Come on, you basically excoriated the man for making a factual statement. You even called him a dumbass. If that’s not hero worship I do not know what is.
These are fallible human beings, they make mistakes. On this area of slavery and rights for the indigent Native Americans, I certainly do believe that Jefferson fell far short of our Lord’s call.
Are you always this snippy?
Ohhhh....first I was “making them into gods”, now that I brought in the OBVIOUS involvement of The Lord it’s down to “hero worship”.
Rom, you say that Mr. Jefferson fell short of the Lord’s call. Most people do. Who are you to judge?
I made a very simple statement. Thomas Jefferson, in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, decried slavery. Maybe, instead of the hypocrisy you find in him, he was expressing what he had learned from and regretted about his experience as a slave holder. Is that not a possibility?
It is grotesquely unfair to hold historical figures to modern morals and/or views. It is also unfair to expect perfection of human beings past or present. Mr. Jefferson lived in a time where slavery was the rule not the exception and yet, he, a slave owner, proclaimed that slavery was wrong. He owned a plantation. Successful, economically viable plantations owned slaves. It was a reflection of that reality that the Founders had the slavery section removed.
The Declaration of Independence was a statement of principles and a very controversial one at that. The issue of slavery was only one of the controversies this document dealt with. The Declaration of Independence declared for the first time in history that man’s rights are God given and not given by a monarch or other kind of human leader. This idea was totally radical for the time.
However, if we take your stance on the issue, that someone who owned slaves cannot credibly denounce slavery, we would have to also believe that Jefferson, a wealthy, British subject, had no moral authority to denounce the concept of monarchy. He was a rich land owner. He most certainly benefited from the monarchy. So, given your logic, the Declaration of Independence is totally hypocritical in every way shape and form. We would have to conclude and agree with our Leftist friends that the very foundation of our country is a fraud. Surely you are not suggesting that?
How about this? Paul was not exactly a fine example of Christian living when God called him to His service, was he? He was, in fact, someone who persecuted the church. And yet, he became an apostle. We don’t dismiss him and his conversion for his previous flaws, do we? Paul was a human being as was Thomas Jefferson. We do not hold Paul to the same standard of perfection you are applying to Jefferson. Why hold our Founders to a higher standard?
The simple fact of the matter is that Jefferson, despite or perhaps even because of his ownership of slaves, wrote the defining document in our country’s history and in his first draft, he denounced slavery as morally wrong. And the fact that the US eventually abolished slavery was, in no small part, based upon the notion that Jefferson penned in the Declaration that “all men are created equal.” That’s not mindless hero worship. That’s straight historical fact.