This is an interesting article about Deism and Christianity, Neocon, in response to several of your posts. I am going to have to break it into several sections to post it all, however. Here is the first one:
Notes on the Founding Fathers and the
Separation of Church and State
by
R.P. Nettelhorst
Introduction
Many well-meaning Christians argue that the United States was founded by Christian men on Christian principles. Although
well-intentioned, such sentiment is unfounded. The men who lead the United States in its revolution against England, who wrote the
Declaration of Independence and put together the Constitution were not Christians by any stretch of the imagination.
Why do some Christians imagine these men are Christians? Besides a desperate desire that it should be so, in a selective
examination of their writings, one can discover positive statements about God and/or Christianity. However, merely believing in God
does not make a person a Christian. The Bible says that "the fool says in his heart, there is no God." Our founding fathers were not
fools. But the Bible also says "You say you believe in God. Good. The demons also believe and tremble."
Merely believing in God is insufficient evidence for demonstrating either Christian principles or that a person is a Christian.
Perhaps, to start, it might be beneficial to remind ourselves of what a Christian might be: it is a person who has acknowledged
his or her sinfulness, responded in faith to the person of Jesus Christ as the only one who can redeem him, and by so doing been
given the Holy Spirit.
The early church summarized the Christian message in six points:
1. Jesus came from God.
2. You killed him.
3. He rose again on the third day.
4. He sent the Holy Spirit
5. Repent and be baptized.
6. He's coming back.
An individual who would not acknowledge this much of the Christian message could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be
called a Christian. The founding fathers of this country did not acknowledge this message. In fact, they denied it.
Founders of the American Revolution
Thomas Jefferson created his own version of the gospels; he was uncomfortable with any reference to miracles, so with two
copies of the New Testament, he cut and pasted them together, excising all references to miracles, from turning water to wine, to
the resurrection.
There has certainly never been a shortage of boldness in the history of biblical scholarship during the past two
centuries, but for sheer audacity Thomas Jefferson's two redactions of the Gospels stand out even in that company. It
is still a bit overwhelming to contemplate the sangfroid exhibited by the third president of the United States as, razor
in hand, he sat editing the Gospels during February 1804, on (as he himself says) "2. or 3. nights only at Washington,
after getting thro' the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day." He was apparently quite sure that he
could tell what was genuine and what was not in the transmitted text of the New Testament...(Thomas Jefferson. The
Jefferson Bible; Jefferson and his Contemporaries, an afterward by Jaroslav Pelikan, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, p.
149. Click to go to a copy of The Jefferson Bible).
In his Notes on Virginia, Jefferson wrote:
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no
injury to my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. (Dumas
Malon, Jefferson The President: First Term 1801-1805. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1970, p. 191)
Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer whose manifestoes encouraged the faltering spirits of the country and aided materially in
winning the War of Independence. But he was a Deist:
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by
the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
(Richard Emery Roberts, ed. "Excerpts from The Age of Reason". Selected Writings of Thomas Paine. New York:
Everbody's Vacation Publishing Co., 1945, p. 362)
Regarding the New Testament, he wrote that:
I hold [it] to be fabulous and have shown [it] to be false...(Roberts, p. 375)
About the afterlife, he wrote:
I do not believe because a man and a woman make a child that it imposes on the Creator the unavoidable
obligation of keeping the being so made in eternal existance hereafter. It is in His power to do so, or not to do so, and
it is not in my power to decide which He will do. (Roberts, p. 375)
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