To: PROLIFE who wrote (30223 ) 4/26/2000 9:06:00 AM From: nihil Read Replies (2) | Respond to
This is a very slippery slope. Politicians who were atheists nearly always tried to conceal their disbelief, because in many places being an atheist was a hanging or burning offense. Wisdom (even for Masons) required expression of believe in a higher or supreme being, but not adherence to a particular church doctrine. Deists were for the most part what we now call Unitarians -- i.e. they rejected the Trinity and the Divinity of Jesus Christ. One of the first was Isaac Newton who had to keep his beliefs secret to hold his government jobs. The fundamental idea of Deism was the "great clockmaker" who found up the world and let it run without interfering with it. Most reasonable men of the Enlightenment were Deists, rather than Christians. Washington, Payne, Jefferson, Lincoln, Newton for example. In the late 18th and 19th century there was a resurgence or protestantism, and Darwin and Husley moved on to a middle position that rejected Creationism (knocking the blocks out of both Christianity and Deism. Scientific materialism rejected the necessity of a god, but agnostics (a weasel term invented by Huxley) could believe anything they wished about god as long as it rejected supernaturalism. Scholars recreated a history of Jesus as an influention human being, without saying anything at all about his divinity.
