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To: USConstitutionBuff; Diamond; Alamo-Girl
So when caught in a bare faced lie, you retreat and then attack a straw man argument?

Ah, I love polemics! :^)

Seems to me you and Diamond are defining key terms differently. Actually, USCB, Diamond has long-standing usage and understandings to back him up. There is no way that TJ was a "materialist" in the sense that word has acquired in recent times. And neither was Locke -- as Diamond has already pointed out.

Christians and Deists both believe that God created the Universe. The essential difference between them is that Christians believe that God's creative activity continues in the Universe, and Deists do not. Both, however, are creationists, for both believe that God created the world. (That is the definition of a creationist.) TJ believed this; Franklin believed this. Indeed, these men took divine creation so for granted that they referred to the Creator as their justification for separation from the British Crown, as we see in the DoI. For the Creator created men as having unalienable rights, which the British Crown was violating. Both TJ and Ben apparently believed that human nature itself is a gift of God that not even a king has the right or power to tamper with, limit, or infringe.

I think perhaps you simply regard the word "creationist" as a term of opprobrium -- which may be the reason why you refuse to apply it to yourself, a self-proclaimed deist. Perhaps you picked up this attitude or habit from the general Kultursmog that we are all breathing in today.... Just remember that it was Marx who first made it fashionable to hold "creationists" in contempt. And his "scientific materialism" was something never encountered by any of the Founders.

48 posted on 11/01/2005 11:34:53 AM PST by betty boop
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To: betty boop
Deists are not Creationists.

cre·a·tion·ism ( P ) Pronunciation Key (kr-sh-nzm)
n.
Belief in the literal interpretation of the account of the creation of the universe and of all living things related in the Bible.

And Thomas Jefferson was a materialist in the full meaning in which I use it; someone who eschews supernatural explanation and doesn't believe in supernatural accounts.

To disprove the generalization that 'the Founding Fathers were Creationists" I need only to show that one was not. No Creationist would say the following...

"But those facts in the bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from god. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change in the laws of nature in the case he relates. For example in the book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still several hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of blood, speaking of statues, beasts, &c."

Thomas Jefferson
50 posted on 11/01/2005 11:43:10 AM PST by USConstitutionBuff
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