Are all of the Founding Fathers in this picture? I count 26 people maybe 27 and there were 56 that signed the Declaration of Independence so you might guess 56 right? Not quite. There were over 250 men who crafted the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and other founding documents.
Many people falsely believe that George Washington and Benjamin Franklin signed the Declaration of Independece - neither did.
Many people falsely believe that many of our Founding Fathers were athiest - none were.
Many people falsely label those who professed to be Deists as athiests - they are not.
Thomas Jefferson is one of our Founding Fathers who have been labeled an athiest since he professed to be a Deist. As is often the case, the meaning of a word can change over time. A hundred years ago, the word "cool" was restricted to a description of temperature. In the current vernacular, it often means trendy or acceptable. Today, people slant the meaning of the word "Deist" to mean athiest, yet anyone who understands even the simplest Latin knows that the root word of deist is deus, which means God.
What do Deists believe? Prior to the 17th century the terms ["Deism" and "Deist"] were used interchangeably with the terms "theism" and "theist", respectively. ... Theologians and philosophers of the seventeenth century began to give a different signification to the words.... Both [theists and Deists] asserted belief in one supreme God, the Creator.... and agreed that God is personal and distinct from the world. But the theist taught that God remained actively interested in and operative in the world which he had made, whereas the Deist maintained that God endowed the world at creation with self-sustaining and self-acting powers and then abandoned it to the operation of these powers acting as second causes.
As a professed Deist and student of the law, Thomas Jefferson didn't want to rely on what other people had said about God or Jesus Christ as this would be hearsay, so, using a razor, Jefferson cut and arranged selected verses from the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in chronological order, mingling excerpts from one text to those of another in order to create a single narrative.
In a letter to John Adams dated 13 October 1813 Jefferson wrote"
"In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves. We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics, their essences and emanations, their logos and demiurges, aeons and daemons, male and female, with a long train of … or, shall I say at once, of nonsense. We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines."Do his actions or words reflect those of an athiest? I think not.
So, why have historians painted Jefferson as an athiest and to what purpose? This is the purpose of this blog. To not only learn the real history of these great men, but also to understand why that history is either being misrepresented today or not being taught at all.
