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To: tdadams
"You're mistaken, Jefferson and Frankliin both professed to be diests, not Christians--"

Both of these men moved closer and closer to orthodox Christianity as they aged, though neither of them ever embraced any particular denomiation. As for your charge that Jefferson eliminated the "supernatural" from his version of the Bible, you have to bear in mind his purpose for writing this version. It was to establish a moral code for people to live by, as he loved everything that Jesus said. It was not to give the world yet another version of the full New Testament. Hence, he focused on writing what Jesus taught from the moral standpoint; which utterly proves my original thought, and reason for making the post. Namely, it was to refute another poster who said that "Christianity in government is vicious". My point in quoting Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers was to make it known that they lived, thought and acted according to Christian morals and values, ,(not necessarily Christian doctrines and dogmas), and therefore our Constitution was steeped in Christian principles and standards. As a man thinks, lives and believes, he writes.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to William Canby, "Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus." He described his own Bible version to Charles Thomson as "a paradigam of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen." In this same letter he wrote of his Bible: "there will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."

So while it is a fact that Jefferson and some other Fathers were never Christians in the traditional sense, they most certainly were men who lived entirely by Christian ethics and morals, hence our Constituion has the fingerprints of Christianity all over it.

501 posted on 07/01/2003 9:49:14 AM PDT by TheCrusader
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To: TheCrusader
"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." --Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, 1801. ME 10:237

"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." --Thomas Jefferson to Charles Thompson, 1816. ME 14:385

Jefferson definitely considered himself a follower of Christ. He also maintained membership in his local Episcopal parish, although he was not active. He might be closer to what we today would call a Unitarian.

504 posted on 07/01/2003 10:34:03 AM PDT by colorado tanker
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