Subject: Are we really "1 nation under God? |
Bible Note: Okay, i am tired of researching, there is just too much out there, i'm not sure how much it will let me post, but here goes. Thomas Jeferson "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth." - "Notes on Virginia" . "Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. - letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787 "It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are not one. But this constitutes the craft, the power and the profit of the priests." - to John Adams, 1803 "Gouverneur Morris had often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system (Christianity) than did he himself." -in his private journal, Feb. 1800 "It is not to be understood that I am with him (Jesus Christ) in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist; he takes the side of Spiritualism, he preaches the efficacy of repentence toward forgiveness of sin; I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it. - to Carey, 1816 "The priests of the superstition, a bloodthirsty race, are as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham,of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore." - to Story, Aug. 4, 1820 "It has been fifty and sixty years since I read the Apocalypse, and then I considered it merely the ravings of a maniac." "The truth is, that the greatest enemies of the doctrine of Jesus are those, calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them to the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come, when the mystical generation [birth] of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation [birth] of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." - to John Adams, Apr. 11, 1823 . "I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology." "We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanatacism and fabrication ." "Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the Common Law." -letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, 1814 |