Atheism and the Tea Party

The Tea Party message of libertarianism has been hijacked by the religious nuts. I agree that big government is not good. But I also happen to think that religion mixed with government is even worse. And, the Founding Fathers would agree with me. Don't believe me? Look up the relationship between Deism and Washington, Jefferson, and Adams.

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What did our Founding Fathers have to say about religion:
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson (letter to Peter Carr, 10 August 1787):
"All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason;
"Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.", John Madison;
“Lighthouses are more helpful than Churches”, Benjamin Franklin

I have read some of the comments of people's opinions of the tea party. For some odd reason some view the tea party as wanting to establish a christian nation.

Do you even understand what made this nation a christian nation at her conception? It was not the establishment of a state religion. It was that the majority of the signers of the constitution were christian. The vast majority of people in this country were christian. So many of the laws instituted came from the common christian beliefs rooted in the ten commandments.

So back to the topic at hand. There may be some atheists who lean toward conservative values. Isn't that the way this nation was established? Were all those involved in the creation of this goverment and our financial systems christian? Certainly not. That is why the Founders wrote the constitution. It was to protect the rights of all people and held within the moral boundries established by all and for all on subjects agreed upon by all.

This is what the Christian Right is using to survive. It realizes the old pet issues of abortion and homosexuality are increasingly unpopular. Even Glenn Beck shyes away from them. By trying to make smaller government and lower taxes "biblical" issues, they want to attract the non-religious to a newer "gospel". Repackaging 101.

This may backfire on them, slightly, in that the increasing pressure in the Tea Party towards religious and even Christian conformity, and that many of the Tea Party darlings (O'Donnell, Angle, Buck etc.) are even more extreme than the regular Religious Right, you could see an exodus of non-religious libertarians who fear theocracy as much as they do socialism.

This is a good explanation for Jillette's hesitance.

The fact that Democrats are still trying to "figure out" what the TeaParty is about.. says it all!
Democrats are so Out-of-Touch, they don't have a clue!

Thank you previous posters - you've renewed my faith in America! It isn't that hard is it? Just a little thought about, and understanding of the issues instead of ranting and hatred towards everyone who disagrees - like most blog comments on political articles. I too 'got' Ron Paul, even though I'm a political liberal. Why can't someone be for supporting limited government that's efficient and works for the middle class and working poor, instead of the elites who seek to control us and enrich themselves on the suffering of others?

"The Catholic League has noted Penn & Teller's "vicious record of Catholic bashing," and called for their Showtime program to non-renewed."

Yes, the Catholic League wants to control what we see and hear -- especially well-deserved criticism. This comes in handy when trying to defend pedophiles -- especially when the media broadcasts all those pesky stories about child-raping Catholic priests. They want to stop those broadcasts too, right?

I completely understand. What good is a theocracy if it can't control what people see, hear, or do?

Actually, this article is just another example of someone defending the 'tea party' who knows absolutely nothing about it, but wants to spit-polish it, wrap it up in a pretty box, and sell it to us as a vacuum cleaner, when really it's nothing more than a jar of useless, smelly, emotional goo mixed with white-right angst manufactured by a gun-shy herd of bovine-like creatures spooked and stampeding across the country, knocking down everything decent and thoughtful that gets in it's way.

Sorry -- No sale.

I'm a libertarian, so when the Tea Parties came around with the "taxed enough already" message, that seemed like a good group to me. When an event was held near me last September, an hour south of Pittsburgh, I made sure to attend. Also that day, I decided that I would never attend another, and wanted nothing to do with the group. Why you ask?

While Tea Partiers have a reputation of being a bunch of racists, I myself didn't see any bigotry in that aspect. However, I did see bigotry toward non-Christians and gay people. I myself am not a Christian, and support a separation of church and state. I believe if the state endorses a religion, then freedom of religion is gone, but your average Glenn Beck fan wants this to be a "Christian Nation", or think it already is! I'm not gay, but I support the idea that they should be treated equally under the eyes of the law. In fact, the libertarian in me thinks government doesn't have the authority to even issue certificates for straight marriages. Get out of our lives! But your average Tea Partier is actually in favor of big govt, assuming it's their form of it.

It baffles me how the Tea Partiers can call for a theocracy and freedom at the same time. It's contradictory. It baffles me how they call for freedom, but attach more *small print to it than anyone I've ever seen. Yay freedom!, well uh... except for these people and those people and...

The other contingent that left me with a headache that day were the neocon wingnuts. The people that insist Obama is not a citizen. People that insist that Obama is a Muslim (which even if he were, shouldn't matter). The people that complain about Obama despite Bush doing the same things too (It's only bad when a Democrat does it, apparently). People that throw words like fascists and socialist around without regard or any understanding how the political spectrum actually works.

The reason these guys weren't around during the Bush years is because their message is not just about spending and taxes. That's probably not even 10% of it. The Tea Party has a strong pro-war message, and a strong anti-science message. There were big posters of dead babies. There were signs claiming we kicked god out, and that's why we have problems. There were claims that pollution is just plant food. There were signs about abortion. There were signs calling for people to die. They spew the neocon rhetoric that you can't support the troops without supporting the war. In my opinion, anyone that supports these wars is not a "fiscal conservative", which is crazy, because being a fiscal conservative was supposed to be the Tea Party's biggest selling point! It's no wonder that libertarians are distancing from "fiscally conservative" and using "fiscally responsible" instead.

I'm getting long winded. Let's just say it was a frustrating experience. There was a great deal of intolerance, and every libertarian I know has distanced themselves from the Tea Party.

The Tea Parties started out as simple protests by Ron Paul supporters. It would have eventually grown to a national movement of Libertarian ideals. The folks on FoxNews didn't want this, so they promoted the hell out of the Tea Parties to right-wing neo-conservatives to join. So the Tea Parties are nothing more than just your standard neocon Republicans, and the Libertarians are once again pushed off the map.

I'm sure there are probably a few people in the Tea Parties who want to keep the focus on fiscal policy, but as soon as they see how much support they're getting from Christian Fundamentalists, and they realize that they're going to LOSE those supporters if they don't cater to them, they inject a bunch of religion into their policies. (Unfortunately, we'll never know how many non-theocrats WOULD HAVE joined the Tea Parties, had they not been aliened, just to stop a few religious extremists from leaving.) It's kind of like the South Park episode, where they want to save movies from being recut, but have to say they want to free Hat from jail, to hold onto the crowd that showed up by mistake.

Are the Tea Parties religious? No. The Tea Parties were infiltrated and taken over by Republicans, who were previously infiltrated and taken over by the Washington Fellowship, which IS a religious organization.

The Tea Party MOVEMENT is NOT a RELIGIOUS ONE....take it from me an AGNOSTIC.
Been to many events...this is more about the BASIC tenants of what has made America what it is.NOT to tell people how to live.Is that not America?
WHY? Do so many Atheists feel so threatened by Christians.So what?
Unite in what threatens them both.
We will never accept Socialism,Marxism,Theocratic or Islamic State.

United We Stand Divided We Fall

I'm still trying to understand this whole "Tea Party" thing. I mean I got Ron Paul. I got what he stands for, and I support that. But this whole Tea Party movement seems to be a regurgitation of Ron Paul, add in some fanatical religious Christian slant, and then have every person looking for their 15 mins of fame on TV to start to look like they are associated with it. The exact same people who would run for the hills when Ron Paul entered the room back in the 2007 leadup to the Federal elections.

If people don't see the Tea Party as just another opportunity for those with little or no actual substance in their content to get more TV exposure (and I'm talking Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, et al) then we are all as doomed as the Germans were post-depression era.

You might mistrust govt, but the fact is that govt is run by people. By mistrusting govt, you have to mistrust people. And I can't see a better place to direct mistrust than the Tea Party movement. If you think things are bad now, then just put a party in power that allow dictatorial opportunists to ride on their coat-tails and eventually become the mouthpiece.

Danger, Will Robinson... danger....

Everything I have seen from the Tea Party indicates that they want to set up a Christian Theocracy and that scares me to the bone. There is nothing they have said or done that indicates they would accept anyone who does not believe they way they do, much less someone who doesn't believe at all.

Government and the national debt has grown MORE under conservative administrations than it ever does under liberal administrations. Liberals just want to be sure that everyone has equal rights and are taken care of in basic ways - food, shelter, education, healthcare. I don't understand how this can be a bad thing. I would think that Christians would embrace this type of attitude, but most Christians aren't very Christ-like in how they live and behave.

"That does not mean that the party itself is closed to those of a different (or no) faith."

Yes it is. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin have made it very clear the tea party is not for people with no faith.

Most of the liberals I know are faithists of one kind or another, as christian as our population; most of the atheists I know are libertarian to one degree or another.

And most of us, the atheists I know, are quite a bit like Jillette in our economic conservativism, and utterly without a positive opinion regarding the government telling people how to live - be that a liberal government or the theocratic government as envisioned by the beckies and palinites.

Though we agree with the stated aims of the tea party regarding economics, we find these are just words in their mouths, designed to attract people of like mind.

Once you get in the door the christianists make it clear that only christians -- white christians in particular, are welcome.

Read what Sekulow has posted on this particular issue. He makes it very clear. Why don't you, Ronald Rychlak, have a conversation with this dominionist Sekulow about how welcome atheists are in "his" tea party.