Miracles

[mrnoodle]

Well, Bruce, I wasn't trolling, but I did expect some resistance. It's become quite chic (again) to deny any biblical connection to America's founding documents. I need some time to get my research together, but I hope to be able to defend myself with documentation in the next day or so.

I thought I was done writing research papers but I can't throw the bait in the water and not fight the fish, I suppose.

I do have some Jeffersonian material handy, though. Both sides of the religion debate want Jefferson to be "theirs" and skew his quotes/letters, etc. to fit their bias. Jefferson himself seemed to be two-faced on the issue, claiming one thing in public and another in private writings. That's politics, I suppose. But he did claim to be a Christian, albeit not in the traditional sense. Sort of a semi-Deist Christian with Humanist/Unitarianism leanings, if that's even possible. He believed in God and believed in an afterlife, but denied the deity of Christ. He cherry-picked his personal faith out of the Biblical texts he liked best, while ignoring the rest, and compiled them into what is popularly known as the Jefferson Bible. Here's a couple of widely-quoted passages from letters he wrote in the early 1800's:

"The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they (the clergy) have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind." -- letter to Moses Robinson, 1801

Jefferson waxes eloquent on his compilation, what we term the Jefferson Bible: "A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen; it is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its Author never said nor saw." -- to Charles Thompson, 1816

To say that Jefferson did not draw on his Biblical influences when drafting what was to become the founding document of a fledgling nation is absurd.

A good Jefferson source

I gotta get some sleep if I'm going to be in the library tomorrow.....