Source A says p is true.
Source A is authoritative.
Therefore, p is true.
This argument is fallacious. It is always wrong. Simply being in a position of authority doesn't mean you know everything. People who use this argument don't know how to form opinions, and they depend on daddy to tell them what they're supposed to think.
I truly, honestly believe that a lot of Republicans confuse how they view God with how they view the Founding Fathers. As in, they think the founders are God. They know absolutely nothing about the founders, and they know absolutely nothing about God. But that's not going to stop them from pretending to. They project their own opinions onto both. They take both of their quotes out of context. They've completely forgotten the messages they originally stood for. They believe the founder's 'word' (or, their own projected opinion) is infallible, and anyone who disagrees is going to hell and/or a communist. They have completely made up their own authority to appeal to.
Anyone who's read even a little bit about the Revolutionary War era should know that the founders were products of the Enlightenment. They were very much secular. The vast majority of the founders were Christian, but they typically held a strong distrust against organized religion in general, specifically when it mixes in with government. That's monarchistic European thinking. That is one of the key principles Revolutionary America fought against, and any fucktard should know it.
Sarah Palin was caught projecting her opinions onto the founders. Keith Olbermann calls her out on it, and shits down her neck.
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I don't know why Olbermann only quoted Jefferson. Thomas Paine and James Madison hated religion even more than he did. Jefferson actually warmed up to Christianity a bit later in his life, believing Jesus was one of the greatest moral philosophers who had ever lived (just not in his divinity). Keep in mind, most of the founders disagreed with them (we can't make the same mistake Republicans are making and assume that every founder universally agreed on everything; they were just as divided as we are). Most everyone was undoubtedly secular, but in terms of personal belief, Jefferson, Paine, and Madison were the extremists of their age.
Jefferson and his best friend John Adams eventually agreed to just stop discussing religion altogether, since their debates would always grow so heated, and threaten their friendship. The Federalists viciously attacked Jefferson in the 1800 election for being a "deist" and an "infidel." Most of the founders cut off relations with Paine entirely during his later years when most of his stronger criticisms against Christianity came out in The Age of Reason. Jefferson was the only friend who stuck by him, and the Federalists attacked him for doing that too. Paine and Jefferson were both deists. James Madison, who was Jefferson's protege and principle author of the Constitution is considered by many to have been an atheist.
“Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make half the world fools and half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the world.”
-Thomas Jefferson
“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.”
-Thomas Jefferson
“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
-Thomas Jefferson
“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”
-Thomas Jefferson
"My own mind is my own church."
-Thomas Paine
“The world is my country, to do good is my religion.”
-Thomas Paine
"Yet, with all this strange appearance of humility and this contempt for human reason, he [the Christian] ventures into the boldest presumptions; he finds fault with everything; his selfishness is never satisfied; his ingratitude is never at an end. He takes on himself to direct the Almighty what to do, even in the government of the universe; he prays dictatorially; when it is sunshine, he prays for rain, and when it is rain, he prays for sunshine; he follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say: Thou knowest not so well as I.”
-Thomas Paine
"The civil government ... functions with complete success ... by the total separation of the Church from the State."
-James Madison
"Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects."
-James Madison
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize, every expanded prospect."
-James Madison
"Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just Government instituted to secure and perpetuate it needs them not."
-James Madison
"That diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some, and to their eternal infamy the clergy can furnish their quota of imps for such a business."
-James Madison
"Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States, is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect ... Equal laws, protecting equal rights, are found, as they ought to be presumed, the best guarantee of loyalty and love of country; as well as best calculated to cherish that mutual respect and good will among citizens of every religious denomination which are necessary to social harmony, and most favorable to the advancement of truth."
-James Madison
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