All religions are cults.

Some are just more popular than others, that's all.

The First Amendment, however, stipulates, separation of church and state.

The Fourteenth Amendment stipulates, equality before the law for all, not for some, but for all.

That means, no discrimination against any religions, including Scientologists.

James Madison said:  "The appropriation of funds of the United States for the use and support of religious societies [is] contrary to the article of the Constitution which declares that 'Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment.'"

James Madison should have known.

He worked with Thomas Jefferson in the Virginia Legislature in the 1770s and 1780s to get passed the Virginia Religious Freedom Statutes on which the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment (the "article" of which he spoke above) was modeled.

And his co-worker, Thomas Jefferson, in his capacity as third president of the United States, in 1802, wrote to the Danbury, Connecticut Baptist clergymen who had lobbied for getting official recognition in the Constitution of Jesus Christ that that was not possible, because the Constitution, in Jefferson's words, was intended to establish a "wall of separation between church and state."

Those were Thomas Jefferson's words, not mine.

Thomas Jefferson wrote and said many things unfavorable to religion.

For instance, Thomas Jefferson said or wrote this:

"Question with boldness even the existence of a god."

Thomas Jefferson said or wrote this:

"I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature.  They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies."

Thomas Jefferson said or wrote this:

"The Christian god is a three-headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious.....  One only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him.  They are always of two classes:  fools and hypocrites."

Thomas Jefferson said or wrote this:

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus ... in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

Thomas Jefferson said or wrote this:

"I am a Materialist; he [Jesus] takes the side of Spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of sins; I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it."

Thomas Jefferson said or wrote this:

"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.... perverted into an engine for enslaving manking ... a mere contrivance [for the clergy] to filch wealth and power to themselves."

Thomas Jefferson said or wrote this:

"In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty, he is always in allegiance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own....  History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government....  Political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves [of public ignorance] for their own purpose."

Thomas Jefferson said or wrote this:

"State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights....  Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society."

Benjamin Franklin, another of the founders of our country, said or wrote this:

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."

Benjamin Franklin said or wrote this:

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason."

Benjamin Franklin said or wrote this:

"Since it is impossible for me to have any positive, clear idea of that which is infinite and incomprehensible, I cannot conceive otherwise than that He ... expects or requires no worship or praise from us."

Benjamin Franklin said or wrote this:

"As to Jesus of Nazareth ... I have some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I think it needless to busy myself with now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble."

Benjamin Franklin said or wrote this:

"Indeed, when religious people quarrel about religion, or hungry people quarrel about victuals, it looks as if they had not much of either among them."

George Washington, the first president of the U.S., and the military leader of the American Revolution of 1775-1783, said or wrote this:

"The United States of America should have a foundation free from the influence of clergy."

Thomas Paine, a leading American revolutionary during the American Revolution against the British Empire of 1775-1783, author of Common Sense, The Crisis, and a revolutionary hero in the formation of the American Republic in the Revolutionary years, said or wrote this:

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."

Thomas Paine also said or wrote this:

"Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.  Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts to stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity."

Thomas Paine said or wrote this:

"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself than this thing called Christianity.  Too absurd for belief ... it produces only atheists and fanatics."

Thomas Paine said or wrote this:

"The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed."

Thomas Paine said or wrote this:

"What is it the New Testament teaches us?  To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married...."

Thomas Paine said or wrote this:

"That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not."

Thomas Paine said or wrote this:

"One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests."

Another early founder of our country was John Adams.  He was part of the American Revolutionary generation.  He was also one of the earlier presidents of the United States, the second president after George Washington.  John Adams said or wrote this extremely sarcastic statement about Christianity:

"God has infinite wisdom, goodness and power; he created the universe....  He created this speck of dirt and the human species for his glory; and with deliberate design of making nine-tenths of our species miserable for ever for his glory.  This is the doctrine of Christian theologians, in general, ten to one....  Wretch!  What is his glory?  Is he ambitious?  Does he want promotion?  Is he vain, tickled with adulation, exulting and triumphing in his power and the sweetness of his vengeance?  Pardon me, my Maker, for these awful questions."

John Adams also said or wrote this:

"Twenty times in the course of my late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out:  This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!"

John Adams also said or wrote this:

"Even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry?"

John Adams also said or wrote this, and this is from the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously in the United States Senate, and signed by Adams when he was president of the United States into law in 1797:

"The United States of America is in no sense founded on the Christian religion."

John Adams also said or wrote this:

"Who does not see that the same authority who can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?"

John Adams said or wrote this:

"In the formation of the American government ... it will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of heaven."

The fact that ignoramus and right-wing lunatic George W. Bush could say, "I trust God speaks through me" or "God told me to invade Iraq" only shows the depths of degeneration, decay, and decline of U.S. capitalism's rotting and decaying and putrefying system to which our country's gotten today.

Abraham Lincoln, though not one of the original founders of the country, is considered by most historians as probably the most important of the presidents, due to his having fought, and won, the Civil War of 1861-1865, a War considered by some of the most insightful historians as America's Second Revolution, a social revolution that did away with the economic and social system of black chattel slavery.

Lincoln was personally a nonbeliever.

He wrote once a pamphlet analyzing the bible and saying it was fiction, and the only reason his pamphlet never saw the light of day is because an employer took it from him and burned it and advised Lincoln, if Lincoln wished to forward himself and his political ambitions, to not say anything further about the subject in public.

But Lincoln did say or write any number of statements about his real views on religion.

For instance, Abraham Lincoln said or wrote this:

"It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity."  "Infidelity" means, nonbelief or doubt.

Abraham Lincoln said or wrote this:

"In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God.  Both may be, and one must be, wrong."

Abraham Lincoln said or wrote this:

"I am approached ... by religious men who are certain they represent the Divine Will....  If God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected to my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me."

So all religions are cults.

The Scientologists just happen to be one of them.

But both the First Amendment's Establishment Clause guaranteeing separation of church and state, and the Fourteenth Amendment's equality before the law clause, and the Fourteenth Amendment's application of all provisions of the Bill of Rights (First Ten Amendments) to all parts of the United States, say or imply that all religions and all nonbelief systems as well have the right to equal protection under the law, and that does not only include Christian sects, Jewish sects, Muslim sects, Hindu sects, Sikh sects, Jainist sects, Buddhist sects, Deist sects, or, on the other side, systems of nonbelief like various kinds of atheism, materialism, humanism,  agnosticism, but also the sect of Scientologists.

They're all entitled to equal protection under the law under the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, and that Amendment also applies every Amendment of the Bill of Rights' first Ten Amendments to every part of the United States bar none.

Therefore, trying to sic the United States government on the Scientologists, which seems to be a campaign and crusade in which The St. Petersburg Times has endlessly engaged in the past 30 years, not only makes no sense legally, but makes no sense from the standpoint of the equal rights and separation of church and state principles on the basis of which the U.S. as a country was supposedly founded.

--Allan Greene