David Barton slanders Thomas Paine

It pains me to see David Barton, an evangelical christian, slander the founding fathers so terribly. Barton is not a historian. He has a bachelor's degree in Christian Education from Oral Roberts University. Though his writing is predicatably popular among conservative Christian Americans his transgressions as a researcher recently led his publisher - Thomas Nelson -  to yank his controversial book Thomas Jefferson Lies off the shelves.

I was personally pushed over the edge by Barton's cavaleir reference to of one of the most progressive freethinkers in American history - Thomas Paine. Watch the following clip in which Barton asserts that the founding fathers had decided creationism should be taught in public schools in the late 1700's and that Thomas Paine spearheaded the campaign. Nevermind how wildly out-of-context this attribution is considering the theory of evolution was not fully formed until nearly a century later.

If only Barton ever actually read Thomas Paine he would have come accross some of these gems...

"The chrstian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun."

or...

"It is from the Bible that man has learned cruelty, rapine, and murder; for the belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man."

Or any single page of Thomas Paine's lengthy diatribe on the man-made myths rampant throughout the bible entitled the Age or Reason.



Listen to the episode of all things considered below. Numerous errors in David Barton's scholarship are pointed out. Barbara Bradley Hagerty makes clear Barton is flat out lying in his pro-christian propaganda.

Hypatia - Carl Sagan and Stephen Greenblatt

I am currently reading The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt and it is fantastic in my humble opinion. Many thanks to Jack for the high recommendation. 

I have just finished the section of the book where Greenblatt tells the story of the great library at Alexandria and the demise of its last librarian, Hypatia in 415 C.E. I was reminded of the above video from Carl Sagan's Cosmos series. There are a few differing details in the two accounts; Sagan says the mob used abalone shells, Greenblatt says they used broken pottery. Either way the scene painted marks a terrible inflection point in history. 

A woman of legendary beauty and intellect, Hypatia's death epitomized the decay of natural philosophy in the wake of spreading Christian fundamentalism. In the moment of her death as a mob of zealous Christians carved her flesh the pendulum of history began a millennium of descent into fear and superstition. 

I can not help but think of the current state of natural philosophy here in the United States. It scares me that people I run into on a daily basis probably are not aware that the inclusion of "under God" in our national pledge of allegiance, the inscription "In God we Trust" on our currency, and the adoption of the same phrase as our national motto all happened in the year 1952! 

These tacitly Christian phrases were injected into our national identity as a result of McCarthy era fear-mongering. A perceived spread of communism pushed the US government to pass reactionary legislation echoed by the Patriot Act.

The founding fathers were more like thinkers in the great library of Alexandria when they adopted the inclusive motto "E Pluribus Unim." 

My question is, when did our Hypatia die? 

Today, it is the height of irony to pull out a nickel and see this!

Ed Brayton, fellow freethinker and blogger posted this on Facebook a few days ago and it has been resonating in my head ever since. Ed writes the blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars.