Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura is in the news again, credited with a large tax cut for citizens of his state. It was just a few years ago that Jesse created a firestorm with his comments on religion.
Jesse Ventura’s famous comments on religion turned my thoughts to the subject. Perhaps it’s foolish of me to discuss it, but I haven’t had a vituperative letter for a couple of weeks now, and miss the rush.
America is not only the most religious of the advanced countries, but it’s one of the most religious in the world, including the Islamic states, which are often ridiculed for their religiosity. The Economist reported in 1999 that 90 percent of Americans say religion is “fairly” or “very” important to them; 70 percent report an affiliation with a religious group of some type and 40 percent regularly attend services. In fact, that July, the House narrowly missed the two-thirds majority needed to pass a resolutions calling on Americans “to observe a day of solemn prayer, fasting and humiliation before God.” Personally, I find the near success of the measure appalling, entirely apart from being an affront to the separation of church and state specified in the Constitution.
In the long-standing tradition of the Constitution being so whimsically interpreted that most of it is dead letter anyway, the barrier against the state involving itself in religion has been lowered gradually over the years. Two instances that come to mind are the addition of the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and the mandatory addition of the motto “In God We Trust” to all currency in 1955.
What about the abolition of school prayer? In the first place, the government (and certainly the federal government) has no business in the school business. But then neither did it have any business instituting a Pledge of Allegiance (which amounts to a loyalty oath and violates the religious views of several sects in itself), or putting a religious motto on currency.
Getting back to Jesse Ventura, he said: “Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people’s business. I live by the golden rule: Treat others as you’d want them to treat you. The religious right wants to tell people how to live.”
That statement provoked widespread outrage, and caused his popularity ratings to fall from the mid-70s to the mid-50s. Entirely apart from my own sentiments on the topic, it was perhaps impolitic to insult the beliefs of a majority of his supporters. But his outspokenness deserves respect in a day when politicians consult the polls before saying a word; and his election didn’t amount to a contract not to voice his opinions.
Of course in the days when moral and intellectual giants walked the political landscape, men in public office were much more outspoken than the sorry, conventional, mealy-mouthed suits who stand in their places today:
Thomas Paine: “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. … Each of these churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”
John Adams: “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!'”
Thomas Jefferson: “Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of god: because, if there is one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than blindfolded fear.” (Note: As a deist, not a Christian, Jefferson often did not capitalize “god.”)
James Madison: “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise. … During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
Ethan Allen: “I am no Christian.”
Certainly, many of the founders were devout Christians. And quoting the opinions of famous people is never a logical resolution to any argument. It was bold for non-believers to say things like that, in those days especially; America was, after all, colonized mostly by gun-bearing Bible-thumpers. What is disturbing is not the content of Jesse’s opinions, but the fact the United States has become so politically correct that few today would have the courage to voice them.
Not so for Mencken and Bakunin, however. The quotes are by no means their most forthright, in view of the fact that this is, after all, a family publication:
H.L. Mencken: “Yet the only great document that comes down to us from that great day (8th & 9th centuries, BC) is part of the book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it. The kind of mind it reveals is the kind one encounters today among New York washroom attendants, Mississippi newspaper editors and Tennessee judges. It is barely above the level of observation and ratiocination of a bright young jackass.”
Mikhail Bakunin: “The people, said the Church, should assure themselves of heavenly treasures by abandoning earthly goods and pleasures to the prosperous and powerful of the earth. You know that all the Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant, continue to preach this way still today. Happily they are less and less listened to, and we can foresee the time when they will be forced to close their establishments for lack of believers, or to put it another way, a lack of dupes.”
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