I think I'm in love...
I will admit that, of the astonishing group of Enlightenment scholars who comprised the US 'founding fathers', I knew less about John Adams than I did about Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. This has been corrected by the brilliant US miniseries, which ended in the UK last Saturday.
In the usual co-incidental fashion, Pharygula's random quote generator produced this
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere
in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths,
Doctrines, and the whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find
in Christianity."
Ah, you have to love the man. Likewise, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.
"Tom, had you and I been 40 days with Moses,
and beheld the great God, and even if God himself had tried to tell us
that three was one . . . and one equals three, you and I would never
have believed it. We would never fall victims to such lies.
And then there is his great friend/rival Jefferson himself...
“And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter."
Yeah.
Of course, these people were not atheists but deists, which was, at that point in time, just about the only sensible and logical position... What they weren't was fundamentalist Christians. Quite the reverse...
In the usual co-incidental fashion, Pharygula's random quote generator produced this
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere
in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths,
Doctrines, and the whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find
in Christianity."
Ah, you have to love the man. Likewise, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.
"Tom, had you and I been 40 days with Moses,
and beheld the great God, and even if God himself had tried to tell us
that three was one . . . and one equals three, you and I would never
have believed it. We would never fall victims to such lies.
And then there is his great friend/rival Jefferson himself...
“And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter."
Yeah.
Of course, these people were not atheists but deists, which was, at that point in time, just about the only sensible and logical position... What they weren't was fundamentalist Christians. Quite the reverse...