August 20, 2012
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The Panda's Thumb
How inaccurate and ridiculous does your book on how Thomas "I Wrote My Own Bible, Cutting Out The Stupid Bits" Jefferson was actually a mainstream Christian have to be for the Discovery Institute to disown it? Pretty darn.
Some of Jefferson's choicer comments on the issue of religion, and if America was intended to be a "a Christian nation".
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government."
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."
"Priests...dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live."
It's interesting that some people see a need to justify their politics not on making an argument that we'd all be healthier, happier, better off, etc, if they were followed, based on objective observations of reality, but on trying to prove that someone else who lived and died centuries ago believed something, and that's all we need.
A good idea is not good because of who said it, but because it can be shown to be good. Jefferson's ideas are worth following not because they were said by Jefferson, but because they have consistently shown themselves to be correct in the real world. Jefferson also held many ideas now shown to be incorrect -- from accepting slavery to believing there were mammoths lurking in the unexplored Americas. His good ideas are not invalidated because he also had bad ideas, and his bad ideas are not validated because he also had good ideas. Each idea has to be judged on its own merits as an idea, and not judged based on who said it or what other ideas they had.
(Hitler thought smoking was unhealthy. Therefore, smoking is healthy.)
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Comments (2)
To play Devil's... err, Christian's advocate here (and not to disagree on the main thrust of your post, with which I agree), all of your quotes from Jefferson cite his views on priests, not Christianity. It's entirely possible to esteem a belief while despising the official spokesmen of that belief, or to hold that a belief is more-correctly followed in a decentralized way. There's no conflict between loving capitalism and hating the pointy-haired boss, for example.
Pity him being wrong about the mammoths, though. That would have been damn cool.
@emamid - Jefferson was almost certainly some brand of Christian (most likely Deist), in that he probably wasn't "a Mohammedan, [a] Hindoo, [or] Infidel", but he was hardly what a modern fundamentalist baptist would consider a role model. He disputed the divinity and miracles of Christ, and considered the bible clearly flawed and written by men, not God, while "biblical inerrancy" is the cornerstone of modern fundamentalism. The book in question attempted to "prove" that Jefferson would have been in theological agreement with those who claim the King James Bible is not only completely ierrant, it is even MORE inerrant than the original Greek and Hebrew texts. (My wife attended PCC. She was reading a Danish bible.It had been translated to Danish from the original texts, which is perfectly logical. She was told it was not an acceptable translation; to be acceptable, it had to be translated from the King James. To the "minds" of modern fundamentalists, translating a translation (thus increasing approximations and changes in meaning) is going to produce a "better" bible than going to the source material, so the translation is at only one remove from the original, not two.)
Barton's book tried to claim Thomas Jefferson -- who, as I note, did his own Bible editing to get rid of all the parts he thought were silly, making it a much slimmer book -- would be happy to be around such people and consider them his intellectual kindred. You could hardly insult the man more by digging up his grave and relieving yourself on his corpse.
"Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by
his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct
morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again
of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism,
and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions
should have proceeded from the same being." These are not the words of someone who would be acceptable to modern fundamentalists. If a Presidential candidate were to say this today, would he have the support of the Republican Party?