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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 2MAR$ who wrote (34866)	3/30/2003 9:18:21 AM
From: average joe	Respond to of 39621

Thomas Woolston Thomas Woolston (1669-1733), a Cambridge graduate admired by Voltaire, was the most vilified of the Deists. Critics did more than respond to Woolston's attacks on the Bible; they accused him of insanity—"poor mad Woolston, most scandalous of the deists," as Leslie Stephen put it. According to Stephen, Woolston attacked the Gospel narratives as "preposterous," and this "would have been sufficient of itself to raise doubts of its author's sanity." He was "a mere buffoon jingling his cap and bells in a sacred shrine." Even Stephen admits, however, that there are "queer gleams of distorted sense, and even of literary power, in the midst of his buffoonery." Woolston believed that "hireling preachers" were conspiring against him—another mark of paranoid insanity, Stephen assures us. Yet Woolston's fear of persecution proved to be well founded. In 1729, he was convicted of blasphemy and fined; then, unable to pay a large bond to insure his future good conduct, Woolston is reported to have spent four years in prison until his death in 1733. (Voltaire, in England at the time, denied that Woolston had died in prison: "Several of my friends have seen him in his house: he died there, at liberty.") Scarcely any New Testament miracle escapes Woolston's withering touch. For example, Woolston comments on the report that Jesus cured a blind man "by the means of eye-salve made of dirt and spittle." If divine power healed this man, what was the point of the homemade "ointment and wash"? This treatment makes Jesus look like "a juggling imposter." Elsewhere, Woolston calls Jesus "a strolling fortune-teller." As for the story that Jesus cast demons into a herd of swine: if he had done the same thing in England to a herd of cattle, "our laws, and judges, too, of the last age would have made him swing for it." By the time he wrote the Six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Savior (1727-1729), Woolston had hit his stride. There, speaking through a fictitious Rabbi, Woolston argues that a literal reading of the New Testament makes Jesus a "deceiver, imposter, and malefactor" for whom "no punishment could be too great." Then, as if anticipating The Passover Plot, Woolston presents the resurrection as a fraud perpetrated by the disciples—"the most bare-fac'd Imposture that ever was put upon the World." David Hume would later propose a similar argument against the historicity of miracles, and no one, so far as I know, ever accused him of insanity. But "poor mad Woolston" was packed off to jail, having offended the pious and humorless sensibilities of respectable society." —by George H. Smith; excerpted from Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies dailyobjectivist.com