The Founding Myth by Andrew L Seidel

Author:Andrew L Seidel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling

American principles dictated a diversion from laws like the third commandment, laws that had been tried early in our history but were found too oppressive. This commandment runs afoul of the First Amendment several times over, violating the two religion clauses and the speech and press clauses. “It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine,” said the Supreme Court in 1952.20 The Supreme Court has also noted that laws prohibiting “sacrilegious” speech “raise substantial questions under the First Amendment’s guaranty of separate church and state with freedom of worship for all.”21 Given this history and the constitutional conflicts, any influence this commandment had was not positive. At best, it was a lighthouse that warned the founders away from regulating speech in the name of god.

Robert Ingersoll mounted an eloquent attack on an archaic New Jersey blasphemy law in May 1877, defending Charles B. Reynolds, who had been charged under the law before a packed courtroom in Morristown.22 (In 2018, Morristown and Morris County were the site of another watershed religious freedom case. The county was giving away millions of taxpayers’ dollars to churches so that they could repair their buildings and the active congregations could continue to worship. I litigated the case to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which agreed, unanimously, that this violated the state constitution: citizens cannot be taxed to support religious worship.23)

Reynolds had been a preacher, an itinerant Seventh-day Adventist. The ex-reverend moved from preaching about the Saturday sabbath in a tent to lecturing on freethought in that tent.24 He aroused local ire with his freethinking and was eventually arrested and charged. Ingersoll attacked the law as counter to American principles. Blasphemy laws suppress “intellectual liberty” and “without that, we are poor miserable serfs and slaves,” he argued. Like Adams, Ingersoll observed that “the ignorant bigots of this world have been trying for thousands of years to rule the minds of men by brute force. They have endeavored to improve the mind by torturing the flesh—to spread religion with the sword and torch.”25

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