Rob Boston has an interesting post at Talk2Action about a group called the Ten Commandments Commission. Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri has actually submitted a resolution, HR 598, lauding this organization and saying that Congress “supports the goals of the Ten Commandments Commission and recognizes the vital contributions of America’s tens of thousands of spiritual leaders, churches, synagogues, fellowships, ministries, and organizations” working with them. Their goal is the establishment of a Ten Commandments Day.

The group is pretty much a Who’s Who of the religious right – Paul Crouch, Pat Robertson, Jay Sekulow, Benny Hinn, Richard Roberts, David Barton, Gary Bauer, James Dobson, and so forth. Even Ted Haggard’s name is still on the list. But the project is led by Ron Wexler, an Orthodox Jew with more than a few wacky ideas. Joseph Grant Swank, a past winner of the Robert O’Brien Trophy, quotes Wexler on Hurricane Katrina:
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Chris Rodda’s latest post at Talk2Action exposing the falsehoods in the NCBCPS curriculum focuses on a couple of very common claims found in Christian Nation apologetics. The big one is the claim that half of the founders attended seminaries. She quotes the following statement from the curriculum:

The leaders of the Revolutionary era were “steeped in the traditions and teachings of Christianity — almost half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence had some form of seminary training or degree.”

Again, an extremely common claim that has been made by David Barton and other revisionists for decades but it is highly misleading. Most of them attended schools like Harvard and Princeton (then known as the College of New Jersey), which were founded as seminaries but which, by then, had law schools and many other courses of study. Rodda explains:
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Chris Rodda has a terrific post at Talk2Action about the NCBCPS Bible curriculum and some of the flat out lies it contains. In particular, the fact that it contains numerous false quotations from the founding fathers. And here’s the irony of it all:

I just received this and haven’t had time to go over it in detail yet, but a quick glance was all it took to confirm that the printed curriculum contains not only the lies from the NCBCPS website and David Barton’s radio program that I noted in my previous pieces, but many more — including six of the misquotes that appear on Barton’s own Unconfirmed Quotations list, among them the infamous James Madison Ten Commandments misquote. What, exactly, is NCBCPS advisory board member Barton, whose advice to the readers of his website regarding these quotes is to “refrain from using them until such time that an original primary source may be found” advising the NCBCPS on?

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For yet another example of the rank intellectual dishonesty of religious right demagogues, take a look at this column by Jerry Falwell at the Worldnutdaily. Just look at the huge straw man he builds in the first paragraph:

Thomas Jefferson, author of the “wall of separation” that is revered as gospel by secularists and civil libertarians who want to purge Christianity from the public square, was firmly in favor of prohibiting public religious expression.

Right?

Hardly. But that’s the message many in the so-called mainstream are preaching today.

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This is really starting to irritate me. We’ve had to correct the absurd claims of the religious right for years, but now more and more we’re having to correct the equally absurd claims of atheists who want to turn the founding fathers into images of themselves as well. Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins seem to be the major culprits here, though Hitchens may bear more blame than Dawkins since Dawkins appears to have accepted Hitchens’ distortions at face value without bothering to do any research himself. That makes him sloppy, while Hitchens, it appears more and more, is just plain peddling nonsense. Jon Rowe catches Hitchens’ latest distortion, this time about Ben Franklin:

Of Franklin it seems almost certainly right to say that he was an atheist (Jerry Weinberger’s excellent recent study Benjamin Franklin Unmasked being the best reference here), but the master tacticians of church-state separation, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were somewhat more opaque about their beliefs.

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A reader sent along a link to this article, which leaves me nearly speechless. The setup and the punchline are one and the same:

The president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission presented the 2006 John Leland Religious Liberty Award to President George W. Bush in the Oval Office. The award is given to an individual for “courageously defending the right of all people to exercise freely their religious faith.”

“I can’t think of another president in my lifetime who has done more to promote religious liberty specifically as a fundamental human right around the world,” said ERLC’s Richard Land…

Land said, “The opportunity to present the award in that setting was a rare honor that reflects well on all Southern Baptists and was a personal privilege that I will cherish for the remainder of my days.”

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I have been invited to address the West Michigan Freethought Association on March 14th. The subject will either be Religion and the Founding Fathers or the Dover trial; it’s undecided at this point.. For anyone who is in the area and interested in attending, you can find directions and details on the website linked above. And while I’m on that subject here, I should mention that Jon Rowe has had some interesting posts on the subject of religion and the founding fathers at Positive Liberty lately. The first one examines the question of whether George Washington really added the words “So help me God” to the presidential oath of office. He presents evidence that this practice did not start with Washington but with Chester Arthur. The second. The second post is about a new book by Chris Rodda called Liars for Jesus, which slams folks like David Barton and D. James Kennedy for their distortions about the founding fathers (much like Jon and I do regularly). I think my presentation will debunk some of the myths on both sides of the issue, principally the myth that the founders were all deists and the myth that they were all orthodox Christians. Both are wrong.

Update: Since writing this, it has been decided that the subject of the address will be the Dover trial rather than religion and the founding fathers.