It's that time of year again, when we gear up for the rewards (or disappointments) promised in our celebrations of the Yule Season. Christmas Time! Days of saccharine movies, maudlin songs, a hope for fluffy white snowfall that is somehow miraculously easy to drive through and falls only on grassy…
Any fundamentalist will tell you that our nation was founded as a Christian nation by Christians and for Christians. Their carefully crafted surveys show that a massive majority of Americans say that they are Christian, and therefore approve the fundamentalist platform.
Let’s look at some of their potent evidence. I pulled this fact from a Christian political activist site, ObjectiveMinistries.org
“Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord [i.e. Jesus Christ] one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth In Witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names…”
– Article VII, US Constitution
Yeah. I’m sure that our Deist founders inserted the phrase “Year of our lord” to enforce Christian doctrine. This was simply a declaration of what calendar they were using (as opposed to the Chinese or Hebrew calendars). But then, this site also is currently pushing “Roy Moore for Alabama Governor — Taking America Back For The Lord One State At A Time!”
Apparently the word “Objective” in their URL refers to its meaning as “Target” rather than “unbiased”. I got to this site while looking for the obvious parody site, LandoverBaptist.org. Anyone with the sense of a 10 year old would recognize that it is a pointed parody, yet the ObjectiveMinitries site has labeled it as hate-speech and misleading, and is running a campaign to get it shut down.
I suggest …
I received the following from a friend of mine, who sent it to his local paper as well. I’ve asked his permission to post it here, in its entirety. It concerns an issue which, while we may hope represents an unfortunate part of our history long outgrown, still rears its…
Four familiar words. Four words not even found in this form in the bible, at that. Why should we even pay attention to this ancient and revered phrase?
Actually, it dates back to a Christian political activist in the 19th century pushing the treasury to make sure that future archaeologists (on finding no evidence of our civilization but our coins) know that we were a Christian nation. It was thus briefly seen on the U.S. 2-cent piece at the end of the civil war. And then retired, not to be seen again for over a generation.
Then came the morality movement backlash from “The Gay 90’s”. Picture a disco era for your great-great-grandparents. This post-Victorian backlash eventually led to the 18th and 21st amendments (prohibition and its repeal). Meanwhile, this slogan started appearing on coins in 1908. There is nothing like the fear of pleasure to get politicians who need to appear churchy to move on a moral issue.
I just read an article “IN GOD WE TRUST” — STAMPING OUT RELIGION ON NATIONAL CURRENCY that suggests protest in the form of marking out the offending theist sentiment on any folding money that passes through our hands. Although it is petty vandalism, it is not a federal offense. As long as an alteration you make to money does not change its value in any way, it isn’t illegal.
To start off my day today, I reviewed some of the inconvenient history about Thanksgiving. Then I moved on to anticipate the headline in tomorrow's paper. In what way (it's not a question of if) will the newspaper urge us to spend our precious time on the planet buying things we…