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So, it’s Mikey Weinstein’s birthday today (Happy Birthday, Mikey!), so, of course, there are some people who just can’t pass up the opportunity to convey their wishes that he’d never been born. Apparently, hell for Mikey is going to be an eternity of being roasted over the flames of birthday candles.

From: E-Mail Address Withheld
Subject: Would Have Been Better if You Were Never Born
Date: April 11, 2012 10:16:42 AM MDT
To: ——@militaryreligiousfreedom.org

Mr. Weinstein, I am a graduate of the Air Force Academy. And I live in Colorado Springs. And guess what, I am a devout believer in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and in spreading the Gospel of His grace and truth far and wide. I speak on behalf of many fellow Academy graduates from all over the country who have a message for you and your unbiblical Military “Religious Freedom” Foundation. Apparently you have a serious problem with Christians. Which stems from the fact that you deliberately believe that the Constitution separates our Lord’s Church from state and that America was not founded to be a Christian nation. It is likely that you also are unhappy with the fact that due to your own free choice your rejection of Jesus Christ will be consigning you to burn in torment in hell forever. That’s right Mr. Weinstein. Hell awaits you. As it awaits your wife and children and all who align with the satanic darkness you and your “Freedom Foundation” preach Mr. Weinstein. And we are frankly very glad of it. You hurt people Mr. Weinstein by denying them access to Christ through our Academy and the military more broadly. There is no changing your hatred of Jesus (2 Corinthians 6:14). As a result of your hatred of Jesus Christ and his followers and your refusal to accept the singular Christian heritage of America you have unfortunately single-handedly become the most recognizable graduate of our Academy in its history. A sinister evil demonic clever and conniving and infamous jewish graduate. Why are we not surprised? And now because of the liberal socialist press your blackness overshadows all of the Air Force Academy’s wonderful graduates and their actual accomplishments. You shame our Academy and its cadets families of cadets and staffers and supporters. We know you were born today. As you have become only the strongest tool of the devil it would have been so much better for America and its true Christian heritage had you never been born at all. As you blow out the candles on your cake today Mr. Weinstein your fellow Academy graduates want you to remember that you will not live forever on earth. But that you will live forever in the flames of those candles.

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Easter Dust Bunnies!

Seriously, hasn’t David Barton lied about this one enough already? I guess compulsive liars are called compulsive for a reason. They just can’t stop lying!

A few weeks ago, in the video I made about some of the lies that Barton told Kirk Cameron in the former-child-star-turned-fundamentalist-wacko’s pseudo-documentary Monumental, I mentioned a Rev. John Rodgers as part of my debunking of Barton’s Aitken Bible lie. This is the one where Barton claims that Congress printed a Bible for use in schools in 1782.

Rev. John Rodgers was a Presbyterian minister who Robert Aitken used to help him try to sell his Bibles to Congress. Aitken, who had already made one unsuccessful attempt to get Congress to buy his Bibles (which nobody else wanted to buy), got Rodgers to write to George Washington asking Washington to ask Congress to buy Aitken’s Bibles to give to the soldiers.

Shortly after I posted my video, a new article about the Aitken Bible appeared on Barton’s website, with a brand new lie added to his already lie-riddled story. This new lie is about Rev. John Rodgers, who Barton transforms into a “close friend” of George Washington. Here’s what Barton wrote:

“Incidentally, on May 30, 1783, the Rev. John Rodgers, a military chaplain and close friend of George Washington, suggested to his Commander-in-Chief that one of these congressionally approved Bibles be given to every member of the Continental Army.”

The truth? Washington barely knew John Rodgers! They were barely even acquaintances, let alone close friends!

Rodgers, who was a Presbyterian minister in New York, did serve as a military chaplain — for all of about six or seven months when the British occupied the city in 1776. He then left New York for Georgia. When he returned to New York in 1777, he served for a brief time as chaplain to New York’s constitutional convention, but then left New York because it was too dangerous a place to be. I’m not speculating here that Rodgers’s reason for leaving New York was to move somewhere safer to make him out as a coward or anything. This is actually what it says in the 1813 biography of him from his own church.(1) Rodgers spent the remainder of the war away from New York, most of it in Connecticut, and then in New Jersey towards the end of the war.

Rodgers only met George Washington one time during the Revolutionary War, on April 14, 1776, when Rodgers, “in company with other friends of the American cause, waited on the General to pay him his respects.”(2) The Memoirs of the Rev. John Rodgers say that “a number of letters passed between” Rodgers and Washington, but there is almost nothing to be found in the Papers of George Washington, and certainly nothing indicating that they were in any way close friends. In fact, Washington doesn’t even appear to have remembered who Rodgers was as of 1788, writing in his journal on March 21 of that year:

“On my return home, found a Mr. Rogers of New York here who dined and proceeded to Alexandria afterwds.”

Does “a Mr. Rogers of New York” sound like the way someone would refer to a close friend?

And that 1788 entry is the only mention of Rodgers anywhere in Washington’s diaries. (There was another John Rodgers that Washington actually was friends with, but this was a different guy who owned a tavern in Maryland.)

The Papers of George Washington in the Library of Congress show almost no correspondence between Washington and Rodgers. All that’s there is Rodgers’s 1783 request for Washington to ask Congress to buy Aitken’s Bibles and Wahington’s reply to that letter, and a letter from Rodgers to Washington in May of 1789 asking for a donation when the Presbyterian church was collecting money for poor people.(4) Washington didn’t even personally answer this letter, but just had his secretary, Tobias Lear, send a $25 donation — six months later.(5) Now, that doesn’t sound like the way someone would treat a request from a “close friend,” does it? There is one more letter from Tobias Lear to Rodgers in August 1790, this time sending a donation from Washington for “the relief of distressed debtors confined in prison,”(6) which indicates nothing more than that Washington was on Rodgers’s list of people to hit up for donations for things.

But, to David Barton, a sparse bit of correspondence and a few casual encounters between a founding father and a minister — even when that founding father doesn’t appear to have even remembered who the hell that minister was the second time he met him — is red meat for revisionism! In Barton’s version of the story they will be “close friends!”

1. Samuel Miller D.D., Memoirs of the Rev. John Rodgers, D.D., Late Pastor of the Wall-street and Brick Churches, in the City of New York, (New York: Whiting and Watson, 1813), 213-228.
2. ibid., 208.
3. Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington, vol. 5, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 288.
4. John Rodgers to George Washington, May 30, 1789, George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741-1799: Series 4, General Correspondence, 1697-1799.
5. Tobias Lear to John Rodgers, November 28, 1789, ibid.
6. Tobias Lear to John Rodgers, August 30, 1790, ibid.

Hey everybody … you may have noticed that I’ve been AWOL again for the past week (except, of course, for my part in FTB’s little April Fool’s prank). The reason I haven’t been around is that David Barton’s new book, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, came out a little over a week ago. It wasn’t supposed to be released until April 10, but came out early. So, naturally, I had to start debunking it. Between Barton’s book and my job at MRFF, I’ve been a very busy fundy fighter.

The chapters of Barton’s new masterpiece of historical revisionism are titled “Lie #1, “Lie #2,” Lie #3, etc, with each chapter being a “debunking” by Barton of some alleged lie that he claims the secularists have made up about Jefferson. This has long been one of Barton’s tactics in his presentations and videos — to present himself as the debunker, claiming that secularists and modern historians are the ones who have revised history and that he’s the one setting the record straight. And it’s a tactic that works very well on his audience.

To begin my debunking of Barton’s new book, I picked the chapter titled “Lie #2: Thomas Jefferson Founded a Secular University,” and there are so may lies in just this one chapter that my video on it ended up being nearly two hours long. There was just no way to adequately debunk all these lies any quicker. When I make shorter videos, the Barton defenders say I didn’t provide enough information; when I make longer videos that go into all the details, they say they’re too long and boring. So, I really can’t win with a lot of those people. But, for those who want a thorough debunking, that’s what I’m doing here. My video even contains footnotes, which appear on a blackboard behind me every time I’m quoting something. This is to preempt the comments I usually get saying, “Barton has lots of footnotes so he must be telling the truth.”

I know that most people don’t have time to watch a two hour video in one shot, and I will be breaking this into shorter segments, which I’ll post here as soon as I get them done, but for now, here is the entire video.

When my friend Ed Brayton invited me to join Freethought Blogs last summer, I knew this was going to be a great network, and that I’d be among some really awesome bloggers. As new bloggers came on board over our first couple of months, it was clear that we were building a network that nobody could rival. But nothing is perfect, and a few of the bloggers who joined us have already decided this wasn’t for them and left. But I never expected that Ed, whose baby FTB is, would be among those who wouldn’t be blogging here for very long. We were all blindsided when Ed suddenly announced in an email to the rest of us that he would be leaving at the end of April.

Ed was reluctant to talk about his decision to leave, which I know must have been a very difficult decision for him after all the work he put into founding FTB, but after several conversations I was finally able to get him to open up and tell me why he was leaving.

He told me that he had decided to make some major changes in his life a few months ago while he was on one of his frequent trips to Las Vegas to play poker. Something happened on that trip that scared the bejeezus out of Ed and made him ask himself if putting himself out there as a blogger and speaker was really worth risking his life over.

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Child star turned fundamentalist Christian activist Kirk Cameron’s pseudo-documentary Monumental is coming to over 500 theaters across the country on March 27, and from the clips available online, it’s clear that Cameron’s movie promises to be packed with the same Christian nationalist historical revisionism that David Barton is so well known for. In fact, Barton himself appears in Cameron’s film. One of the clips available online shows Cameron visiting Barton’s personal museum in Texas, and hearing a few of Barton’s lies about the early Congress and Thomas Jefferson printing Bibles to spread the word of God to all American families.

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