000 17. I do not believe Republicans can read enough to ever know any truth about anything. I read writers who I do not agree with such sad the following “Catholic” professor of history.
Donald J D’Elia was professor of history at The State University of New York at New Paltz. The author and co-author of many books on American history, Dr. D’Elia’s
Dr. Benjamin Rush: Philosopher of the American Revolution, published by the American Philosophical Society in 1974, is a standard in the field of American Revolution scholarship. The book was described as “magnificent” in the
Journal of the American Medical Association and was cited for its importance by the Institute for Early American History and Culture in its “Bicentennial Bibliography of the American Revolution” (1976). The Library of the History of Ideas has selected his work as among the “best of the essays on the American Enlightenment” to have appeared in the prestigious
Journal of the History of Ideas. He is the author of
The Catholic As Historian, and
Spirits Of ’76: Catholic Inquiryamong other works. Dr. D’Elia was cited by Governor Mario Cuomo in 1984, for his “many years of dedicated service to the humanities.” He is listed in Marquis “Who’s Who in America” (East), “Who’s Who Among Italian Americans,” “American Catholic Who’s Who,” and other reference works. Don D’Elia was active with the Society of Catholic Social Scientists and was a member of the Advisory Board of the Catholic Education Resource Center.
October 23, 2000
Among the Founding Fathers of the American nation there appears to be none more deserving of the title of modern man than the Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States.
the bane and ruin of the Christian church, its own fatal invention, which, through so many ages, made of Christendom a slaughter-house, and at this day divides it into casts of inextinguishable hatred to one another.” 43 Ibid.; TJ to Thomas Whittemore, June 5, 1822, ibid., p. 158.
I have never “pretended” Jefferson was an atheist. There were no a fees that I’ve ever read about and involved in the American Revolution and founding of America..
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theHawk vii. : Why do lefties have to lie about the founding fathers? They like to pretend they were all a bunch of atheists and not Christians.
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NotfooledbyW xvii to 7. : Jefferson was a rational theist. He was not a Christian. Jefferson did not believe in any of the spirituality of Jesus Christ.. he did not believe in original sin the Virgin birth, or that he arose from the dead.. Jesus was a normal human being to Thomas Jefferson.
You Saint Thehawk can always read Jefferson’s actual writing to verify the truth in the above paragraph, and you do not need to take a “leftist’s” word for it.
Here is a devout Catholic’s view of Thomas Jefferson’s opposition to Catholicism and Christianity in general;
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Donald J D’Elia. Saving America
Library : The Relevance of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson did not relent in his crusade against Platonizing Christians even in the final years of his life. Indeed, his founding of the University of Virginia, in 1819, was conceived as a means of promoting his Enlightenment philosophy of reason and science against the forces of reaction. These were being led by the old enemies of Jefferson and the rights of man, the Presbyterians, the Jesuits, and other Platonized followers of that "fanatic Athanasius", who opposed "freedom of religious opinion and its external divorce from the civil authority."42 Their creeds and formulas, their "
hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads" were "
the bane and ruin of the Christian church, its own fatal invention, which, through so many ages, made of Christendom a slaughter-house, and at this day divides it into casts of inextinguishable hatred to one another."43
America must be saved from "the fire and faggots of Calvin and his victim Servetus". And it would be saved, Jefferson was certain, by that very materialistic and anti-trinitarian doctrine for which Servetus was martyred, Unitarianism. "The diffusion of instruction, to which there is now so growing an attention," he confided to his friend, Thomas Cooper, his choice for a professorship at the University of Virginia, "will be the remote remedy to this fever of fanaticism; while the more proximate one will be the progress of Unitarianism. That this will, ere long, be the religion of the majority from north to south, I have no doubt."44
It was, apparently, with these views that Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, went to his death on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We have no evidence that he ever thought otherwise. Just before he died, he composed his epitaph, listing his authorship of the Declaration, of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and his founding of the University of Virginia as his greatest achievements. His nephew, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, said that the eighty-seven year old patriot had nothing to confess on his death bed.45 Dr. Robley Dunglinson, Jefferson's friend and attending physician, testified, after his patient's death, that he had "never heard an observation that savored, in the slightest degree, of impiety."46
Yet,
Jefferson's false principles in philosophy and religion, which are essentially those of "modern man" in today's consenting-adult society, and his private scurrilities, must be an affront to real Christians. This truth is beyond opinion, despite Jefferson's transparent sincerity. The man who had "sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man"47 was himself the victim of the most dangerous tyranny of all: ignorance of the Word of God. For Jefferson could not, and modern Americans cannot, declare themselves independent of God's truth.
-Notes-
1 Thomas Jefferson's Autobiography in H.A. Washington (ed.), Writings of Thomas Jefferson (9 v., Washington, D.C., 1853) I .2. Hereafter cited as Writings.
2 Ibid.; Jefferson to Mr. Louis H. Girardin, Jan. 15, 1815, Ibid., VI: 411. Thomas Jefferson hereafter cited as TJ.
3 See Father Michael J. Mahony's brilliant analysis of the History of Modern Thought; the English, Irish and Scotch Schools (New York: Fordham University Press, 1933), esp. pp. 11, 76. An earlier work of genius is Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers: Lather, Descartes, Rousseau (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1970).
4 Writings I:2.
5 TJ to Benjamin Rush, Jan. 16, 1811, WritingsV:599. See D.J. D'Elia, "Jefferson, Rush, and the Limits of Philosophical Friendship" in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 117 (October 1973): pp. 333-343.
6 Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy (8 v., Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press) V: 127. 139; Russel Kirk (ed.), John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Chicago, Ill.: Henry Regnery, 1956), preface, pp. v-xii. See TJ to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814, Saul K. Padover (ed.), The Complete Jefferson; Containing His Major Writings, Published and Unpublished, Except His Letters (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969) p. 1034.
7 Idem., Thomas Jefferson and the Foundations of American Freedom(Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1965), p.85.
8 Copleston. p. 138.
9 TJ to Edward Dowse, April 19. 1803, in Norman Cousins (ed.), In God We Trust: The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p.167. This includes a useful collection of Jefferson's writings on religion.
10 TJ to Samuel Miller, Jan. 23. 1808, ibid., p. 137.
11 TJ to John Adams, Aug. 22. 1813, ibid., p. 237.
12 Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson (3 v.. New York, 1858) III: p.672, cited in George H. Knowles' helpful but uncritical "The Religious Ideas of Thomas Jefferson" in Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 30 (Sept. 1943): pp. 187-204.
13 Mahony, p. 159.
14 See Stephen D. Schwarz, "Who's to Judge? A Reply to Ethical Relativism" in Faith & ReasonII,1 (Spring 1976),42.
15 John 8:32; and Christopher Derrick's commentary on this verse at the Manhattan Institute Conference, March 18-20, 1977.
16 Cousins, p.129.
17 Padover, The Complete Jefferson, p.675.
18 TJ to Mrs. Samuel H. Smith. Aug. 6, 1816, ibid., p.955.
19 Padover, Thomas Jefferson, p.40.
20 Cousins, p. 125. Also see TJ's "Notes on Religion" in Padover, The Complete Jefferson,pp. 937-946.
21 The Reasonableness of Christianity, edited by I.T. Ramsey (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1974), pp. 60-1, et passim.
22 TJ to William Short. Oct. 31, 1819, Cousins, p. 149, et passim.
23 August 15, 1820, ibid., p. 286.
24 August 10, 1787, ibid., p. 128.
25 TJ to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1805, ibid., p. 168.
26 TJ to Isaac Story, December 5, 1801, ibid., p. 133.
27 TJ to Jared Sparks, November 4, 1820, ibid., p. 156.
28 TJ to Timothy Pickering, February 27, 1821, ibid., p. 157.
29 Ibid.
30 TJ to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803, ibid., p. 168.
31 "Syllabus", ibid., pp. 170-71.
32 TJ to William Short, April 13, 1820, ibid., p. 150. Jefferson's principal theological authority for these and other ideas seems to have been Dr. Joseph Priestly (1733-1804), renowned chemist and Unitarian thinker, whose Socrates and Jesus Compared appeared in 1803 and whose The Doctrines of Heathen Philosophy Compared with Those of Revelation (1804) was written at the suggestion of Jefferson, John F, Fulton, "Joseph Priestly" in Dictionary of American Biography VIII: 223-226.
33 TJ to William Short, October 31, 1819, Cousins, p. 149.
34 TJ to John Adams, Oct. 13, 1813, ibid., p. 242.
35 TJ to John Adams, Aug. 15. 1820. ibid., p. 286; TJ to Thomas Cooper. Aug. 14, 1820, ibid., p. 132.
36 TJ to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820, ibid., p.286.
37 Ibid.
38 D'Elia, "Jefferson, Rush . . .", pp. 340-42. Important too in TJ's thinking at this time was the Scottish "Common Sense" philosopher. Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), see Adrienne Koch, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson(Chicago, 1964), et passim.
39 TJ to John Adams, Oct. 13. 1813, Cousins, p. 242.
40 Ibid. p. 243.
41 "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth", ibid., p. 216.
42 TJ to James Smith, Dec. 8, 1822, ibid., p. 159.
43 Ibid.; TJ to Thomas Whittemore, June 5, 1822, ibid., p. 158.
44 TJ to Thomas Cooper, Nov. 2, 1822, pp. 163-164; TJ to Benjamin Waterhouse. July 19, 1822, Ibid., p. 162. And TJ to John Adams. April II, 1823, ibid., p. 289: "I can never join Calvin in addressing his God. He was indeed an atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false God, he did. The being described in five points, is not the God whom you and I acknowledge and adore, the creator and benevolent governor of the world; but a daemon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin."
45 Knowles, "The Religious Ideas . . .", pp. 203-204.
46 Ibid.
47 TJ to Benjamin Rush, Sept. 23, 1800, Writings IV: p. 336.
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