Ed Brayton is a freelance writer and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
From - where else? - the Worldnutdaily, which features this absurd column from Tom Flannery chock full of silly claims and myths. Including this whopper of a myth that the rest of us left behind in about the 5th grade:
Christopher Columbus, after all, became convinced that the world was round after reading a verse of Scripture from the book of Isaiah: "It is He [God] who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers" (Isaiah 40:22a, emphasis mine). This revelation led ultimately to his decision to sail to the Indies and his discovery of America in 1492.
Oi vey, the old "everyone thought the earth was flat until Columbus sailed to America" myth. Seriously, how ridiculous is this claim? Sailors, of all people, knew the earth to be spherical centuries before Columbus lived. This is an absurd myth foisted on the ignorant by Washington Irving two centuries ago. No educated person takes it seriously, which of course explains why Flannery does.
And by the way, Columbus obviously did not discover America either; there were thriving civilizations already there when he got there. And he didn't even set foot anywhere in North America, for crying out loud. This is history for people who still think George Washington cut down a cherry tree and could not tell a lie. He then quotes this from Columbus:
"It was the Lord who put into my mind (I could feel His hand upon me) the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies," Columbus wrote in his "Book of Prophecies." "All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit, because He comforted me with rays of marvelous illumination from the Holy Scriptures ... encouraging me continually to press forward."
Gee, I wonder if the Holy Spirit also was the one who encouraged him to enslave tens of thousands of natives from Hispanola to mine minerals for him, or the tens of thousands he sent back to Spain as slaves? Then there are the litany of lies about the founding fathers, like this one:
Adams understood that, without the God of the Bible intervening on her behalf, there would be no America. From the founding of our nation, to our break with England, to the framing of our Constitution and enacting of our laws, he and most of our other founders recognized that Providence (the will and work of Almighty God) was supremely evident throughout.
Now here is Adams himself writing his Defense of the Constitutions of the United States:
The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature;* and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses...
In 1776, Adams and our other Founding Fathers fought the tyrannical King George with the rallying cry of "No king but King Jesus!"
Utter nonsense. This "rallying cry" was used by British religious dissenters during the British civil war, and while there were some American Christians who referred to it during the Revolutionary War it was never associated with John Adams or any of the other founding fathers.
The aforementioned Declaration of Independence they signed to break from Britain contains four separate references to God and acknowledges that our inalienable human rights come from Him. It also delineates a litany of King George's biblical violations, which they based that break upon.
The Declaration nowhere mentions any "biblical violations" whatsoever. And the references to "Nature's God" in the Declaration were written by a man who emphatically rejected the Biblical God as "cruel, capricious, vindictive and unjust" and who savaged the gospel writers and Paul as illiterate and ignorant men.
When God gave the ragtag revolutionaries a stunning victory over the greatest army on earth, our founders set about forging a new nation. Washington and Alexander Hamilton said they based the idea for America's separation of powers upon the Bible verse Jeremiah 17:9, which teaches that the human heart is "deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." The founders also based our three branches of government on Isaiah 33:22; tax exemption for churches on Ezra 7:24; Article 4 of our Constitution on Exodus 18:21-22; and so on.
This is a flat out lie. Nowhere in their writings do Washington or Hamilton ever make any reference to this or any other verse in the Bible as a source for any constitutional principle, nor did any other founding father. In fact, the only place any reference to this verse appears in relationship to the Constitution is in the debates in the New York ratification convention in 1788. The verse was quoted not by Hamilton but by Thomas Tredwell, an anti-federalist, and he was arguing against the passage of the constitution.
Indeed, of the 15,000 political writings of the men who crafted the Constitution, the source they quoted most frequently in expressing their political beliefs was the Bible. A whopping 34 percent of their political quotes came straight out of the Book they hailed as the inspired Word of God.
Another flat out lie, this one referring to the Donald Lutz study. That study was not of 15,000 political writings at all; that was the original sample but the actual study was of a much smaller subset of those documents. And virtually none of those documents were written by the men who crafted the constitution, most of them were from sermons reprinted as pamphlets; that sermons from ministers contained lots of Biblical references is hardly a shock.
And Lutz says plainly in his study that if you took out all the reprinted sermons, virtually all the Biblical references are gone. He also pointed out that during 1787 and 1788, when the constitution was being explained, debated and ratified, the only Biblical references to be found were from anti-federalists arguing against the constitution on Biblical grounds, not from those who wrote the constitution or advocated its passage.
Prayer even played an integral role at the Constitutional Convention. During a particularly contentious impasse, Benjamin Franklin addressed the founders gathered there with this stinging rebuke: "In the beginning of the contest with Great Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine protection. Our prayers, sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. ... And have we now forgotten this powerful Friend? Or do we imagine we no longer need His assistance? I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, sir, in the Sacred Writings, that 'except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.' I firmly believe this; and I firmly believe that without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel."Upon concluding his remarks, a motion for daily prayer was quickly adopted and the impasse was broken.
And yet another lie. In fact, Franklin's motion was ignored, no prayer took place and the convention moved on. We know this from the notes of James Madison and others at the convention.
Even by Christian Nation standards, this is an appallingly bad article. Even David Barton might flinch at some of this absurdity.
Politics
Comments
I got better history than that in my grade 8 mathematics class. Honestly! When the teacher introduced the triginomatry unit he talked about how trig was used by the ancient Greeks to determine that the world was not flat.
But I guess mathematics is yet another subject this rube is woefully ignorant of...
Posted by: kodiak | July 7, 2008 9:40 AM
Mr. Brayton Wrote:
Where can I find more about Lutz's fabrication? A name search alone turns up more feces than a pig could bear to enjoy.
Posted by: chrisD | July 7, 2008 9:47 AM
If memory serves (and it may not).
The main criticism of Columbus' plans was that he underestimated the circumference of the earth and the available ships could not make the real distance from Spain to Asia without re-supply. The critics were right and if the fleet hadn't chanced upon the carribean islands when they did it is likely that the loss of Columbus' fleet would be a footnote in a history book about some other 'discovery' of the Americas.
I think you mean the English civil war not British, since there was not yet a nation called Britain.
Posted by: Matt | July 7, 2008 9:56 AM
Although this is sadly typical, I really appreciate the rational debunking of these crazy-Xtian spoutings. I'm sure that many people have already figured out the back-and-forth internet volley that normally ensues from this sort of thing, but I'm going to state my hypothesis of the future reaction below to ensure a certain level of scientific rigor to what I think will be inevitable:
Xtian loony: "I've got evidence that God Almighty created the World/humans/the Constitution/twinkies."
[shows evidence]
Rationalist: "Umm... Your evidence is incorrect here, here, here, here, here, here, (continues)"
Xtian loony: "Lalalalalalalalalala! I'm not listening to you, because you're an atheist by my definition, and your rejection of my interpretation of God Almighty makes you wrong in all ways. By the way, I've got this evidence that God Almighty also created ... YOU!"
Posted by: Umlud | July 7, 2008 9:58 AM
Perhaps the story about Columbus results from a confused retelling of this:
(From the Wikipedia article "Biblical apocrypha", under the heading "Cultural impact":
"Christopher Columbus was said to have been inspired by a verse from 4 Esdras 6:42 to undertake his hazardous journey across the Atlantic."
The verse led Columbus to believe that the size of the earth was smaller than what the scholars had determined. The scholars got the size rather right (going as far back as Aristotle), and Columbus got it rather wrong. Columbus thought that he only had to sail a rather short distance.
By the way, Biblical literalists generally don't include 4 Esdras in their Bibles.
Posted by: TomS | July 7, 2008 10:21 AM
And did the Holy Spirit "inspire" him to look at charts and see that an eclipse was about to happen?" Did the Spirit "inspire" him to act like a "god" and make the moon "disappear" to get the natives to fear him-since they were about ready to kill Columbus and his crew?
My faith has no problem with history being shared CORRECTLY!!!
Posted by: Rev. AJB | July 7, 2008 10:29 AM
Did the Lord forget to tell him that he was not, in fact, in "the Indies"? Silly God, foolin round like that.
Posted by: PalMD | July 7, 2008 10:32 AM
On the Lutz paper, you could read, The Origins of American Constitutionalism by Lutz in which amongst other arguments, he summarizes his paper "The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought," The American Political Science Review, 78 (1984), pp. 189-197. The paper is the origin of the claim "out of 15,000 papers, 34% have biblical references" as Ed has pointed out in his posting.
Posted by: Somerville | July 7, 2008 10:33 AM
I read a book I think was called "The Story of the Declaration of Independence". It had a fold-out of a photo copy of Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence. If you look closely at that draft the reference to "nature's god" is written with a small case "g", not a capital G.
Posted by: Bob Thomas | July 7, 2008 11:19 AM
Uhhhm, a circle is still flat.
Posted by: BaldApe | July 7, 2008 11:44 AM
DUSTOFF! DUSTOFF! Our historian has taken a claymore to the legs!
Or was he not talking about Vietnam?
Sorry, never mind.
Posted by: Johnny Vector | July 7, 2008 11:51 AM
The term "English Civil War" is somewhat frowned upon nowadays, as it was not really one war, and a lot of it happened outside of England (the Irish in particular get upset by this - they almost certainly did the majority of the dying). I believe the preferred replacement term is either "The British Wars" or "The Wars of the Three Kingdoms".
Posted by: Dunc | July 7, 2008 12:05 PM
Also a myth; I suggest Mr Flannery should go away and read a good, accurate, modern book on the American War of Independence.
Just to give the figures for York Town 10 800 French and 8 500 American soldiers versus 7 500 British soldiers most of whom were Hessian "mercenaries" ( who were actual mostly conscripts who didn't want to be there!).
Posted by: Thony C. | July 7, 2008 12:11 PM
The first person to see the Earth's shadow cross the Moon knew that the Earth, like the Moon, was round.
The first person either at sea or at a large lake who saw something in the distance disappear below the horizon knew the Earth was round.
I'd be impressed if the bible gave any indication of the size of the Earth, something the old testament hacks were too ignorant to know, but Eratosthenes was the first (AFAIK) to actually measure the Earth.
To jump from circle to sphere is an unreasonable stretch. God may have had his circle of believers, but that 'circle' is only a synonym for 'group'.
Posted by: 6EQUJ5 | July 7, 2008 12:17 PM
That the oldest globe still in existence, IIRC, was made in the late 15th century should put an end to the "Columbus sailed to show the world was spherical" crap, with or without claims of biblical influence.
Posted by: Jeremy | July 7, 2008 12:19 PM
Since Joey Farah and his staff at WorldNutDaily seem to use the Bible (as in Farah's recent vow to cripple McDonald's via boycott for its offering same-sex partner benefits to employees) as justification for nearly every position, why the hell doesn't it drop the transparent premise that WND is about news, and just convert (no pun intended) to an all-religious format?
At least then, it would be honest (for once)...
Posted by: CHV | July 7, 2008 12:21 PM
I emailed Mr. F. my version of the deconstruction found here
and he replied somewhat angrily with the expected responses. One surprising thing was he didn't even know the source of his 34% figure was the Lutz study but rather attributed it to David Barton and his thousands of documents he owns. He didn't even know Barton got the figure from Lutz, but apparently thought Barton conducted a study based on the thousands of Founding era documents in his personal Wallbuilders library. I didn't get a 2nd response because I think he realized he was dealing with someone who knew more about the topic than he does.
Posted by: Jon Rowe | July 7, 2008 12:27 PM
I forget where but, again IIRC, there is a passage in the bible that says there is a tree on a mountain top from which one could see the whole world. Kind of hard to do unless the world was flat and quite a bit smaller than it is.
Posted by: Jeremy | July 7, 2008 12:28 PM
Bob Thomas - I read a book I think was called "The Story of the Declaration of Independence". It had a fold-out of a photo copy of Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence. If you look closely at that draft the reference to "nature's god" is written with a small case "g", not a capital G.
There's a scan of the original Jefferson draft (June 1776) at this PBS site which refers to "nature's god" - lower case.
Posted by: jimmiraybob | July 7, 2008 2:26 PM
What is "IIRC" please, googling did not help.
thnx, TPS
Posted by: The Pale Scot | July 7, 2008 2:51 PM
IIRC - shorthand for "if I recall correctly".
Posted by: Taz | July 7, 2008 3:03 PM
"IIRC" means If I Recall Correctly.
Posted by: John | July 7, 2008 3:03 PM
"If I Recall Correctly" - In other words, this is off the top of my head.
Let us not forget the French Navy's contribution to the defeat at Yorktown. Someone get these folks Tuchmans "The First Salute"!
Posted by: KeithB | July 7, 2008 3:05 PM
a) Any "government" in history worth its name, right down to a single parent, has to make rules, enforce the rules, and then deal with the ruler breakers or ambiguities & conflicts in the rules. The Bible is hardly needed to understand that.
b) The verse says that Jehovah is the poobah of all three roles - thus the accurate analogy to creating a human government would ultimately put all 3 functions under a single King. Whoops. Bring on the unitary executive!
Posted by: Foggg | July 7, 2008 3:07 PM
The "circle of the earth" refers to the fact that the horizon encircles the viewer, not to the real curvature of the earth's surface.
People did indeed "believe" that the world is flat in Columbus' time (some still do today) out of pure obstinacy, as people "believe" in intelligent design today. People lie to themselves all the time and call it "belief," and that's why they write for WorldNutDaffy.
Posted by: Kristine | July 7, 2008 3:26 PM
I've seen this "biblical quotations" article referenced before as "the American Political Science Association said the founders used the bible." Utter nonsense, of course, as the APSA is the publisher of the American Political Science Review (in which I have published a co-authored article, if I may boast), and is not itself a research organization. But I hadn't seen the actual citation before, but thanks to Somerville, I just downloaded and read it.
To begin, the article is not actually about biblical references in the founders, but is a document analysis analyzing how influential different European authors (none of whom contributed to the Bible, so far as I know) were on the revolutionary generation. I.e., were the founders all Lockeans, or were they Harringtonians? A debate that I had to suffer through in grad school, to very little profit. The methodology of sample selection was:
916 is a hell of a long way from 15,000, and so the people reporting that figure are beginning with a lie of monstrous proportions, so to speak.Second, the author was simply doing a citation count, and as he notes:
So the assumption that biblical references were positive is negated by the author's own description of his methodology.Indeed, 34% of citations in those 916 items came from the Bible. But here's how the author puts it:
Deuteronomy? That well-known source of political theory? Eh? But Lutz continues:Fortunately, Lutz gives actual numbers of citations, so we can do a rough calculation.
In 916 publications he counted 3154 citations.
34% of those were biblical, so there were 1,072 biblical citations.
3/4, or 75% of those came from the roughly 10% of the publications that were reprinted sermons, or 804 citations from approximately 92 sermons (916 * .1, assuming they were proportionately represented in his sample), a rate of 8.7 biblical citations per sermon.
That leaves 1,072-804 = 268 biblical citations for 916 - 92 = 824 non-sermon publications, or a rate of .3 biblical citations per non-sermon.
That is, non-religious publications in the founding era averaged less than 1 biblical citation. Astonishingly, the number is less than .5, meaning revolutionary era political writers were more likely to not cite the Bible than they were to cite it.
Of course this is a rough estimate, but it's based on Lutz's own figures, and even if I've overestimated the difference, it would take a vast reordering of the published numbers to close the gap between religious and non-religious publications.
(This also assumes my math is correct. I'm open to correction.)
Posted by: James Hanley | July 7, 2008 3:35 PM
The case is even worse than that, James. You'll also notice that Lutz' study breaks down those references year by year and when he looked at 1787 and 1788, the years the constitution was being written, explained to the public and debated in state conventions, the Biblical references are almost non-existent. In fact, Lutz notes that the Biblical references found during that period of time were by those opposed to the Constitution:
He notes that reprinted sermons accounted for about 10% of the writings in his sample, but that those sermons accounted for 75% of all the Biblical references. This study argues strongly against the idea that the Bible was an influence on the principles found in the Constitution, not for it.
Posted by: Ed Brayton | July 7, 2008 3:43 PM
Here's a couple other (genuine) quotes from Adams I'm sure the WorldNutDaily types will ignore:
"[God] created the human species... with the deliberate design of making nine tenths of our species miserable for ever... Pardon me, my Maker, I believe no such things."
"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved - the Cross. Consider what horrible calamities that engine of grief has produced!"
Posted by: Joe Max | July 7, 2008 3:55 PM
thnx,
duh, I missed the grammatical context and thought it was a source. I find it interesting that there seems to maps showing S. America and Antarctica before they were discovered. At least, the globe was made the same year Columbus sailed, and historically at least there is a lag between discoveries and their showing up on charts. Even the S.Pacific hadn't been properly charted at the start of WWII. From a sailor's point of view, anyway. Coastlines, reef locations etc.
Posted by: The Pale Scot | July 7, 2008 3:57 PM
WorldNutDaily is giving it both barrels; here's today's column from public intellectual Chuck Norris:
America's founding creationists
Posted by: Herod the Freemason | July 7, 2008 4:06 PM
Ed & James H.,
If Mr. Hanley doesn't reproduce what he's just written in his own blog post, I suggest Ed taking his comments and featuring them in a new blog post. It's very insightful. And I say this because, even though I know a great deal about the historiography of this subject, I have no idea how to do the social science analysis that Hanley did here and few professional social scientists have ever analyzed the Lutz study in this sense.
It could be that I'm just not good in math though (I'm not.)
Posted by: Jon Rowe | July 7, 2008 4:59 PM
The Scots might object to the English civil war being called the British civil war. They certainly played a part, but it was a fundamentally English affair.
A lot of people consider the American revolution to be the Civil War Part II. It's an interesting period.
Anyway: Columbus should have no role in the question of whether the US is based in Christianity or not. Not that it is a question; I think that anyone trying to call Jefferson a Christian should read his Bible, and that alone settles it, surely? What is wrong with these ignorami of the right? Where do they get their historical glasses, their inability to see fact? Of course, we know where, and it's no secret.
Posted by: AlWest | July 7, 2008 5:30 PM
Ed, I concur, I just focused on the overall, rather than the specific years of constitutional drafting and ratifying.
Jon, I probably will put it on my own blog, with Ed's insightful additions. Thanks for the prop. I'm not great with math either, and it took me considerably longer to puzzle that out than it should have.
JH
Posted by: James Hanley | July 7, 2008 7:38 PM
By George Washington, I HATE it when people politicize the founding fathers. They were all sexist and most were racist, but you don't see anyone talking about how this is a Christian-White-Patriarchal nation. It was the culture of the time and should be treated as just that. Anyone who knows anything about the founding of the US knows that the founders, though many of them had faith in divine providence, did not spend a significant portion of their political time worrying over what God would want.
And Franklin was a deist, for cry it out loud. What he said at the Constitutional Convention had less to do with faith in God, and more to do with keeping the delegates from clawing each other's eyes out.
Posted by: Sophia G. | July 7, 2008 8:51 PM
I'm not nearly enough of a military history buff to state this with great confidence, but I would strongly suspect that the "greatest" army in the world at the time was probably French, though the Chinese &/or Ottoman empires may have had the edge in head-count. In any case, as ThonyC & KeithB note, 'twas the French who gave the ragtag rabble their big win (at the cost of blowing out the national treasury, triggering their own revolution).
As for Columbus, he not only underestimated the size of the earth, he overestimated the size of "Cathay" (China) and its reach into the "Western Ocean". According to Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers (pg 242), ol' Chris did intend to revolutionize understanding of the shape of our planet:
[Ellipses both mine and Boorstin's; bracketed interpolations by Boorstin, who provides much more fascinating detail & context on Columbus's (mis)understanding of geography.]
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | July 7, 2008 9:36 PM
From what I understand of Franklin's motion, it has always been a little out context as well. Franklin was a deist who obviously didn't think much of Christian churches ("The only difference between the Church of Rome and the Church of England is the Church of Rome is infallible, while the Church of England is never wrong.") The motion for prayer was his way of saying "Look you idiots, is it going to take divine intervention for you to get things done around here?" As noted, the resolution was ignored and they went on without the prayer. I should add that Franklin was not a fan of the results of the Constitutional Convention.
Posted by: Ted H. | July 7, 2008 10:59 PM
No, not really. You could make a good argument that it actually started in Scotland with the Prayerbook Riots of July 1637, and Scots certainly played a significant military role throughout the entire conflict, which eventually led to the temporary unification of Scotland and England under Cromwell's Protectorate. We object to it being called the English Civil War because that name completely overlooks all this. As for it being a "fundamentally English affair", there are a heck of lot of Scots and Irish who would disagree most vociferously.
Anyway, this is all rather off-topic...
Posted by: Dunc | July 8, 2008 7:05 AM
And don't forget the French Navy. The American Naval forces then were rudimentary at best. The French Navy could and di take on the British head to head.
No French military help=no American independence.
Posted by: Max von Schuler-Kobayashi | July 8, 2008 7:45 AM
Since ancient times it was thought that the great masses of continental land in the northern hemisphere should somehow be balanced by continental land masses in the southern hemisphere. So they drew in land where they guessed it needed to be.
Posted by: Dave S. | July 8, 2008 7:52 AM