View From the Bushes

As I was driving home yesterday, I ended up behind a truck with numerous liberal bumper stickers. Some examples:

Against Abortion? Don't have one!

He's not my president

God told me to hate you

I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned.

The last quote was attributed to Thomas Jefferson, and I guess that's what bothered me the most, because I'm 90+% sure he never said it. I love quotes, I have sat down and read books of quotes cover to cover, and in all that time I had never encountered that quote, so right off that bat I was pretty sure it was spurious. After searching for it on the internet I discovered that it was contained in various forms all over the place, but nowhere definitive. In particular it was no where among the 87,000 quotations referenced at Bartleby's. The people over at WikiQuote.org had this to say:

A variant "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." seems to be spreading even more broadly on the internet, but without ANY citation of sources that I could find, and appears to be merely a somewhat casual and improper paraphrase of the more extensive statement. Until such time as a reliable sources are provided for either of these statements, I am inclined to consider them spurious. I was prompted to investigate these quotes after finding the shorter one on Wikiquote's Religion Theme page, and though long an admirer of Jefferson I could not recall ever encountering it before. I am now going to remove it from there, as probably spurious, until proven otherwise.

So I guess what I'm trying to get at is if you're going to make a statement for all the world to see, go to the expense of printing up stickers, and plaster them on cars all over the country, you think you would make sure that you're not full of crap. Anyway, I just get worked up over people who make up quotes to support their positions. Anyway to further gush about my eldest daughter it appears that she was the only person from her school to make it into the gifted program.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross