





Debunking "Beck U" -- Faith 102 with "Professor" David Barton Chris Rodda print page Thu Aug 05, 2010 at 11:30:25 AM EST editor: here's Chris Rodda's take on David Barton's claim that a substantial number of the Founding Fathers were ministers: "Barton cleverly uses the word 'seminary' to dupe his followers into thinking that 29 signers of the Declaration of Independence had theology degrees and were ministers, when in reality the word 'seminary' just means college, although its use today is almost always to refer to a theological seminary. The truth is that only four of the 56 signers of the Declaration went to college to study theology, and only two, John Witherspoon and Lyman Hall, stuck with it and became ministers, but Hall was booted out of his church for some moral indiscretion and decided to become a doctor instead of a minister. Of the other two, one became a lawyer and the other became a merchant."] This week's class at Beck University was the second class taught by "Professor" David Barton, and, as expected, the class was packed with quite a few of Barton's pseudo-historical lies and distortions. In fact, Barton managed to get over a dozen separate lies into this single half-hour class. The entire goal of Barton's "Faith 102" class was to prove that the two least religious founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, had no intention of separating church and state. I've debunked many of the lies Barton used in this class before, so, since I've been a bit swamped with my "day job" at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and didn't have time to make an entirely new video this week, I've thrown together a few videos debunking some of the lies from "Professor" Barton's Beck U class, mainly using my debunkings of these same lies from a video series I made last year. Barton's lie that more than half the signers of the Declaration of Independence were ministers (he also used this one in his first Beck U class):

Barton's lie that Benjamin Franklin chose to begin a treaty in the name of the trinity:

Barton's lie that Thomas Jefferson started church services at the Capitol (should be watched along with the next video about the Marine Band):

Barton's lie that Thomas Jefferson told the Marine Band to play at church services:

Barton's lie that Thomas Jefferson sent Christian missionaries to evangelize the Indians

Barton's lie about why the Danbury Baptists wrote to Thomas Jefferson, and what his reply meant:

During this Beck U class, Barton once again told his lie about Thomas Jefferson dating his documents "in the year of our Lord Christ," a lie that he told on Beck's show that I debunked in my current "No, Mr. Beck …" video series, so here's that video:

The above videos cover only seven of the over a dozen lies from Barton's latest class, but I'll be trying to get to all the rest, as well as a few more things from Faith 101, in other posts before Barton's next class -- Faith 103. (My apologies to those who can't watch videos at work or because they don't have fast enough connections. I just don't have time to transcribe these videos and include a text version in this post like I've been doing in my other video posts since receiving requests for text versions from people who can't watch the videos.)



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Debunking "Beck U" -- Faith 102 with "Professor" David Barton | 4 comments (4 topical, 0 hidden) comments (4 topical, 0 hidden)







Debunking "Beck U" -- Faith 102 with "Professor" David Barton | 4 comments (4 topical, 0 hidden) comments (4 topical, 0 hidden)