In a world that is full of misinformation and outright lies, I have tried to create a site that can provide accurate and rational responses to questions about life. We can explore the pressing questions about science, religion, government and society together. Of course, we can have some fun doing this as well. "The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall" - Thomas Paine
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Saturday, November 12, 2011
Did Washington add the words, under God, to his oath of office?
Philander D. Chase, Senior Editor, The Papers of George Washington,
University of Virginia , wrote in a November 17, 2005 email "... Washington
as president was a remarkably strict constructionist of the Constitution, and it
seems to me very unlikely that he would have altered or amended the
constitutional oath regardless of whatever views he may have had on the subject,
and his personal views as far as they are known seem to have been pretty
comfortable with the oath as it appears in the Constitution." Charlene Bickford,
Director, First Federal Congress Project, George Washington University , also
confirms that there is no contemporaneous account of George Washington saying
those words. In a November 29, 2004 email she wrote "In fact, the only
contemporaneous account that repeats the oath, a letter of the French consul,
Comte de Moustier, April 30, 1789 (PDF), states only the
constitutional oath. We now believe that Washington consciously (he rarely did
something that wasn't very calculated) repeated only the prescribed oath with no
reference to God to show strict adherence to the Constitution."
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