The Founders Finding Higher Forms of Faith

 THOMAS JEFFERSON was often accused of being an atheist by his political enemies. They considered it the greatest insult they could hurl at him,as Christians often do, other then his being an adulterer, which, alas, he was. Jefferson, who actually believed in God, felt bemused at his enemy's ignorance rather than insulted. Jefferson's concept of God was so scientific, natural, and logical that from the Christian point of view he was indeed an atheist. Jefferson, who attended church regularly, doing as Romans do when in Rome, and to keep up appearances and maintain his reputation, made it plain in personal letters that he considered Christianity, as he put it, "our modern superstition". The fact that as president he cut a copy of the Bible into pieces, set aside everything in it he thought noble and true and in another pile everything he thought superstitious and mythical and foolish, explained that he was "extracting diamonds from a pile of dung". Yes, he called the bible a "pile of dung". The superstitious untrue pile was much taller, it seems. He published the good parts in his own version, popularly called "the Jefferson Bible", and that was that. Jefferson wanted a higher form of communion with the awesome eternity of the natural world. The world, arguably, would be a far better place if everyone would abandon their traditional, superstitious religions, and accept Thomas Jefferson's religion, "deism", which was also the religion of most of America's founding fathers, a fact which is neither widely known nor taught in America's schools. Franklin and Paine were deists, and probably Washington and both Adams the elder and younger. Nobody is sure about Washington; he steadfastly refused to talk about his religion, and Hamilton and Jefferson had on ongoing wager, which neither of them ever collected, as to which of them could discover Washington's true religious beliefs. The deism of the intellectual founders, to quote T.S. Eliot, seems 'so elegant, so intelligent". None of this primitive, barbaric, supernatural nonsense about which many people so violently and uselessly argue and fight, and which adds nothing to intellectual enterprise, and which does so much to twist and distort small minds into useless attitudes and beliefs about all aspects of life, is worth the trouble it brings us. America's founders invented a seriously flawed albeit basically good political system, much of which is outdated, and badly in need of amending if not replacing. Their true genius was somewhat surprisingly, religious. Bye establishing the sacred principle of the separation of church and state, and by embracing a sublime sir if religiosity, as many of them did, they led by example, and example of religious freedom, tolerance, and the possibility of higher forms of inquiry and faith.