The Fundamentalism Virus

¡Hola! Everybody…
I’m tired today…

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-=[ The Myth of the Ten Commandments ]=-

“I hope I will live to see the day when… we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them.”

-- Rev. Jerry Falwell

“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction… consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith… We need believing people.”

-- Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933 speech during negotiations leading to Nazi-Vatican Concordan

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“God wants me to run for president.”

George W. Bush, 2000 presidential campaign

I am convinced that I am acting as an agent of our Creator. By fighting the jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.”

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Most don’t notice that I call my blog [un]Common Sense. There’s a reason for that and mostly id a tip of the hat to Thomas Paine. I call it [un]Common Sense because of my firm belief that nothing even resembling common sense exists. Today, I’m going to rely a little on Paine and the men he influenced…

As much as we like to deify mythologize them, the founders of this nation were imperfect men. Many were slave-owners. Others, like Paine, wrote anti-slavery pamphlets, while Franklin organized the fist anti-slavery societies. Forget women -- they weren’t even on the radar screens.

These men, contrary to what the rabid will tell you, were far from being uniformly Christian. They were freethinkers, agnostics, atheists, Christians, Freemasons, and Deists. Whatever their religious affiliation or lack thereof, they fought for a secular state and for freedom of belief.

Today, the greatest danger we face is not from Islamic extremists or “Jihadists” as Bush likes to call them. The greatest danger we face as a society is from right within our boundaries and it takes the form of a virulent orthodoxy, a state of mind characterized by intolerance and a belligerent anti-reason. It’s called fundamentalism and it has managed to overtake our government and threatens the freedoms we take for granted.

Such is the influence of these fundamentalists that when asked, almost all of the major republican presidential candidates expressed a disbelief in evolutionary science. Indeed, once a leader in virtually every research field, the United States now educates fewer scientists each year, and now imports more high-tech products than it exports.

We have a hick running on the presidential ticket, whose motto is “Drill, baby, drill,” (referring to drilling in the Alaskan wilderness) in the face of a vast scientific consensus that fossil fuels constitute the single greatest factor in climate change. She also, when pressed, couldn’t identify one major newspaper she reads as a way of forming her worldview.

She wears her ignorance with pride. And you vote for her, think she’s “cute” and emblematic of women all over our country. The rest of the world watches as we make collective asses of ourselves.

Let me be clear: the Ten Commandments are unconstitutional and have nothing to do with our legal system or the foundations our freedoms are based on. By any name the Ten Commandments intersects with U.S. law on only three issues: murder, theft, and perjury. In addition, all these crimes had already been forbidden in recorded history long before any Judeo-Christian cultures. In fact, the author of the Declaration of independence himself refuted the false claim about the basis of U.S. law when he outlined the history of common law in a letter to Thomas Cooper in 1814.

The constitution contains not one reference to a deity or to any supernatural powers. This was not an oversight; it was crafted in that manner on purpose.

People? It’s very simple:

First Commandment (or Decalogue):

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof… ”

Period.

Love,

Eddie