And Jesus Was Our First President
It’s time again for another laugh-filled episode of our new favorite sitcom, Everybody Loves Doug Giles.
This week, Doug is railing about those damned Communist/hippie history teachers, always claiming that the Founding Fathers were Deists or Unitarians or agnostics, instead of the Southern Baptists we know they were.
No matter what your Marxist, lesbian, long-toothed, community college history teacher sporting a bad haircut, stretch pants and stale coffee breath says, the vast majority of the founding fathers of our great nation were deeply committed Christians. I?m talkin? deep.
So deep that you can’t see it, even! And if you happen to find quotes from John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Ethan Allen, which seem to indicate they weren’t Christians, then those aren’t the vast majority of the founding fathers Doug is talking about.
Those godly, risk-taking ?rebels with a cause? went into life?s laboratory on fresh American soil, as they looked to heaven for wisdom to build a country that would blow their grandmothers? non-existent support stockings off.
And man, did these Christian men ? you heard me, Christian men, not atheist or agnostic or secular relativists — did they do it right!
And it’s so obvious that these men were Christian — you heard Doug, Christian! — that he doesn’t have to offer any proof of it. I mean, could non-Christian men have created America, the land God favors about all other nations? Of course not! So, the founding fathers had to be Christians.
And we have fallen away from the Christian utopia they created by taking “In Christ We Trust” off the flag, by eliminating the religious tests for public office, and by letting non-Christians be American citizens.
Yes, little Sally secularist, they created, from a Judeo-Christian premise, the United States of America ? a human achievement without parallel. (By the way, my secularist friend, what have you created over the last 300 years that comes close to what Judeo-Christian men have built here in the US ? uhh, France?)
Um, I’m only a secularist in the sense that I don’t believe that religion should be the basis of goverment, just like the founding fathers who created the United States of America believed. And don’t call me Shirley … I mean, Sally.
The re-writing of our history (by denying that God was integral to these godly men?s lives) ? the ongoing offensives to remove the law of God from our country and Constitution ? our ethical rot that?s on a par with Sodom and Rome: America! What the hell are you thinking?
Let us be clear. If traditional Americans don?t wake up, stand up, rile up and build up our original godly foundations, then history will throw up on our ?Great Experiment?, and the U.S. will serve merely as a tourist stop on the way to another new, principled, God-honoring land.
Canada?
Or is Doug saying that he and his fellow traditional Americans who have woken up are going to found their own God-honoring nation? If so, maybe they could do it in Doug’s backyard, and call it Christica. Or Gilelandia.
My ClashPoint is this: Judeo-Christian roots support our luscious American tree. There is a direct correlation between our principled relationship to God and the prosperity of our nation. Currently, atheistic and god-denying, axe-wielders are hacking away at our religious roots like Paul Bunyan on crystal meth, while the Church and many traditional Americans are taking a passive nap. Mr. & Mrs. America, we all should want to protect this heritage and proudly perpetuate the great gift of a richly principled America to coming generations.
And my CounterClashPoint is this: Our yummy American apple tree was planted in the rich, black dirt of seperation of church and state, and there is a direct correlation between Freedom of Religion for all and the lack of a state religion. Currently, wingnuts are picking the apples of freedom off of the tree of America and throwing them at people who don’t want a state religion. And then those wingnuts are making applejack with the apples, getting drunk, and making up crap about the founding fathers. Mr. and Mrs. America, we should want to protect our heritage of freedom by allowing each person to worship (or not) God (or not) according to the dictates of his own conscience, and not try to force America to be something it never was: a country with laws based on Christianity. Now, who wants pie?
“…hacking away at our religious roots like Paul Bunyan on crystal meth…”
Oh, there’s a foundation that’s being hacked away all right, but it’s not by atheistic & God denying people. The foundation of this country is being hacked away by Christian fundamentalists who believe that their way is the only way.
This guy Doug doesn’t seem to understand that the founding fathers were escaping religious persecution and sought to create a goverment where that would not be an issue.
OK, this is about enough now. I did all my work completely clean and sober. (OK, there was that episode in Door County with the applejack and the woman who drove the donkeycart, but that was just once, and they dropped the charges.) Where does this clown get off, anyway?
Who do I sue?
Now, who wants pie?
I’d like some, but only if it’s blueberry. Or pecan. Or lemon meringue. Or Boston Cream. Mmm…
There’s pie? Somebody said there’d be pie…
Something tells me that Town Hall was taken in by a not-so-elaborate hoax. I mean, nobody with enough brain functioning to support basic respiration could have seriously typed that.
Man oh man, I hate it when Christian right-wingers try to be snarky, coming up with all sorts of sarcastic nicknames and lame attempts at oh-no-you-dih-ent “zingers.” Giles sounds like your lame uncle who used to be cool but is now in mid-life-crisis stage, trying to cover up his emptiness with a Corvette and a so-so rug. “Hey, bro, what’s happening? You want to go to church with me, hang with the Big J.C.? You know that’s who our Founding Fathers were down with, my little agnostic hombre…”
And God, spare me the “ClashPoints.” Dude, that’s caught on with precisely nobody. The phrase “solid gone, daddy-o” will return to American conversation in non-ironic fashion before anyone picks up “ClashPoint” as a legitimate slang term.
More proof that the right wing is insane.
Now, where’s that pie?
I’m going to send this nitwit a link to earlyamerica.com where you can read some of the interesting comments made by our founding fathers about religion in general and Christians as well. Maybe we can get Howie to start fact-checking this guy……………
“community college history teacher sporting a bad haircut, stretch pants and stale coffee breath”
Hey, guys…maybe we’re looking at this Doug fellow all wrong. I mean it sounds like Doug is saying that we should put more funding into education so that our teachers can afford FRESH coffee and then (if I understand his reasoning) be able to offer our finest young minds better schooling.
But what’s with the comment about bad haircuts? You’re damned if you spend money on a haircut (i.e. John Kerry, Bill Clinton) but you’re also damned if you don’t spend money on a haircut (i.e. damned commie pinko child molesting Islamofascists).
Oh…wait…NOW I get it!
Doug thinks we should all use the Flowbie!
See? I think we’ve got poor Doug all wrong. Nobody who advocates the Flowbie as a public policy cure-all can be a bad guy!
Currently, atheistic and god-denying, axe-wielders are hacking away at our religious roots like Paul Bunyan on crystal meth, while the Church and many traditional Americans are taking a passive nap.
Yeah! ‘Cause, like, remember how all the Democratic contenders spent time cracking up during the debates on their favorite ridiculous bible quote, and doing imitations of Jimmy Swaggart crying? And how they even convinced Sharpton to become an atheist? And how Kerry referred to the story of Jesus standing out in contrast to the rest of the bible “like a diamond in a dung-heap”?* Oh, wait – that was Thomas Jefferson. The third president actually implied that the vast majority of the bible was a big pile of shit. I wish we had politicians that honest today.
And yeah, why don’t we ever hear from all those traditional Americans and right-wing Church leaders? I have no idea where they stand on these things; I wish someone would wake them up!
*Either from The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America, by Frank Lambert, or American Jesus by Stephen Prothero. Can’t remember which off the top of my head.
I’m going to send this nitwit a link to earlyamerica.com where you can read some of the interesting comments made by our founding fathers about religion in general and Christians as well.
That won’t work. Anything that disagrees with the narrow Christian worldview is just a part of the homo-liberal, Islamo-fascist conspiracy to rewrite history and exclude the Christian contributions.
Paul Bunyan sez: Where does this clown get off, anyway? Who do I sue?
Well, Paul, I’m sure that you and the Weyerhauser legal department will think of something…
You so snaaarr-keey.
Doug Giles, the Fighting Young Priest Who Can Talk to Today’s Teens, wrote: By the way, my secularist friend, what have you created over the last 300 years that comes close to what Judeo-Christian men have built here in the US ? uhh, France?
Well, I was going to mention the cathedrals of France, surely among the most beautiful in the world and hardly secularist, but they were all built more than 300 years ago. That’s because France, along with the rest of the western world, realized centuries ago that obsessing over imaginary invisible superhero cloud beings was really, really fucking silly. Thus ended the dark ages.
Naturally, some disagreed, and they fled to America–
Where they could burn witches in peace. [badump-bum]
By the way, S., that was one of the most beautiful demonstrations of metaphor torture I’ve ever seen. We may have to open up a new category in the Koufax Awards!
Doug should take note: if you really want to screw the language– and screw it good!– you’ve got to know what you’re doing; this is no task for rank amateurs.
Fab post. I want pie!
s.z.! Your apple pie is just _delicious_!
Unlike that plastic turkee that preznit keeps trying to feed us!
That’s because France, along with the rest of the western world, realized centuries ago that obsessing over imaginary invisible superhero cloud beings was really, really fucking silly. Thus ended the dark ages.
Chris Vosburg! What would your mother say if she saw you out here, all hopped up on crystal meth, denying God and wielding that axe against our nation’s religious roots? For shame, good sir!
Besides, you look like you could use a break. Lemme have that axe…
I wonder, if someone literally tied down this man and forced him to realize that the founding fathers were much more inspired by (then contemporary) French secularist philosophy than by Christianity (which was still hung up on, um, ‘the divine right of kings’), would it kill him, or would he have to be finished off by showing him George Washington’s Treaty of Tripoli?
Wow, Doug has really, really bought into the company line. Is there such a thing as auto-indoctrination? Well, at least I learned that richly principled Americans do not wear stretch pants. (Wal-Mart fashon buyers: please note.)
Wonder if this man, who wants everything good in this country to be attributed to Christianity, is at the same time willing to contemplate that Christian values were also used to justify some of the most criminal actions in our nation’s history: slavery, racism, conquest of Native Americans, etc.
Didn’t think so.
Chris Vosburg! What would your mother say…
Well[laughing], it just makes me so darn mad!
Nevertheless, my apologies for being so cranky.
It’s been getting worse: I used to be polite to Jehovah’s Witless on the porch, but several months ago I sorta snapped and hollered “Oh, don’t make me laugh! God didn’t tell you to do this! He wouldn’t talk to you clowns if you were the last people in the universe!” as the unsuspecting God peddlers scuttled away.
Haven’t seen any since, so perhaps there’s some sort of “hobo’s mark” on my place to warn of the infidel inside…
Hmmm… “Infidel Inside”… oh man, I gotta find someone who can print this on a shirt (Intel trademark violation, woohoo!).
Q: What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a biker?
A: Somebody who knocks on your door and tells YOU to f— off!
How can we deny Christian roots of Democracy? Let us inspect, one by one, may tenets of our democratic system.
1. Demo-kratia, rule of the people, is a Greek word, and Greek is the language of Gospels. But Athens introduced democracy without any input from Judeo-Christian tradition, and that Gospels, Letters etc. say zilch on democracy.
2. Rule by officials elected for short terms. Again, Greeks. A pair of legislative assamblies, separate executive and separate judiciary: Roman Republic, and a systematic theory by French Montesqieu.
3. How Christian were theories of Montesqieu? They were instantly noticed by Roman Catholic Church and his book entered The List of Prohibited Books. But British philosophers of Enlightement appreciated Montesqieu a lot, and our Founding Fathers knew him well. The chap joined Free Mason when he visited London for two years.
4. Is there ANY detail of the Constitution that could be inpired by the Scripture? Perhaps the federal system, the initial number of states was even similar to the number of tribes of Israel. But that would be about it.
5. Is there any detail of the Constitution that is strictly against the Scripture? Well, it seems that the idea of Census is condemned in Old Testament, especially if it is used to levy taxes — as it was originally done.
And so we are cutting our Judeo-Christian roots with abominations like Census and adultery.
By the way, I refreshed myself on Montesqieu, and in those times British and French thinkers were visiting each other, writing to each other, or even touring Europe together, without any regard on wars, religious disputes etc. For well educated gentlemen, there was a single European culture. Enlightement is definitely a monument that secular people can be proud of.
Good one, glen. To back this off a little bit, I should point out that I most definitely believe in god.
The nature of my belief has been explained more eloquently than I ever could in the pages of the New York Sun, in the late nineteenth century:
“He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and they give to your life its highest beauty and joy.”
piotr, you need only look at the etymology of the wod “citizen”…
No need for apologies, Chris. I don’t see how sane people can avoid getting mad over this kind of theocratic historical revisionism. People like Giles know full well that they’re lying, overstuffed bags of carrion and offal. They just hope the old “repeat it loud and long enough” strategy will work eventually.
I got a “No Bible-Thumpers” sticker, a picture of two Jehovah’s Witnesses inside a red circle/slash, from Northern Sun (www.northernsun.com)to put on my door; it’s worked like a charm. I also found an Intel parody “Devil Inside” shirt from somewhere on the web – tshirtking.com, or something like that.
The founding fathers must have been Christian… who else could have so efficiently decimated the indigenous populations?
I just figured out what Giles is doing: He’s trying to be the conservative-Christian Dennis Miller (not realizing, evidently, that Dennis Miller has already become the conservative-Christian Dennis Miller).
Think about it: the ranty tone; the long, convoluted metaphors and attempts at pop-culture references; the overpowering aroma of forced snarkiness; the stream-of-consciousness succession of political dogmas (dogmae?) reduced to sound-bite size. Hell, he’s even got his use-it-till-it-hurts catch phrase (“My ClashPoint is this”
Dammit! Who ate all the pie?