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Melody Clark
melodyclark
26 January 2008 @ 04:20 pm
Mittens and the Huckster are taking Adams' name in vain again  
Mittens (Mitt Romney) and Huckster (Mike Huckabee) have once again been running their gobs this weekend, trying to make John Adams sound like a Christian (along with all the other founders). They always haul out his adjurations to "God Almighty" and "religion" without reading the context (hint: by "religion" he meant "natural moral law"). I'm an Adams buff and any Adams historian can tell you that the contention he was a fundamentalist Christian is utter crap (He was a Unitarian, incidentally). They always leave out his far more specific and pointed comments such as:

The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.

-- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, undated

The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?

-- John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 20, 1815

We should begin by setting conscience free. When all men of all religions ... shall enjoy equal liberty, property, and an equal chance for honors and power ... we may expect that improvements will be made in the human character and the state of society.

-- John Adams, letter to Dr. Price, April 8, 1785

As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?

-- John Adams, letter to FA Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816

God is an essence that we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy [the absoluteness of the divinity of Christ] is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.

-- John Adams, letter to FA Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816

And last but by no means least and perhaps definitively (keep in mind Washington approved this, too):

from The Treaty of Tripoli
Signed by John Adams
"
As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion
; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen [Muslims] ...
it is declared ... that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever product an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries...." "The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation."




Take that, Mittens. You, too, Huckster. More fun fannish stuff tomorrow, but this I had to vent.
 
 
Threat Level: cranky
 
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Enkidu's Esoterica[info]enkiduts on January 27th, 2008 03:16 am (UTC)
Amen!!

I get so tired of that dragging out the "Christian nation founded by Christians" crap by the fundies.
From my understanding, just about every founding father we had was a Unitarian and a/or deist. And the country was founded on the idea of religious freedom--perish the thought!

Someone save us from the fundie idiots please--most of whom are so ignorant of their own history that they scream about the use of Xmas for Christmas, saying it takes the "Christ out of Christmas". If they knew jack shit about their own religion, they'd KNOW that X was a perfectly acceptable shorthand for Christ--when the church was small and vulnerable and having to operate underground! (Don't expect the dummies to know about Greek X being christos in translation or whatever...) Xmas is putting the Christ back INTO Christmas (which is actually the birthday of Mithras anyway, not Christ. Mithras' holy day and symbols having been appropriated by the Church to make dogma more acceptable to the "pagans"
who liked their monthly holy days. The cross was first associated with Mithras as was Sunday as a day of rest, but I digress).

You go Melody!!
Melody Clark: robert anton wilson[info]melodyclark on January 27th, 2008 05:52 am (UTC)
Exactly -- every frickin' damned one of them was an avowed embracer of that era's idea of deism. Adams' Unitarian church (where he and Abigail are buried and where they have a continuing congregation to this day) is planning to start picketing if either of these clowns wins the nomination (and/or if the nominee starts invoking him again).