Thomas Paine, John Brummett, and Arkansas "Freethinkers"

Some members of Arkansas "Free Thinker" Societies celebrating a Winter Solstice. What they want to be free of thinking about is the knowledge of God. In order for that to happen, you of course, need to shut up about Him outside the confines of your own home (and maybe even there).
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There he goes again. John Brummett once again displays the vast gap between how he sees himself and how others see him in the column "Intolerant of Free Thought, Who, US?". Here is a guy who is basically a paid character assassin for the print establishment, whose job is to bully the population into "not going there" on a number of issues and political candidates, chiding the Arkansas legislature for being "intolerant". His whole career has been as a media enforcer against ideas and against candidates whose positions on issues are outside the bounds that the establishment is willing to tolerate!

Now that he has a blog that allows comments, I'd mosey on over there and call him on it in his own "house", except that I notice that his blog is floundering with essentially no public comments on any articles despite the huge platform he has to pump it. If anyone starts using his blog as an information watering hole, maybe I'll bother. In the meantime, I don't know if he even has the 10K unique visitors a month that this little-old hobby blog draws (even if 8.5K a month are just here for the stuff about the Duggars!)

In this particular article, Brummett chides the legislature for their refusal to create a "Thomas Paine Day". The bill to do so was sponsored by perhaps the most radical leftist in the Arkansas legislature (Lindsley Smith). Rep. Sid Rosenbaum turned back the Thomas Paine day measure in the last session, by reading quotes from Paine himself. Smith wants to bring the bill back, as she does with the ERA amendment.

My wife noticed that this is the way things work, when the left gets beaten on a bill, they bring it back again and again until it passes. Alleged conservative legislators mostly act like they are afraid to introduce a bill, and when they finally do and lose, they shrug their shoulders and give up. That needs to change, and we can help make it change by giving the good guys the media cover that the left has to encourage them to keep plugging.

At any rate, Brummett lists some of Paine's beliefs and asked what is so unreasonable about them. "His own church is his own mind" Brummett writes. On the surface that may sound a lot like the "every man is his own high priest" doctrine of the Baptists, but there is a huge difference. The Baptist doctrine means that even though the scriptures are binding, it is up to each person to figure out how to live them out. Paine acknowledges no scripture. The Baptist doctrine makes every man his own high priest in the service of God, Paine's doctrine makes every man out to be his own god.

There are many men and women in U.S. History that we could honor. Paine is used today as an icon of a group which styles themselves "Freethinkers". While they are free to believe how they wish, I concur with our legislators that neither they nor their icon Paine are worthy of special honors from the state.

The "freethinkers" are not a group of well-meaning philosophers- they are people who are extremely antagonistic to God and virtually every person who worships God. Here is the "Quote of the Moment" on their website......

"A man who eats another man, we call insane. A man who eats his god, we call a Christian." --Adapted from a quote of Claude A.
Helvetius, 1715-1771, French philosopher and encyclopedist

If you visit the site, there is a lot more provocative, antagonistic stuff to be read. While they have a right to hold all of these views, they are offensive to the vast majority of taxpayers in this state, and the ledge has better things to do than dither about whether their icon should be given special honor.