I’m back! Did ya’ll miss me?

After a week in Virginia, I feel like I need to be “sanitized” and to go through some kind of quarantine process even though I took regular showers while there. Don’t get me wrong…Virginia is a beautiful state, full of magnolia trees which fill the air with a perfumy scent that makes me wish I could have one or two of them right in my own backyard. The surroundings are green and lush with flowers everywhere and colorful songbirds flying all around. Settlers who arrived from the Old World in the midst of springtime must have initially thought they had found paradise. But I wonder what the founding fathers, who fought so hard to establish and uphold our freedoms and the separation of church and state would think about their grand state of Virginia turning into the “fundie Vatican” and headquarters of some of the most intolerant religious fundamentalists on Earth.

My sympathies go out to all of you atheists and secular humanists who must live in these areas surrounded by the self-righteous horde. Around the D.C. area, Virginia didn’t seem much different than Chicagoland, but as we drove farther into Virginia, I began to feel like I was back in Little Rock, Arkansas once again . . . only back in the mid 70s, I was still a Xian so was easier to deal with fundies, though I did still feel like an outsider because I was not considered to be a “True Xian”. As we were driving down the interstate, every so many miles we would come upon these sets of three crosses on a hillside with the center one painted a yellow-gold, the two on either side were white. We also saw a lot of these going through West Virginia (West Virginia needs a whole post of it’s own. It’s a whole other world.)

We stopped at Mt. Vernon first, which is a beautiful mansion and plantation nestled on the hills overlooking the Potomac River. George Washington was a man of many interests and abilities, and he valued knowledge and reason. Not many religious references were to be found amongst the many, many artifacts which remain from the Washington family, except for a family Bible (which belonged to his wife Martha from her first marriage), and a few references in writings by Washington about “Divine Providence”, but nothing about Jesus or Christianity.

As noted by Franklin Steiner in “The Religious Beliefs Of Our Presidents” (1936), Washington commented on sermons only twice. In his writings, he never referred to “Jesus Christ.” He attended church rarely, and did not take communion - though Martha did, requiring the family carriage to return back to the church to get her later.

Washington was, at most, a deist, however fundies are determined to rewrite Washington’s beliefs and his stance on religion. In the museum that is on the grounds of Mt Vernon, there is a mini-sanctuary with pews to throw in a bit of a religious fiction to the whole “educational” experience, trying to make Washington seem like he was a Christian man when he was not. As his writings show evidence of, and as I said before . . . at most, he was a deist. [George Washington and Religion] The experience at the end of the tour was also quite irritating. At the entrance to Washington’s tomb there is a live prayer reading every twenty minutes, a prayer that was delivered by a Rev. Thomas Davis, Rector of Christ Church at his entombment. When the guide called everyone to the area in front of the tomb for the prayer, the sheeple dressed in their “John 3:16” and “Jesus Loves Me” t-shirts all herded in a huddle with eyes closed and faces squinched as if constipated as the guide read the prayer. Some of us kept walking around irreverantly taking pictures and ignoring the whole oogie boogie recitation. After it was over, I scooted in the out gate and took my photos of the tomb and sarcophagus.

Monticello was similar in the way the preservationists try to highlight Jefferson’s brief references to God, however I was glad to see that they did place emphasis on Jefferson’s adament stance that knowledge was the key to success and happiness. While Washington kept his beliefs concerning religion private, Jefferson was more outspoken about where he stood, and therefore a bit more difficult to make shit up about his beliefs. However, Jefferson’s true beliefs were downplayed, while anything remotely “godly” he might have said was taken out of context, highlighted and prominently displayed. This following video contains quotes by Jefferson that SHOULD have been displayed, but weren’t.


Gift shops at the Williamsburg tourist trap information center were playing a steady stream of religious music . . . “and he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own” . . .and in most shops and restaurants we stopped at, church music permeated these places.

During this trip, I came to realize how fine the line is drawn between church and state in the south, and in the same way they do their Bible, fundamentalist Christians choose to interpret and rewrite history to their own liking in order to force their beliefs upon the rest of us.

Good video in response by Dr. Michael Newdow on separation of church and state:

Going back to our hotel room one evening, there was a woman who scared me. She was standing at the railing of the balcony where our second floor room was located, and she was telling another woman how the “power of the Lawd shot down through her arms” and how she could “feel the heat and tingling as the power of the Lawd” went through her and “traveled out of her fingertips” and into the back of her little dog and healed it! I told my husband to hurry up and get inside our room and barricade the door!