Telling The Truth, Losing Your Job

WHEN THOMAS JEFFERSON RAN FOR PRESIDENT, he was accused by his opponents of being an atheist and an adulterer, in the newspapers. No, politics back then was no more civil than it is now. The word "adultery" amused Jefferson, because for all the world the word sounds as if it should literally mean: "the activities of an adult". Jefferson was in fact neither, and yet, is some ways, a bit of both. Thomas Jefferson, ever the complex walking bundle of contradictions. He had affairs, but only after his wife had died. He had promised Martha on her deathbed that he would never remarry. He believe in God, but not the Christian biblical version. Miracles were not part of Jefferson's world view. Jefferson's God was nature itself, as revealed through science like it was for many eighteenth century intellectuals. They were called "deists". They believed that god was inherent in the laws of nature, and deists tended to greatly distrust traditional religion as superstitious poppycock. Jefferson called himself a "primitive Christian", by which he meant that he didn't believe in miraculous divine intervention, and hes once said: "I am a sect unto myself, as far as I know"> Jefferson was particularly concerned about the power of the entrenched priesthood in civic, secular matters. Jefferson sat in the White House on one occasion, cutting a copy of the Bible into pieces, forming two piles of scripture. The larger pile, he explained, was untruth and without value, while the other, smaller stack was wisdom. "I am extracting diamonds from a pile of dung", in his words. He assembled his stack of biblical wisdom into a narrative, added his own commentary, and published it under the tile "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth". A copy can be found in any good research library. The tragedy is that hardly anyone in America knows about all this, because it isn't taught in public schools. Heaven forbid that we should teach about our unsaved founding fathers in schools supported by the tax dollars of the Christian conservative community. But, just a hint, I whisper to you now, at great personal risk: "Nature's God: The Heretical origins of the American Republic" by Mathew Stewart explains it all. The bad news is that our beloved United States was never intended to be a "Christian" nation by anyone who had a hand in establishing it. just make sure you don't try to teach this fact in any public school in America. You might lose your job.