Bill O’Reilly, the genius who recently enlightened us to the “fact” that Christianity is not a religion(!), interviewed FFRF attorney Andrew Seidel about the use of bible during presidenctial inaugurations. O’Reilly, who hates president Obama’s guts, was obviously on the side of the president this time, defending his plans to swear in using the bible.
I think Seidel did a good job representing the secularist viewpoint. There were a couple of points that I think deserved to be further clarified, however. First, O’Reilly kept bringing up the mention of “God” in the Declaration of Independence. Seidel should have said that the word God does not appear in the declaration; what does appear in the rather nebulous term “creator”. As such, the Declaration is by no means an endorsement of a biblical perspective. Thomas Jefferson, the main author of the Declaration, said in so many words that the idea of Trinity deserved ridicule. That is something O’Reilly’s viewers needed to hear. Second, O’Reilly continued to bring up the fact that bibles Obama will use belonged to Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. It would have been good if Seidel brought up the fact that both abolitionism and the Civil Rights movements had significant Humanist elements, and use of bible as representation of these movements essetially is a dismissal of the works of those Humanists who worked hard for the cauase of justice.
Third, Seidel was right on the money when he said that the Bill of Rights was there to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. O’Reilly asked “Do you think the bible is tyranny”? Of course, O’Reilly himself would be thinking that the scripture at inauguration was tyrannical if it happeneded to be from a religion other than the one that he practices. And swearing in on the bible is in fact exclusionary: Mr. Obama is going to be everyone’s president, not just the president of those who believe in the bible. Those points also needed to be brought up.
CNN had a good article on this matter by Dean Obeidallah:
Placing a hand on a Bible while reciting the presidential oath is simply a tradition started by George Washington. Indeed, two presidents, Teddy Roosevelt and John Quincy Adams, did not use a Bible at their swearing-in ceremonies.Although Roosevelt’s reasons are unclear, John Quincy Adams’ reasons could not be more plain.Adams, the son of President John Adams, was a religious man. But he chose to be sworn in with his hand on a book of U.S. laws. He wanted to demonstrate that he recognized a barrier between church and state and that his loyalty was to our nation’s laws above all else.
http://youtu.be/XE-K0CfFNCQ
