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How We Got Our Brains, If We Did

Michele Bachmann said that our founders fought tirelessly against slavery.  
The problem is that many of our founders owned slaves.  
Slavery was not abolished until the time of the Civil War.  


Most of our presidential aspirants talk as if our founders intended to establish a Christian nation.  The genius of the people who wrote our Constitution was not that they intended a church-state, but that they were religious of a sort that used common religious language, and might or might not have believed in a god of some sort, but that knew that if there were a god, it was a god who had created brains, and intended people to use them; intended them to be rational.  

Thomas Jefferson did say this:

"Question with boldness
even the existence of a God;
because, if there be one,
he must more approve of the homage of reason,
than that of blindfolded fear."
                             --Thomas Jefferson


The Jefferson Memorial, in Washington D.C., is one of my favorite places.  It is so simple, so architecturally elegant, so thunderously powerful with the words on its walls, that one has to fight back tears.  Circling around it perimeter, on the inside, is this quote:



"I have sworn 
upon the altar of god 
eternal hostility 
against every form of tyranny 
over the mind of man."

                             --Thomas Jefferson


I am wearied by the nonsense spewed by people who do not know what they are talking about, even when they are good people, who only want us to be as good and as decent and as religious as they want us to think they are.  


We were not ever founded as a Christian nation--not a Protestant, or a Catholic, or a Mormon Christian nation.  The founders were not like Michele Bachmann, nor Rick Santorum, nor Mitt Romney, nor Newt Gingrich.  The founders, like Thomas Jefferson, mostly believed there was a god, but a god who plainly had endowed people with brains, and who expected people to use them.  And if they didn't use their brains, they would have to endure being stupid, or ignorant.  And they did not end slavery, nor give women the right to vote.  They plainly were not stupid or ignorant, but they were caught in their own culture.  Some, like Jefferson, almost broke free.


If there is a god,
it must expect us to use our brains.
If it doesn't, it doesn't have any brains, either.  


So what did your god create?
Critters with brains?
Or did you get your brains some other way?


Having them, and using them, is more important than how you got them.

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