American Liberal

Our founders knew first-hand about tyranny in all its forms: social, economic, political, and religious. That is why they founded a Republic, based on democratic principles. Never - ever - did they wish for a theocracy. They left written records expressing their strong views about protecting personal religious freedom by keeping religion and government separate.

"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,'thus building a wall of separation between church and State."

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

"..our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry."

"The people will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Govt (sic) will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."

"When a religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are obliged to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."

"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?"

"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst."

"Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law."