Ugh! I want to throw something at David Barton.

[white_wolf]

Is anyone else watching the Daily Show? This guy is so smug and so wrong. Seriously, if I have to hear about how persecuted Christians are, I'm going to scream. I'm no historian, but I"m pretty sure Jefferson wasn't in favor of religion "infecting" government.

[Hissyspit]

1. Here's who he is:

Barton is full of shit, of course, and Jon is going a little too easy on him or is not organized enough.

http://au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/the-jefferson-lies-david-barton%E2%80%99s-new-collection-of-whoppers

The Jefferson Lies: David Barton’s New Collection Of Whoppers

April 13, 2012 by Rob Boston in Wall of Separation

Barton is no historian; his only earned degree is in Christian education from Oral Roberts University.

I have obtained a copy of David Barton’s new book The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. I haven’t read the entire tome yet but did spend some time leafing through it last night. Within half an hour I had noticed several outrageous distortions of the truth.

That’s not surprising since Barton, a Texas-based “Christian nation” propagandist, has been spreading fundamentalist misinformation about the nation’s founding for years. He’s no historian; his only earned degree is in Christian education from Oral Roberts University. But that hasn’t stopped his WallBuilders outfit from convincing many evangelical Christians that the Religious Right’s version of America was intended by the Founders from the start.

Today is Jefferson’s birthday, so it’s an appropriate occasion to rise to his defense against people like Barton who are trying to covert our third president into an 18th-century Religious Right zealot. With that thought in mind, here are some of the lies Barton is spreading about Jefferson:

Jefferson arranged to have a Bible printed by the federal government. Barton writes that Jefferson “personally helped finance the printing of one of America’s groundbreaking editions of the Bible.” He mentions that John Adams was also involved in the project. The clear implication is that these government leaders wanted to see the Bible printed and promoted at public expense.

What really happened is much more mundane:

MORE AT LINK

[KT2000]

2. Pretty nauseating

and he uses the same old tactic of talking fast and not letting anyone else speak.

[Archae]

3. David Barton was on the Daily Show?

Barton is Glenn Beck's favorite "Christian Nation" revisionist, he's been caught lying so many times I wouldn't trust him to tell me if it were cloudy or sunny out.

I hope he got tore a new one.

[Angry Dragon]

5. He is a member of Satan's army

[haele]

6. I remember David Barton from usenet in the late 1990's - he was a smug git even then

His.American.Colonial and His.UnitedStates; he was always losing arguments about Jefferson, Washington and Madison - to the point that most of us wondered if he lived in an alternate United States.
I must say that he held on to his pig-headed view and unique logic - if you could call cherry-picking down to tenses and making up new meanings for old words to make a point logic; he'd quote the source material, and then tell us that Jefferson, etc really meant something totally different then what he quoted. A ten-year old with a decent elementary school education could argue and win against him, so long as the child could keep it's temper...

His one area of interest was religion - and what was rather funny, the particular religiosity he claimed for the "founding fathers" did not really emerge until the mid 1820's with the advent of Christian Spiritualism and the justifications for Manifest Destiny - and the rise of petty bourgeois.
It played no part in whatever rather pragmatic religiosity that was common during and immediately after the Revolution; simply because that sort of "Creating God's Kingdom of Heaven on Earth" viewpoint cut too close to the idea of King and Lords as anointed by God - and that was what most of the early Constitutionalists and political movers and shakers during that time were trying to avoid.

He belonged in rec.arts.alternative.history.

Haele