Washington, Hamilton, Madison: “Religion is okay, but keep it at arm’s length from the government.”
Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams: “Religion is pretty not-okay, keep it at arm’s length from the government.”
Jay: “No Catholics”
Thomas Paine: “Fuck all 'yall, I’m going to France where I don’t have to put up with any of this bullshit.”
To adapt an old Soviet joke…
Three men are sitting in prison awaiting Madame Guillotine. One says to the other, “I’m sentenced for supporting Thomas Paine. What about you?”
“I’m sentenced for opposing Thomas Paine.” They both turn to the third man and ask what he’s going to be executed for.
Thomas Paine sighs.
Nothing makes atheists faster than reading the bible
In my experience, if you read it cover to cover, it either makes you an atheist or makes you super religious. Not too many people go into it as a basic “I go to church on Sundays” Christian and come out of it the same.
I highly recommend the Esoterica channel on YouTube. He gets into all the interesting stuff that was left out of the Bible. The greater context and pre-Bible history is fascinating.
Does he go over the apocrypha too? I love the Infancy Gospel of Thomas where teenage Jesus is an asshole who abuses his powers because he feels like it.
He mentions it fairly often. If he doesn’t have some videos on it yet, I imagine he will add some. I’ve mostly been watching his videos on Gnosticism and also some about the early pantheon from which Yahweh likely emerged. He covers a wide variety of stuff.
I like the one where Jesus was born in a cave, there were no wise men, just a few random children, and within like an hour of being born, Jesus fights a dragon and wins. That’s a much cooler nativity scene.
Mainline Protestant over here just munching on my popcorn
Same thing I was thinking. Episcopalians with the daily office read through the Bible every 2 years and most of them are super chill
I have been reading scholarly works about Jesus, the formation and development of Christianity, previously lost teachings and such. I’ve read a lot of OT passages in these books about later events as a result. I am have become convinced that the Old Testament god was a mean piece of shit.
What gave it away? Ruining someone’s entire life, taking all he loves, inflicting him with the worst pains a human can feel, just to prove “See? I told you he’s my greatest bootlick”? Nuking an entire town and killing someone for the entirely human reaction of looking back at the home they left behind like some even more twisted version of Orpheus and Eurydike?
Or giving his creations curiosity, tempting their curiosity, enabling them to indulge their curiosity, then yelling at them, throwing them out, condemning them to mortality, inflicting suffering on them and all their descendants as punishment for their ancestors’ curiosity who didn’t even have the comprehension to know what they were doing was wrong?
Yes, I know that story is supposed to be a metaphor, but I have yet to find an explanation that doesn’t make him look like an absolute twat.
No mixing fabrics, fucken killjoy.
Actually, that one I’ll give a pass for its context: Cheats mixing in cheap materials with expensive ones, but demanding the full price as if the whole thing was made of the expensive one.
Now the bit in Numbers about the cursed water, that was a bit fucked up - you shouldn’t have to secretly cheat on your husband just to get an abortion. Imagine someone catches you and you get put to death instead. And what if he doesn’t suspect anything or doesn’t give enough of a shit to charge you? Just too unreliable.
I am making a joke ai understand a good bit of context, plus if memory serves right there is a debate amongst scholars if the laws of say Leviticus was a general law that applied to all Hebrews or simply the tribe of Leviticus. Basically were they clan laws or not.
Oh yeah. Judaism at the time was basically, “God is a big mean motherfucker and if you don’t do what he wants, he won’t just punish you, he’ll punish your entire people collectively.”
My headcanon is that the New Testament god was someone else who murdered the old god and usurped his followers, pretending to be him.
One interesting topic in the book, How Jesus Became God, was theological work in the first couple hundred years of christianity deciding whether the god of the OT was the same god Jesus praised or a different god.
It’s pretty good at making Satanists too.
Not just completely excluded, explicitly excluded.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
1st ammendment of the US constitution
The separation of church and state was not only to keep your religion out of politics, but also to keep politics out of your religion.
And today’s christian fundamentalists usually have not read the Bible, or, heaven forbid, understood the key messages, but want it to force on other people against their will. Which tells a lot of how little those fundamentalists have understood the Bible.
They don’t read the Bible, they just do whatever their pastor tells them.
Exactly. And the pastor would never try to teach about the more … problematic … parts of the Bible: Incest, robbery, murder, rape, and all of it in the name of God. Heck, confront them with a real text from the book, and they assume you are showing them a faked version intended to mock them or make their believe sound bad.
I was a fundamentalist. (Raised in it.)
I actually read the bible and studied it. No longer a Christian.
Funny how that works.
Thompson Chain Reference KJV represent.
It’s not just the Bible. But also the literal religious wars and genocides that Europe dealt with for hundreds of years. Those wars went to 1710. So they were very fresh in the minds of political thinkers.
The Church of Christ is much more culty and insular than other denominations. I almost lost some friends to them, but they managed to escape.
I’m a member, there is a vast spectrum of Churches of Christ. Many of the more conservative ones are extremely difficult to work with.
Just a tiny push-back here: The political philosophy of the founding of America did depend on the 18th Enlightenment, but it also has roots in the 17th century Protestantism of the English Civil War.
Specifically ideals like “Equality before the State”, separation of Church and State, and universal (male) suffrage, have a direct through-line to anti-monarchist, anti-Catholic, radical Puritanism.
I’m no David Barton, but America didn’t fall out of a coconut tree.
But even (and especially) those religious founders influenced by the puritans saw the wisdom of the separation of church and state. They remembered when the religious English and Scottish states persecuted them.
On the shoulders of giants. Everything builds from the past, successes and failures. The colonies might have continued to endure their hardships even longer if it wasn’t for one more giant’s writings, Thomas Paine.
