From: lip@voyager..ARPA (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Thomas Jefferson's Religious Beliefs, etc.

        What were Thomas Jefferson's religious beliefs? I mention this
because this issue came up recently in this newsgroup. He was a
"Deist," an eighteenth-century school of thought that held that the
Universe we know had a creator, God, but that God had decided not to
miraculously intervene in the Universe that he (she? it? they?) had
created. He believed that the Bible was purely the product of human
beings, and even wrote the "Jefferson Bible," in which he pictured
Jesus Christ as a great man who had worked no miracles, someone like
Socrates or the Buddha or Confucius or Lao-Tze. He even felt confident
that the day would someday come when the supposed virgin birth of
Jesus Christ would one day be viewed as fictional as the emergence of
Athena from the head of Zeus, as he expressed in one letter. For his
part, he did not care if someone believed in twenty gods or no god at
all.

        He was not opposed to all organized religion; he had
disestablished the Church of England in Virginia, an act the Danbury
Baptists appreciated (any more on this?), and he felt congenial to
Unitarianism, though he never officially became one. He probably was a
Unitarian at heart.

        Thomas Paine, who held similar views, went public with them in
_The Age of Reason_, and got vilified as an atheist. He made similar
comments about the virgin birth of Jesus Christ being analogous to
similar incidents in Pagan mythology. And he also criticized the Bible
in detail on historical and moral grounds. For instance, he wondered
why the Israelites were supposed to slaughter the men and married
women of certain of their enemies, but not the unmarried young women.
To anyone with any awareness of sex, the reason seems obvious.  An
indignant clergyman replied that the young ladies had not been spared
to become concubines, but slaves, to which there could be no moral
objection.

        Others amongst our Founding Fathers had similar beliefs,
though were not so open about them, like Benjamin Franklin. Abraham
Lincoln apparently had similar views.

        It is an interesting philosophical/theological construction,
that of a God who creates a Universe, and lets it run according to its
natural laws. All supposed "revelations from God" become figments of
the imagination, for one thing. If one wants to be cynical, one may
decide that this kind of God is simply a God imagined in the likeness
of a rationalist. Perhaps. Man has always created God in his image.

        A careful look at the Constitution of the United States
reveals not a trace of theological foundation. Indeed, it starts off
with "WE THE PEOPLE, in order to form a more perfect union..." No
mention of any deity whatsoever. It is _solely_ on their own
initiative. This may explain why George Washington sent a diplomatic
message to Malta declaring that the United States is "not in any way
founded upon the Christian religion."  The Declaration of
Independence, while it makes a number of references to the Deity, also
does not support the hypothesis of a divine mandate. It also agrees
with the view propounded in the Constitution, and also gives a host of
non-theological reasons for finding fault with King George III.
Interestingly, King George III and his admirers believed in the Divine
Right of Kings, according to which, God had appointed King George
III's family ruler of all the territory ruled from London, including
13 rebellious North American colonies. So the American revolutionaries
were not also fighting King George III, but also God, in this view.  I
suspect that a Fundamentalist who was not a fervent, flag-waving and
-worshipping professional patriot would say that the United States was
founded on a denial of the sovereignty of God. After all, its founders
seemed to do everything on their own initiative, without asking God
about anything.

        About the great flag-burning controversy, I think that there
are better ways to handle issues like that than outlawing them. It
seems a bit on the silly side to get worked up about issues like that.
For my part, I see flags as artwork, and I am turned off at the
thought of gratuitously destroying art. But I think it inappropriate
to legislate such things.

        Legal regulation? I think our nation's experience with
Prohibition should suggest that legal regulation, by itself, is not
enough. Though it yielded a limited amount of success in reducing
total alcohol consumption (about a factor of 2, according to some
studies), after 10 years of it, it became apparent that it was a cure
worse than the disease (there is a gruesome variant from the days
before anesthesia and antibiotics: the operation was successful but
the patient died).
                                                        ^
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"I'm just a spud boy looking for that real tomato" -- Devo