It seems my little joke about your being an engineer or accountant has been taken very literally by you, and is leading off in a direction of no usefulness whatsoever.
Again, you have rolled out terms such as "fundamentalism", "branded", etc. and employed the passive tense evasively, as if politely to reveal your suspicions about my posts and beliefs, which are anything but what you suspect -- and again, imagining that while you are so grand as to have read other scriptures with an open mind, I could not have done so. Possibly you believe I could not have done so and also have made an informed decision to choose Christ (an end product of the process you attributed to Jefferson), because apparently you have not done so after your erudite readings.
But it is true -- I have read many other scriptures with an open mind as a seeker, I am an Ivy graduate-degreed reader of same, and yet I eventually chose Christ -- most assuredly not due to the exhortations of any pastor, but due to the words of Christ and the impact of realizing their scope and majesty.
In fact, most of the pastors I have ever encountered were intellectual disappointments; and many were spiritual disappointments as well. You have only to look at the churches to see that this is so. But that has nothing to do with the messages taught by Christ and reinforced by the Holy Spirit. Part of leaving behind the "thinking as a child" is to understand the human limitations of the church, and taking up the cross of individual responsibility.
I wish you well, but this discussion is now over.
Thank you for a spirited debate.......all the best to you as well.