>>I think the Declaration was the high point,
The Declaration is an essential instrument of implementation for an idea...
“TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, governments are instituted among men”
...that is rooted elsewhere.
To secure them from what? That question is answered by understanding Jefferson’s Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom.
The inalienable rights of the Individual must be secured from the tendency of human nature to manifest the tyranny of the collective majority — most often observable, throughout history, in the theocratic merger of state, religion, and commerce wherein “COMMERCE BETWEEN MASTER AND SLAVE IS DESPOTISM”.
But we won’t hear that from revisionist weasels like Juan Barton.
If being a Christian means living in a country where a lot of people call themselves Christian, then Jefferson was one. But if it means believing in the Trinity, Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, the Bible as the inerrant Word of God, in the Resurrection and the Final Judgement, then Jefferson was not a Christian. And neither was Washington, nor Madison, nor John Adams, and certainly not Ben Franklin. Let’s be clear on this!
You sir are an idiot. Jefferson rightly did not like kings, nor did he like churches that enslave their members with guilt.
He was right in accepting Jesus as the purest thinker in history, but wrong to reject the very book that described and predicted his arrival and departure. Enlightened idiots that like to remember that Jefferson had a Koran, would do well to look at what he wrote about that book.