guno
Gold Member
- Banned
- #141
The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814
Jefferson was a deist - that is, he believed in God, but he didn't believe in the 'miracles' described in the Bible. The quote you show is a result of a question from John Adams during his second term campaign.
"About his first Jesus book, "The Philosophy of Jesus," Jefferson wrote: "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." In a separate letter, he asserted again the authenticity of his faith: "I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other."
Read more at Beliefnet Presents Separating Diamonds from the Dunghill Founding Faith Steven Waldman - Beliefnet.com
You are being intellectually dishonest to remove the quote from context and try to use it to, somehow, portray as a non-believer.
In spite of right-wing Christian attempts to rewrite history to make Jefferson into a Christian, little about his philosophy resembles that of Christianity. Although Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence wrote of the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God, there exists nothing in the Declaration about Christianity.
Thomas Jefferson quotes
As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?
-- John Adams, letter to FA Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816
Positive Atheism s Big List of John Adams Quotations