Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, I'm Paul Vogel saying and this is episode number 3.58. Today's show is brought to you by AutoSl. As part of our Smithsonian Associates Art of Living Author interview series,

we are joined today by Historian-selling award-winning author Dr. John Regasta.

Dr. John Regasta will be appearing at the Smithsonian Associates program June 17th,

2019 and the title of his presentation is Jefferson and the meaning of

religious freedom. For 200 years Thomas Jefferson and his Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom

have stood at the center of our understanding of religious liberty and the First Amendment.

Jefferson's expansive vision, including his insistence that political

freedom and free thought would be at risk if we did not establish a strict separation of church and state, enjoyed a near consensus of support

at the Supreme Court level and among historians until 1985 when Justice William Requist called the reliance on Jefferson demonstrably

incorrect as a matter of history.

But the statute for establishing religious freedom is quite powerful, persuasive, and even as Dr. Regosta points out,

poetic.

Let's listen as Dr. Regosta reads briefly from Jefferson's statuette about why Jefferson felt that freedom of religion is so essential

to establishing a functioning American republic.

Jefferson's statute for establishing religious freedom is Jefferson at his best, sometimes his most poetic.

Almighty God hath created the mind free.

All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of

hypocrisy and meanness. To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the

propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.

Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions

in physics or geometry.

The opinions and men are not the objects of civil government or

...