Below The Beltway

Well, I knew that Glenn Beck’s 912 Project was a massive load a of nonsense simply because who it came from, but this confirms it (at about the :49 mark):

Beck references The Jefferson Bible, a book that Thomas Jefferson created for a very specific purpose:

In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of … or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines. [3]

Put simple, The Jefferson Bible is the New Testament without any reference to anything supernatural whether it be angels, genealogy, prophecy ,miracles, the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, or Jesus’ resurrection, which Jefferson had once characterized as “so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture.” Though I doubt Beck either knew that our would bother to tell his viewers.

Of course, as Allahpundit points out, basing an appeal to individual on a supernatural being doesn’t really solve anything:

Good luck getting God to protect your rights when they’re being trampled on, and better luck in trying to form a consensus between left and right on precisely which rights “belong to him” and what that means in practice. Do I have a right to be cared for when I’m sick? I say no, but I don’t think it’s nutty that a socialist might read Biblical passages about doing unto others and being my brother’s keeper and conclude otherwise.

And, as Yaron Brook reminded Beck, there’s a much better definition of individual rights:

The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.

Sounds about right to me.