Morning Reads for Tuesday, August 1

One of the many compromises agreed to by the framers in the first session of Congress were chaplains for each House. So if the preacher is there entirely on the VP’s own dime I’m OK with it, however I’m in complete agreement with the chief framer Madison who had to give in to the congressional chaplains to get something else at the time that I don’t recall. He later wrote:

“If Religion consist in voluntary acts of individuals, singly, or voluntarily associated, and it be proper that public functionaries, as well as their Constituents shd discharge their religious duties, let them like their Constituents, do so at their own expense.”

The quote in the article that really has me scratching my head though is:
““I don’t think Donald Trump has figured out that he chained himself to the Apostle Paul,” Drollinger said, though it isn’t clear who the “Paul” is in this analogy.”
So is the preacher comparing himself to the Apostle or does he assume President Trump tied himself to Paul when he invoked his “Two Corinthians” on the campaign trail? In any case this reminded me of another founder’s opinion on Paul:

“Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Christ] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate therefore the gold from the dross; restore to him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of his disciples. Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus. These palpable interpolations and falsifications of his doctrines led me to try to sift them apart.” — Thomas Jefferson