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"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

Well, I may agree with that statement, considering the other main religion, Islam.

But nevertheless, individual freedom and personal liberty have hardly been a noticable thrust of Christianity, even though most Americans are and have been Christians.

"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"

I feel that this most accurately summarizes the man's belief systems. Let us not forget that he had the right to develop in faith and change as regards its practise. Perhaps one can take an early quote from a time when certain areas of his belief were undeveloped or underformed. Yet later quotes reveal a maturing man of faith.

If you can pin a man to what he once believed and then show that he held, years later, only all of the same you have happened upon one failed in faith or dead. God expects development and maturing of faith; that necessitates change.

I think his problem was the charicature of God which was presented in churches by clergy so that the god whom people served was not at all God by any stretch of his knowledge of that God.

Scripture puts it this way, "Work out your own salvation wtih fear and trembling". This man more than most understood that we answer INDIVIDUALLY to the one omnipotent God. We are ultimately responsible for whatever God has taught (revealed to) us about himself, not that upon which He supposedly lead some committee of the clergy to agree.