Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum

A satellite image of yesterday's presidential inauguration -- The U.S. Capitol is at the top of the image and the Washington Monument is at the bottom; the brown splotches running vertically down the Mall are the human witnesses to history being made.


(Satellite image courtesy of GeoEye. Click here to view it in glorious high resolution.)

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama gave a wee tip o' the hat to atheists and agnostics:

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers."

Thank you, President Obama. My guess is that this reference to skeptics was one of your many historical firsts. At any rate, we've come a long way since 1987, when George H.W. Bush remarked,

"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

16.1% of the U.S. population is religiously unaffiliated but, to borrow a label from Steven Waldman of beliefnet, we are the political Untouchables. It wasn't always this way, however. There were no preachers or ministers delivering invocations at either of Abraham Lincoln's inaugural ceremonies; John Quincy Adams swore his oath of office not on a Bible, but on a book of Constitutional law. While he was a religious man, Adams actually believed in Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and the state. Like Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Adams was savvy enough to know that

“...a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.”

In fact, it is heartening to note that our Constitution, the founding document of our republic, never mentions a god and even goes so far as to state (Article VI, section 3) that "...no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States," i.e., no elected official nor civil servant must profess a belief in any religion, or even a belief in any god, to hold their office. It's an ironic contrast to our most recent election, in which many of the candidates (especially the Republicans) tried to out-Jesus one other. Contrary to Fox News reports, these United States did not come together to form a Christian nation. In fact, many of our "founding fathers" actually wrote about the evils of religion in general and the Christian Bible in particular. Here are some representative quotations:

"One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian." -- Mortimer Adler

"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man" -- Thomas Jefferson

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

"His [John Calvin's] religion was demonism. If ever a man worshiped a false god, he did. The being described in his five points is ... a demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin. -- Thomas Jefferson, Works, 1829 edition, vol. 4, p. 322, quoted from Franklin Steiner.

"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity" -- John Adams

Ben Franklin wrote "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason" and that "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches".

James Madison, a Unitarian: "I would not dare to so dishonor my Creator God by attaching His name to that book (the Bible)."

And Thomas Paine, from The Age of Reason (1794): "What is it the New Testament teaches us? To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith." and "The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense."

Again I thank you, President Obama. It is splendid to know that a modern president can have my back, too.