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December 2, 2016 § 9 Comments
” … What influence in fact have ecclesiastical establishments had on Civil Society? In some instances they have been seen erecting a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of Civil authority; in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who have wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to preserve and perpetuate it [public liberty] needs them not. Such a government will be best supported by protecting in every Citizen in the enjoyment of his Religion with the same equal hand which protects his person and his property; by neither invading the equal rights of any Sect, nor suffering any Sect to invade those of others.” — James Madison
” … this would be the best possible world if there were no religion in it.” — John Adams (quoted by Jefferson in a letter)
“In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot. … they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purpose.” — Thomas Jefferson
[I came across these quotes and thought they were share-worthy as a counterpoint to the school of thought that our founding fathers intended this to be a Christian nation. Madison, Adams, and Jefferson were three of the most prominent founders. Madison is considered by many scholars to have been a Deist, and Jefferson definitely was so. Jefferson revered the teachings of Jesus, but believed Christianity had subverted and corrupted His teachings. Adams, who was a Congregationalist and later a Unitarian, considered himself a Christian, but shared Jefferson’s views on Christianity.
Two other founding fathers, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, were also Deists. Paine’s Age of Reason is a scathing denunciation of religion. Franklin considered himself both a Deist and a Christian. Franklin made a motion at the 1787 Constitutional Convention that every session begin with a prayer for God’s guidance; the motion was defeated.
What the founders shared was an abhorrence of any state-sponsored religion such as the Anglican Church in England. They also recognized that there were many different religions planted in and taking root in the new nation, and that any persecution for religious beliefs would be too much like the English system, which the rejected. Hence the First Amendment.
When the French were looking for a model for their post-royalty nation, they admired the new United States Constitution, and used it as a template for their own recognition of the rights of citizens. After consultation with several of our founders, they were persuaded to make their own government a purely secular one, which, with a few deviations, it has remained to this day.]
“Quote Unquote”
November 4, 2016 § Leave a comment
“True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Deeds of kindness are equal in weight to all the commandments.” – Talmud
“ … equity, though just, is not legal justice, but a rectification of legal justice. The reason for this is that law is always a general statement, yet there are cases which it is not possible to cover in a general statement.” – Aristotle
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September 2, 2016 § Leave a comment
“Gods always behave like the people who made them.” – Zora Neale Hurston
“We are what we create.” – James Oppenheim
“The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However, vast darkness, we must supply our own light.” – Stanley Kubrick
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August 5, 2016 § Leave a comment
“Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action — such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism — these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.” – W. J. Cash
“That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness…” – Anne Rivers Siddons
“I’m very Southern in the way I walk in the world. I love to laugh. I love to eat. I love to hug people. But if somebody makes me mad, my neck may roll. I can be aggressive with a Southern twang.” – Katori Hall
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July 1, 2016 § Leave a comment
“I wanted you to see what real courage is … It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” — Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird
“I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.” — Christopher Reeve
“We should never despair, our Situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again. If new difficulties arise, we must only put forth New Exertions and proportion our Efforts to the exigency of the times.” — George Washington
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June 3, 2016 § 2 Comments
“Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. … The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state … is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from [bs]. An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country.” – Charles Simic
“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.” – Attributed to Aristotle
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” – Plutarch
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May 6, 2016 § 1 Comment
“A madman is not cured by another running mad also.” — Antisthenes.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” — Nietzche
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April 8, 2016 § Leave a comment
“Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.” — Ray Bradbury
“Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.” — E. M. Forster
“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” — Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird
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February 5, 2016 § 1 Comment
“To bargain freedom for security is the devil’s bargain. Having made the bargain, one enjoys neither freedom nor security.” — Gerry Spence
“If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
“A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” — William Greenough Thayer Shedd
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January 8, 2016 § 1 Comment
“The woods were silent until the first squeak of cricket, followed by young frogs in the creek below and the rising drone of cicadas. He inhaled the heavy scent of summer earth, a loamy musk that settled over him like a caul. He was home.” — Chris Offutt in The Good Brother
“I fancied I could smell the Mississippi, which for me is southern America in a liquid form, signifying fried catfish, roasting ears dipped in butter, and watermelon in the cool of the evening, washed down with corn liquor and accompanied by the blues.” — Alan Lomax in The Land Where the Blues Began
“They have thundered past now and crashed silently on into the dusk; night has fully come. Yet he still sits at the study window, the room still dark behind him. The street lamp at the corner flickers and glares, so that the bitten shadows of the unwinded maples seem to toss faintly upon the August darkness. From a distance, quite faintly, he can hear the sonorous waves of massed voices from the church: a sound at once austere and rich, abject and proud, swelling and falling in the quiet summer darkness like a harmonic tide.” — William Faulkner in Light in August
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