of some kind. My father, knowing that I was a fanatic about observing the artist's intentions, not to mention that I was at that time (I was in fourth grade) a Tchaikovsky enthusiast, figured that I would be outraged.

But I wasn't, for some reason. Instead I was fascinated by the pieces--the similarities and differences from the canonical version, so to speak. This wasn't like the usual vulgarization of high art--Tony the Tiger singing about Sugar Frosted Flakes to the tune of Beethoven's fifth or the like--this was more like a dialog between musicians from different eras. The result: I went through the family music collection and listened to all the Duke Ellington I could get my hands on.

There's no real point to this story--it's just how I happened to encounter the music of the greatest twentieth-century American composer. Again, happy birthday, Duke Ellington, wherever you are.

Books most often not read?

2008-04-26T22:55:00.004-07:00

John Lynch (Stranger Fruit) has a book meme up. It's the "the top 106 books most often marked as 'unread' by LibraryThing's users." The books I've read are in italics; books I never finished are struck through.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
~~The Picture of Dorian Gray~~
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
~~The Mists of Avalon~~
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

51 read and 2 unfinished. There are actually a couple more that I've started but didn't get far enough in to even count them as unfinished--War and Peace for one. But as I only read a small portion of that for school, and from an abridged edition of it to boot, I don't feel like counting it. Several of these are among my personal favorite books--Emma, Great Expectation, and A Clockwork Orange, for example. Although there are some real turds on this list--Atlas Shrugged and In Cold Blood are good examples--there are none that I wish I hadn't read. Even Ayn Rand; at least Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead helped inoculate me against the illness of market fundamentalism, Reaganosis, and Friedmanitis.

(Hat tip to Afarensis.)

Why do Christians Hate America?

2008-04-20T21:01:00.004-07:00

Five Public Opinions asks what seems to me to be a reasonable question: has Council Nedd II stopped molesting children while he's beating his wife yet? At least it's as reasonable as the question Council Nedd, Bishop of the Chesapeake and Northeast for the Episcopal Missionary Church, chooses to ask on his hate site. Wordpress apparently disagrees.

Today's Editorial

2008-04-18T02:03:00.002-07:00

Now this is what I'd like to see in my newspaper--front page, editorial section:

Sanctimonious Monsters

by P. Z. Myers

Yesterday, two great pious leaders of the world met in Washington DC. President Bush has immense temporal power, leading one of the richest countries on the planet with the most potent military force. Pope Benedict is a spiritual leader to a billion people, with immense influence and the responsibility of a long religious legacy. What could they have talked about? Mostly, they seem to have patted each other on the back and congratulated each other on their commitment to superstition....
Bush calls us a nation of prayer — a depressing label that makes us a country of delusions. Worse, he claims that we respect life as sacred, a lie straight from his lips. How can George Bush claim our country does not debase and discard human lives? ...
The great pious Catholic Pope stands before this man, and what does he say? Does he mention that Jesus asked that we do to others as we would have them do to us? Does he remind him that they call their religious figurehead the "Prince of Peace", and that he asked us to turn the other cheek when we were struck, or that he asked that we protect the poor and weak? Does he point out that the central event in their shared faith was the torture and execution of their prophet and god, and that the New Testament isn't about emulating the heroic Romans?

No, of course not. An obscenely wealthy old man heading an organization that protects child abusers and advocates horrendous and ignorant social practices that harm the poor all around the world would look utterly hypocritical even trying to rebuke a war-monger and apologist for torture. So instead he stands there and tells him that they share common principles founded in fear of a nebulous god. ...
There's an evil tableau for you: the callous torturer stands up with blood on his hands and a lie in his teeth, while the priest draped in gilt reassures him of his righteousness. How often has that scene played out in history, I wonder?