:|On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Carol Lee Smith wrote:
:|
:|> Complete interviews made by Ken Burns with 24 Jefferson scholars, for the
:|> 1996 PBS program "Thomas Jefferson" may be read at:
:|>
:|> http://www.pbs.org/jefferson/archives/interviews/frame.htm
:|>
:|> the sidebar has a whole listing of interviews re: Jefferson
:|-------excerpt-------------
:|
:| What kind of manyou spoke a bit about being unsure, being torn on the
:|bias in a way... What kind of man was Thomas Jefferson? Drink him in for
:|me.
:|Well, I'll give you one example. He was an atheist, and we were not sick
:|with religion in 1800 as we are sick with religion in 1995.

:|Religion was a
:|private matter, and they had seen to it that it was kept a private matter.

:|People could go to any church they wanted, and the government stayed away
:|from them, and they stayed out of the government. Yet there was a certain
:|amount of evangelical Christianity going on, and they finally got after
:|Jefferson because they knew this was in his background, as indeed it was
:|in the background of Abraham Lincoln. So he gets caught on this, and
:|finally comes up with a weird premise that he's a deist, which means one
:|who believes in a god but he can't quite define what it is. Well, you're
:|living a lie every day of your life if you're surrounded by devout
:|Christians and you have to give them a feeling that you're one too, or at
:|least you're not hostile, and he was hostile. Well, these contradictions
:|are a joy for most politicians. I mean, there is nothing a real politician
:|loves better than telling a lie, and the bigger the lie, the more ecstatic
:|it is. I mean it's really exciting stuff to lie. Jefferson did lie, but he
:|didn't much enjoy it, and you could see that things were turning over in
:|his brain, and he would make excuses for his behavior, particularly over
:|the Aaron Burr case, that were just ludicrous." --Gore Vidal