Bogus

The internet is a Cesspool of deceit and chicanery.  There, I said it.  Sorry to be so negative, especially considering where this blog ends up (that is, on the internet), but it needed to be said.  The contradictory posts on websites and social media surrounding presidential candidates, that are even seen on mainstream media news sources on both sides, demonstrate that there is no longer any such thing as truth these days.  One such post was a perported Twitter statement made by a certain Presidential candidate in 1990.  (Twitter began in 2006, invalidating any "tweets" from 1990...)  Quite frankly, I'm sick of it.

One of the more common things seen swirling around the internet these days are photos, memes, and the like that often attribute quotes to famous people, and especially the founders of the United States.  Today's case study is just such a quote, from a website called "Go Left."  I am presuming that it intends to make the case that religion should be kept out of politics, which is generally not borne out by anything the founders stated, either in the official charters of this country, or in their personal writings.  Here is the image in question:

 

A part of the quote I would take as at least a partial truth in terms of what the founders intended.  (All Heresies in the church itself always contained a kernel of the truth, but then morphed into things never intended by the original kernel of truth)  But the whole quote is problematic, and doesn't seem to be borne out by many other things Jefferson said both publicly and privately.   Now attempting to verify anything found on the internet is itself a difficult task, much like salmon swimming upstream to spawn.  But the best place I could find as an actual source came from two locations.  One site shows it to be personal commentary by website's author on a number of other Jefferson quotes related to church and state.  Clicking on the link will yield the quote at the top of the page, not itself attributed to Jefferson.

From there it gets more troublesome.  I stumbled on a US News blog from 2009 in which it automatically assumes that a reader's use of this perported quote is factual and true, and so they quote it as the basis for their entire post.  Now what is fascinating about this is that the quote is also source cited as from a letter Jefferson wrote in 1808 to the Virginia Baptists.  Both a government site showing the original letter and the printed text of the letter (linked above) match, and nowhere within that letter do those words from the meme quote exist.  Yet multiple "quote" sites not only attribute it to Jefferson, but they also attribute it as coming from this letter, linked above.  Not only can you find multiple sites that obviously have never actually checked the source on it, but if one looks hard enough, you'll find previous efforts at debunking this mythical quote as well!  And from all this:  bogus and intentionally deceptive quotes and news are born.

P.T. Barnum perportedly said "There's a sucker born every minute."  Oddly enough, we cannot even be certain he ever said that.  Regardless, it appears whoever first said it knew what they were talking about.  The more we buy into the internet as containing truth, the more we are intentionally deceived and tricked into believing that which is simply not true, nor had it ever been.  Remember this commercial from a few years ago?  Let's not be like the young lady dating her "French Model."  Let's seek the truth in all things, and let's assume that if it's on the internet, it's likely bogus.