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• Friday, October 3, 2008 03:48 PM

  The Founding Presindents Were Not Christian

  Andrew O'Hehir: "the religion Maher is describing is not imaginary, and in various forms and guises is professed by most people in the United States, including every president we've ever had..."

  Andrew I'm a fan of yours, but that's not correct. As the Encyclopedia Brittanica puts it:

  "One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian."

  http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/quotes_founders.html

  Moreover there is no indication that George Washington and James Madison were in any sense Christians. And Jefferson was an avowed anti-Christian, in the sense that per Christians Jesus was the Son of God. Here's of many statements Jefferson made on the subject:

  "The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a Virgin Mary, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

  Andrew O'Hehir: "(I'm sorry, that's right -- one of this year's candidates is a Muslim.)"

  If only more than 10% of Americans didn't take that joke seriously...

  —Publicola Read Publicola's other letters
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