Gen LaGreca has posted this on George Reisman's blog. D. James Kennedy asks if Jefferson was a deist or a Christian.
Jefferson's Declaration of Independence speaks of certain "self-evident truths." These are "the doctrines of Jesus" as Jefferson called them, and are "simple, and tend all to the happiness of man":
1. That there is one only God, and He all perfect.
2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments.
3. That to love God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself, is the sum of religion.…
Had the doctrines of Jesus been preached always as pure as they came from his lips, the whole civilized world would now have been Christian.
—To Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse. (1822) The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Albert Ellery Bergh. 20 vols. Washington: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907. (Memorial Edition) vol. 15, p. 383. [More]
I would venture to guess that Jefferson would recognize the practice of these "self-evident truths" in less than one percent of our current government. He would have been outraged (as Laurence M. Vance has shown) at the consuming event of our day (for which hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent): the "war on terrorism."
Perhaps (if Jefferson were alive) it would not be such a happy birthday after all.
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