Over and over, New Atheists with whom I disagree about anything assume that I am a Christian. It's a standard reflex with them: NEW ATHEIST: When the Council of Nicea convened in AD 346 -- ME: Actually, they met in 325. NA: Look, pal, your precious God isn't going to come to your rescue here! Not in this discussion!
Don't I know it! It happened again today: someone supposedly responding to my blog post Of Course The US Is A Christian Nation referred to "your mythical deity."
He also mentioned the one line in the Treaty of Tripoli which another reader quoted 2 days ago in a comment here on the blog:
"The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
Talk about cherry-picking. Going on 240 years of history of hundreds of millions of people, and one line in a treaty addressed to the Ottoman Empire is the best they can do when challenged by the suggestion that the famous American separation of church and state is lip-service occasionally paid to a principle, as opposed to an honest reflection of the way things are actually done here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. It's not so surprising that two New Atheists separately mentioned a line from a treaty about which presumably neither of them knows anything else, a treaty very rarely discussed by anyone in the US outside of academic journals and graduate courses in US history. When you've got so very few straws to cling to defend a talking point, you've got to make sure that those straws are widely known.
What would the alternative be? Why, they'd have to abandon some preconceived ideas, and re-think some things! And we know they're not going to do that! No more than they're actually going to read the entire Declaration of Independence or Gettysburg Address from beginning to end.
The New Atheists' favorite American statesman when they insist that church and state really are separated in the US is Thomas Jefferson. Yes, Thomas Jefferson spoke out quite boldly against religion -- in some of his private letters to John Adams. What a firebrand! Jefferson is the most popular choice among New Atheists to replace Jesus. Jefferson himself sort of did this when he -- secretly, again -- cut out the parts of the Bible which offended him, creating the "Jefferson Bible," highly revered among New Atheists. Makes sense that they would love a book with many passages cut out. Makes sense that they would lionize this staunch opponent of slavery -- publicly. Occasionally. Depending upon his audience -- who never freed one of his hundreds of slaves during his lifetime, and in his will freed 5 of them, 2 of his children by Sally Hemings and 3 further members of the Hemings family, leaving the Jefferson family free to sell the other 130 to help defray the enormous debts he also bequeathed to them. I agree with the New Atheists: Jefferson is a fitting symbol for them.
(Besides the 2 of his children with Hemings freed in Jefferson's will, 2 others escaped during his lifetime. Unlike all the other slaves who escaped from Jefferson, no effort was made to re-capture these 2. What a great Dad, huh? What a statesman!)
Showing posts with label thomas jefferson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thomas jefferson. Show all posts
Friday, February 12, 2016
Friday, June 19, 2015
Often, Atheists Discussing The American Revolution Sound Like Fundamentalists Discussing The Bible
"Thomas Jefferson said it, I believe it and that settles it." It wouldn't surprise me if that is an actual bumpersticker by now. Anything to avoid thinking for themselves. Of course, much like the fundies, these dingbats don't actually know very much about that in which they supposedly believe.
The truth is that some of the founders of the US were Christians, and the rest, except for Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin, pretended to be when in public or writing for the public. We only know about the deistic and theistic tendencies of some of them from their private letters. Thomas Jefferson, who in many New Atheist circles seems to have taken the place of Jesus -- because so many of them so recently were Southern Baptists? Yes, probably that has a lot to do with it -- Jefferson was an Anglican deacon and, while President of the US, he led weekly prayer meetings of Congress in the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. The Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty begins: "Whereas Almighty God Hath created the mind free[...]" The "Jefferson Bible" which has recently become so famous was not meant to be seen by the public, no more than Jefferson wanted it to be publicly known that he and his slave Sally Hemings had children. Whatever private impulses may have led Jefferson to include the language about separation of church and state in his public writings and statements, he belonged to the very church from which so many Americans wanted to separate their state: the Anglican church, the church whose supreme head was the King of England. The major impulse for the separation of church and state came from Puritans in Massachusetts -- the same ones who killed all of those people in the 1690's because they thought they were witches. When the Puritans talked about freedom of religion, at least at first, they meant no more or less than freedom from the Anglican church; and the Anglican church was only created in the 1530's because Henry VIII, up until then a very loyal Catholic, wanted the freedom to divorce Anne Boleyn.
Things change, of course. The Congregationalists were Puritans in the 17th century when they fled from England and burnt witches, and today they're quite liberal on social issues as Christians go, and in 1776 and 1789 they were something in between. John Adams, born a Congregationalist, became a Unitarian, and some atheists have misunderstood this to mean that he was like a 21st-century Unitarian: either an atheist, or at the very least very friendly toward atheism. But the Unitarian Church in the 18th and 19th centuries wasn't exactly like the present-day version, and Adams wasn't its least traditionally-Christian member, just as his sometimes friend and sometimes enemy Jefferson was not the most traditionally-Christian member of the Anglican church. And it's not as if Adams was just Christian for show, like Jefferson; consider this passage from his diary of 1796:
"The Christian religion is, above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity, and humanity, let the blackguard Paine say what he will; it is resignation to God, it is goodness itself to man."
The world is complicated, and things change.
And, of course, the actual writings, both public and private, of Adams and Jefferson and many of their contemporaries, have been preserved and are quite conveniently available for the perusal of all of us in the general public. Go to any large library in the US which uses the Dewey decimal system, and go to the shelves marked 973 through 978, or to the shelves marked E in libraries using the Library of Congress system, and you will find shelves groaning with volumes of the actual written words of Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Hamilton and many of their contemporaries. Original documents from the early history of the US are all over the place.
Primary documents aren't for everybody, of course. But some of us occasionally want to appear as if we know what we're talking about.
The truth is that some of the founders of the US were Christians, and the rest, except for Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin, pretended to be when in public or writing for the public. We only know about the deistic and theistic tendencies of some of them from their private letters. Thomas Jefferson, who in many New Atheist circles seems to have taken the place of Jesus -- because so many of them so recently were Southern Baptists? Yes, probably that has a lot to do with it -- Jefferson was an Anglican deacon and, while President of the US, he led weekly prayer meetings of Congress in the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. The Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty begins: "Whereas Almighty God Hath created the mind free[...]" The "Jefferson Bible" which has recently become so famous was not meant to be seen by the public, no more than Jefferson wanted it to be publicly known that he and his slave Sally Hemings had children. Whatever private impulses may have led Jefferson to include the language about separation of church and state in his public writings and statements, he belonged to the very church from which so many Americans wanted to separate their state: the Anglican church, the church whose supreme head was the King of England. The major impulse for the separation of church and state came from Puritans in Massachusetts -- the same ones who killed all of those people in the 1690's because they thought they were witches. When the Puritans talked about freedom of religion, at least at first, they meant no more or less than freedom from the Anglican church; and the Anglican church was only created in the 1530's because Henry VIII, up until then a very loyal Catholic, wanted the freedom to divorce Anne Boleyn.
Things change, of course. The Congregationalists were Puritans in the 17th century when they fled from England and burnt witches, and today they're quite liberal on social issues as Christians go, and in 1776 and 1789 they were something in between. John Adams, born a Congregationalist, became a Unitarian, and some atheists have misunderstood this to mean that he was like a 21st-century Unitarian: either an atheist, or at the very least very friendly toward atheism. But the Unitarian Church in the 18th and 19th centuries wasn't exactly like the present-day version, and Adams wasn't its least traditionally-Christian member, just as his sometimes friend and sometimes enemy Jefferson was not the most traditionally-Christian member of the Anglican church. And it's not as if Adams was just Christian for show, like Jefferson; consider this passage from his diary of 1796:
"The Christian religion is, above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity, and humanity, let the blackguard Paine say what he will; it is resignation to God, it is goodness itself to man."
The world is complicated, and things change.
And, of course, the actual writings, both public and private, of Adams and Jefferson and many of their contemporaries, have been preserved and are quite conveniently available for the perusal of all of us in the general public. Go to any large library in the US which uses the Dewey decimal system, and go to the shelves marked 973 through 978, or to the shelves marked E in libraries using the Library of Congress system, and you will find shelves groaning with volumes of the actual written words of Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Hamilton and many of their contemporaries. Original documents from the early history of the US are all over the place.
Primary documents aren't for everybody, of course. But some of us occasionally want to appear as if we know what we're talking about.
Saturday, June 22, 2013
The Founders Of The US, And Religion
As Alcoholics Anonymous has taught us, a basic first step toward handling a problem is acknowledging that that problem exists. As essential part of acknowledging the existence of a problem is recognizing the true nature and dimensions and severity of that problem. A lot of today's atheists are failing to acknowledge that a real church-state divide has not yet existed in many countries, including the US, despite the famous lip service paid to a supposed such divide in the Constitution.
(And please don't even get me started on those dopey smug Brit atheists trying to tell us how secular the UK is, God save their Queen, Dei Gratia Regina.)
Atheists today triumphantly quote antireligious passages from Thomas Jefferson, ignoring -- if they ever realized to begin with -- that 1) those passages come from private letters by Jefferson, and that publicly he was an Anglican vestryman in perfectly good standing who while President led weekly prayer meetings of members of Congress, in the Congress building, and 2) that Jefferson hardly spoke, privately or publicly, for all of the Founders, many of whom were wild-eyed Bible thumpers by any measure.
If Jefferson and other Founders had been anywhere near as boldly critical of religion in their public statements as Jefferson was in his private letters -- and possibly in a deliciously scandalous conversation or two in a Paris salon while he was Ambassador to France, conversation which traveled no more than a block or two during his lifetime -- now that would've been something. (Something which resembled the French Revolution much more closely than the American.)
But alas no, Jefferson and the other Founders were not atheist firebrands who would stand out sharply from the American political climate of today, they were careful not to offend the sensibilities of the pious and in that respect they would fit right in.
In short, the secular Golden Age of the early US, about which so many atheists rhapsodize these days, like many if not all Golden Ages, never really happened. Oh, if only.
(And please don't even get me started on those dopey smug Brit atheists trying to tell us how secular the UK is, God save their Queen, Dei Gratia Regina.)
Atheists today triumphantly quote antireligious passages from Thomas Jefferson, ignoring -- if they ever realized to begin with -- that 1) those passages come from private letters by Jefferson, and that publicly he was an Anglican vestryman in perfectly good standing who while President led weekly prayer meetings of members of Congress, in the Congress building, and 2) that Jefferson hardly spoke, privately or publicly, for all of the Founders, many of whom were wild-eyed Bible thumpers by any measure.
If Jefferson and other Founders had been anywhere near as boldly critical of religion in their public statements as Jefferson was in his private letters -- and possibly in a deliciously scandalous conversation or two in a Paris salon while he was Ambassador to France, conversation which traveled no more than a block or two during his lifetime -- now that would've been something. (Something which resembled the French Revolution much more closely than the American.)
But alas no, Jefferson and the other Founders were not atheist firebrands who would stand out sharply from the American political climate of today, they were careful not to offend the sensibilities of the pious and in that respect they would fit right in.
In short, the secular Golden Age of the early US, about which so many atheists rhapsodize these days, like many if not all Golden Ages, never really happened. Oh, if only.
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