AMERICA'S FOUNDING FATHERS WERE NOT CHRISTIANS
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[ Subject: The Founding Fathers of the United States Were NOT Christians
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[ Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2006
The Founding Fathers of the United States Were NOT Christians
http://dim.com/ ~randl/founders. htm [sic]
Excerpts from:
The Founding Fathers Were Not Christians by Steven
Morris, in Free Inquiry, Fall, 1995 (If you want to
complain about this article, complain to Steven Morris,
who wrote it)
"The Christian right is trying to rewrite the history of
the United States as part of its campaign to force its
religion on others. They try to depict the founding
fathers as pious Christians who wanted the United States
to be a Christian nation, with laws that favored
Christians and Christianity.
This is patently untrue. The early presidents and
patriots were generally Deists or Unitarians, believing
in some form of impersonal Providence but rejecting the
divinity of Jesus and the absurdities of the Old and New
testaments.
Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer whose manifestos
encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided
materially in winning the war of Independence:
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish
church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the
Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any
church that I know of...Each of those churches accuse the
other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them
all."
-From: The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, pp. 8,9
(Republished 1984, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY)
George Washington, the first president of the United
States, never declared himself a Christian according to
contemporary reports or in any of his voluminous
correspondence. Washington Championed the cause of
freedom from religious intolerance and compulsion. When
John Murray (a universalist who denied the existence of
hell) was invited to become an army chaplain, the other
chaplains petitioned Washington for his dismissal.
Instead, Washington gave him the appointment. On his
deathbed, Washinton uttered no words of a religious
nature and did not call for a clergyman to be in
attendance.
-From: George Washington and Religion by Paul F. Boller
Jr., pp. 16, 87, 88, 108, 113, 121, 127 (1963, Southern
Methodist University Press, Dallas, TX)
John Adams, the country's second president, was drawn to
the study of law but faced pressure from his father to
become a clergyman. He wrote that he found among the
lawyers 'noble and gallant achievments" but among the
clergy, the "pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces".
Late in life he wrote: "Twenty times in the course of my
late reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out,
"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there
were no religion in it!"
It was during Adam's administration that the Senate
ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which states
in Article XI that "the government of the United States
of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian
Religion."
-From: The Character of John Adams by Peter Shaw, pp. 17
(1976, North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC) Quoting a
letter by JA to Charles Cushing Oct 19, 1756, and John
Adams, A Biography in his Own Words, edited by James
Peabody, p. 403 (1973, Newsweek, New York NY) Quoting
letter by JA to Jefferson April 19, 1817, and in
reference to the treaty, Thomas Jefferson, Passionate
Pilgrim by Alf Mapp Jr., pp. 311 (1991, Madison Books,
Lanham, MD) quoting letter by TJ to Dr. Benjamin
Waterhouse, June, 1814.
Thomas Jefferson, third president and author of the
Declaration of Independence, said:"I trust that there is
not a young man now living in the United States who will
not die a Unitarian." He referred to the Revelation of
St. John as "the ravings of a maniac" and wrote: "The
Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ
levelled to every understanding and too plain to need
explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials
with which they might build up an artificial system which
might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting
controversy, give employment for their order, and
introduce it to profit, power, and pre-eminence. The
doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are
within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of
volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted
on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can
never be explained."
-From: Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate History by Fawn M.
Brodie, p. 453 (1974, W.W) Norton and Co. Inc. New York,
NY) Quoting a letter by TJ to Alexander Smyth Jan 17,
1825, and Thomas Jefferson, Passionate Pilgrim by Alf
Mapp Jr., pp. 246 (1991, Madison Books, Lanham, MD)
quoting letter by TJ to John Adams, July 5, 1814.
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus,
by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a
virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation
of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
- Thomas Jefferson (letter to J. Adams April 11,1823)
James Madison, fourth president and father of the
Constitution, was not religious in any conventional
sense. "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the
mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise." "During
almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of
Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits?
More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the
Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both,
superstition, bigotry and persecution."
-From: The Madisons by Virginia Moore, P. 43 (1979,
McGraw-Hill Co. New York, NY) quoting a letter by JM to
William Bradford April 1, 1774, and James Madison, A
Biography in his Own Words, edited by Joseph Gardner, p.
93, (1974, Newsweek, New York, NY) Quoting Memorial and
Remonstrance against Religious Assessments by JM, June
1785.
Ethan Allen, whose capture of Fort Ticonderoga while
commanding the Green Mountain Boys helped inspire
Congress and the country to pursue the War of
Independence, said, "That Jesus Christ was not God is
evidence from his own words." In the same book, Allen
noted that he was generally "denominated a Deist, the
reality of which I never disputed, being conscious that I
am no Christian." When Allen married Fanny Buchanan, he
stopped his own wedding ceremony when the judge asked him
if he promised "to live with Fanny Buchanan agreeable to
the laws of God." Allen refused to answer until the judge
agreed that the God referred to was the God of Nature,
and the laws those "written in the great book of nature."
-From: Religion of the American Enlightenment by G.
Adolph Koch, p. 40 (1968, Thomas Crowell Co., New York,
NY.) quoting preface and p. 352 of Reason, the Only
Oracle of Man and A Sense of History compiled by American
Heritage Press Inc., p. 103 (1985, American Heritage
Press, Inc., New York, NY.)
Benjamin Franklin, delegate to the Continental Congress
and the Constitutional Convention, said: "As to Jesus of
Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I
think the System of Morals and his Religion...has
received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with
most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as
to his Divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize
upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to
busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an
opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble." He
died a month later, and historians consider him, like so
many great Americans of his time, to be a Deist, not a
Christian.
-From: Benjamin Franklin, A Biography in his Own Words,
edited by Thomas Fleming, p. 404, (1972, Newsweek, New
York, NY) quoting letter by BF to Exra Stiles March 9,
1790.
Speaking of the independence of the first 13 States, H.G.
Wells in his Outline of History, says:
"It was a Western European civilization that had broken
free from the last traces of Empire and Christendom; and
it had not a vestige of monarchy left, and no State
Religion... The absence of any binding religious tie is
especially noteworthy. It had a number of forms of
Christianity, its spirit was indubitably Christian; but,
as a State document of 1796 expicity declared: 'The
government of the United States is not in any sense
founded on the Christian religion.'"
The words "In God We Trust" were not consistently on all
U.S. currency until 1956, during the McCarthy Hysteria.
The Treaty of Tripoli, passed by the U.S. Senate in 1797,
read in part: "The government of the United States is not
in any sense founded on the Christian religion." The
treaty was written during the Washington administration,
and sent to the Senate during the Adams administration.
It was read aloud to the Senate, and each Senator
received a printed copy. This was the 339th time that a
recorded vote was required by the Senate, but only the
third time a vote was unanimous (the next time was to
honor George Washington). There is no record of any
debate or dissension on the treaty. It was reprinted in
full in three newspapers - two in Philadelphia, one in
New York City. There is no record of public outcry or
complaint in subsequent editions of the papers.
CONTRADICTIONS @ http://dim.com/ ~randl/tcont. htm [sic]
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