Right Wing Watch reports on the fantasies of Bryan Fischer:
… repeating his frequent assertion that the First Amendment applies only to Christians.
Fischer’s excuse? His assertion – with no citations, no backing – that the word “religion” was synonymous with “Christianity” in the days of the Founders. Once you accept this equality, then it’s easy to make the Founder’s intention argument if you’re willing to not skate below the surface of the argument. For that leg of this topic, see my discussion of the Founder’s environment here.
If we stipulate the assertion, then he’s faced with such questions as “Is the LDS Christian?” Methodists? Baptists? Which of the Christian sects are really Christian, and which will you make war on? The assertion leads to disaster.
But, in the end, the assertion has no basis in fact. We’ll go with a leading name: Benjamin Franklin, on the subject of religion:
Every person, of whatever religious denomination he may be, is a DEIST in the first article of his Creed. Deism, from the Latin word Deus, God, is the belief of a God, and this belief is the first article of every man’s creed.
It is on this article, universally consented to by all mankind, that the Deist builds his church, and here he rests. Whenever we step aside from this article, by mixing it with articles of human invention, we wander into a labyrinth of uncertainty and fable, and become exposed to every kind of imposition by pretenders to revelation.
The Persian shows the Zend-Avesta of Zoroaster, the lawgiver of Persia, and calls it the divine law; the Bramin shows the Shaster, revealed, he says, by God to Brama, and given to him out of a cloud; the Jew shows what he calls the law of Moses, given, he says, by God, on the Mount Sinai; the Christian shows a collection of books and epistles, written by nobody knows who, and called the New Testament; and the Mahometan shows the Koran, given, he says, by God to Mahomet: each of these calls itself revealed religion, and the only true Word of God, and this the followers of each profess to believe from the habit of education, and each believes the others are imposed upon.
(Courtesy barefootsworld.net, but no doubt available in other venues)
If Fischer wishes to continue this ridiculous assertion, he must contend with the likes of Franklin.
Do his listeners know this?
