March 3, 2005

• A Christian Country (words from its founders).

   

  "A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law" – Benjamin Franklin

   

  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." – Thomas Paine

   

  "religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize." – James Madison

   

  "What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution." – again, James Madison

   

   “As the Government of the United States...is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion…  it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” – 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, article 11.    Endorsed by the Secretary of State and President John Adams, passed unanimously by the Senate and printed in full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers.

   

  "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." – Thomas Jefferson.

   

  "Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been upon the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!'" – John Adams

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