Mike Harman: Godless Democrats are in good company
I don't think godless Democrats are
all of a piece, as Smith would have you believe. I assume most Americans, like
me, bristle when others start telling us what kind of religion to embrace, if
any. It seems to me that some key figures in America's past, like Thomas Paine
and Thomas Jefferson, had some problems with the Christian Bible and worked
hard to ensure religious freedom when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were
written.
Some of us godless Democrats are
quite interested in learning about the various religious teachings, because we
want to understand what purpose religion serves, and where people like Smith
get their ideas. And, in keeping with tradition, it looks like they're making
it up as they go.
Why not take a look at what some
great Americans thought? Let's consider Paine, whom many credit with stirring
the revolutionary fervor to the tipping point: "I do not believe in the
creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church,
by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know
of. My own mind is my own Church," he wrote in "The Age of
Reason."
Jefferson was known to be cautious of
investment in any organized religious code. "The whole history of these
books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt
minute inquiry 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," he wrote
in a letter to John Adams in 1814.
Later on, Mark Twain got in his licks
in his autobiography: "In religion and politics people's beliefs and
convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without
examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at
issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose
opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."
Will Rogers: "There is no
argument in the world that carries the hatred that a religious belief does. The
more learned a man is the less consideration he has for another man's
belief."
Frederick Douglass, an American slave
who escaped, wrote his autobiography at age 27 and went on to become a friend
of Abraham Lincoln and recruited thousands of black men into the Union Army.
"I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere
covering for the most horrid crimes -- a justifier of the most appalling
barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under
which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders
find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of
slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a
religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me ... I ... hate the
corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and
hypocritical Christianity of this land," he wrote in "After the
Escape."
Let's not leave out John F. Kennedy,
a Democrat who was a Catholic, but famously said, "I believe in a
president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by
him upon the nation, or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to
holding that office. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the
church does not speak for me."
Smith couldn't help but refer to Ann
Coulter in his defamation of godless Democrats, which makes me suspect that he
is in fact a handler of serpents. She has been known to bite anyone within
spitting range. He has apparently been bitten hard.
Harman is retired
and lives in St. Albans.
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