Mitt Romney

Quoted in the NY Times:

I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from the God who gave us liberty. Nor would I separate us from our religious heritage.

MITT ROMNEY on his Mormon faith

Such a goal sends shivers of fear through me. I want to be separated from Romney's god and everyone else's god, too. No god gave me or my ancestors liberty. And I utterly reject as archaic and liberty-depriving the religious heritage of the so-called Great Awakenings of this nation. It is a religious heritage more recent than the secular Enlightenment that informed the philosophy of our Founding Fathers. The second Great Awakening wave of the early 1800s is also what spawned Mormonism. And what a rational development that was--NOT. Buried books written in a proto-Egyptian script, interpreted by magic stones called ummin and thummin, and then conveniently taken to heaven by an angel. Riiiiight. What was Joseph Smith's background? His father believed in the magic of divining rods and other superstitions. Throw a susceptible, nearly illiterate, superstitious mind like Smith's into the fervor of the second Great Awakening of the eastern seaboard states and presto, you get Mormonism.