I'm now My parents, I believe, were stuck in tradition and that's why they remained Catholic. Seriously questioning the Catholic dogmas was simply not done. I questioned them and became a fundamentalist evangelical type of Christian in my late teens and remained so until I became a Deist at age If you have children, did becoming a parent change your relationship to faith?
If so, how? Becoming a parent did not change my relationship to faith. Where and when do you practice your faith? Deists believe we should do our very best to help, as Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason, "our fellow creatures" and do our very best to make the world a much better place.
To Deists the entire Universe is "the word of God", we don't have a special time or place to "practice our faith. Is it to believe that which is evident? It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason.
Does your family practice more than one religion or faith? If so, how do you blend the traditions? How easy or difficult is it to live your faith? In my house, the thing that most represents my faith is What should be the role of religion in politics? Should courses about religion be taught in public schools?
Why or why not? But they should be taught objectively, not preached. When they make unreasonable claims such as Christians will have power to heal the sick and will have greater powers than it is claimed Jesus had John , it should be put to the test to see if it's true or false. They spread Unitarianism into Reformation of Europe for about 75 years in the 16th and 17th centuries until the Counter-Reformation obliterated Unitarianism from Europe.
Poland has an influential Unitarian church. Its leader is an Italian convert from Roman Catholicism, Faustus Socinus, and he issues the first Unitarian catechism. He asserts that Jesus of Nazareth was a human being, like all of us.
But he had lived such a life of exemplary and peculiar obedience to the will of God that God had raised him to divine power and seated him at his right hand and given him a kind of delegated divinity, so that since his ascension Jesus has become hearer of prayer and an intercessor with God in heaven for sinful humans. And Unitarian thought also appears in England in the 17th century and in New England in the 18th. Now Arius was declared a heretic. Servetus and Socinus left the churches of their upbringing.
But Jefferson, the anti-Trinitarian, never formally did. And so many books will list him as a lifelong Episcopalian. And it is true that he was baptized, educated, married, and buried by Anglican and Episcopal clergy. He served on the vestry, or governing body, of Episcopal parishes. He attended church regularly, and often those churches were Episcopalian. He contributed to Episcopal churches regularly, and he had his children not only baptized but also married under Anglican and Episcopal auspices.
But was he an Episcopalian or a Unitarian? Here we have to make a judgment call. But it may not be that hard. As many of you know Jefferson was generally reticent in public about his religious views. But as the years went on he revealed many of his views to correspondents such as Rush or Adams whom he believed could be trusted to be discreet. Jefferson described himself as a "sect unto myself.
I'll quickly look at three, and then look with a little more detail at the four, and then finish. First Jefferson was anti-Medieval and anti-mystery. I take these in no special order. Jefferson saw the Middle Ages as a time of priestcraft and mystery. And he tended to equate mystery with fraud. We seem to have no evidence that Jefferson ever received holy communion though I wonder if he did not receive it once as a teen.
Nor was he apparently confirmed though these admissions may stem from his disbelief that God can be encapsulated in bread and wine or that grace can be communicated through the weighing on of a bishop's hands. And anyway, second, Jefferson was anti-clerical. He saw clergy as the authors of the corruptions that had crept into the religion of Jesus after his death.
Jefferson's reading and his stay in Europe made him feel that kings and clergy were responsible for countless evils. He had some clerical friends and correspondents, but he clearly distrusted most Trinitarian clergy. The powerful Calvinist clergy of New England strongly opposed him, and he returned the compliment. Thus it is no surprise that his favorite religious body, outside perhaps of Unitarianism, seems to have been the Quakers.
A group that had neither clergy nor dogmatic creeds, though he seems to have ignored that they did have a lot of mystery. Third, Jefferson was anti-Calvinist. Deism as we'll see in a minute had five points. Calvinism is also summed up in five points. Church historians remember them by the acrostic tulip, you think of Holland.
Total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints. And Jefferson opposed every one of those points. He thought the predestinarian Calvin had not only terrible ideas but also worshipped quote "a malignant demon," end quote.
Jefferson summed up his views of Calvin in these words quote, "Calvinism has introduced into the Christian religion more new obscenities than its leader had purged it of old ones," end quote. And I might add, for balance, that one of the surprises in the graduate study of church history is that academic church historians tend not to view Calvin in that way at all.
In point of act they tend to put him at the top of the Reformation hierarchy. Fourth, his religion was reason centered. In a letter to his nephew Jefferson declared quote, "reason causes a stronger religion than does revelation," end quote. From the late 17th century on there was a school of religious thought in the West that was not necessarily Christian.
It was a prevailing religious sentiment among the ruling classes not just in England not just in parts of the U. It taught that people should be skeptical on things that are dependent on faith and revelation alone. Most of you know of it, it was called Deism, in England its leading figures including an Archbishop of Canterbury.
Today Deism's traditions are continued in the Masonic Order, in the Unitarian Universalist denomination, in the ethical culture movement, to some extent in the Friends or Quakers, and above all, in what might be called 'golf course religion.
In the 18th century there were all kinds of Deists, it has to be emphasized. And even served. As we've heard, in the clergy, the Congregationalists, the Episcopalians, and even the Roman Catholics in the early republic had deists not just in the pews but also in their clergy. There were mildly supernatural deists, there were anti-supernatural deists, and there were people in between. But the tendency of all school of Deism was to emphasize two things first ethical endeavors.
And second a kind of natural religion of reason that called into question many teachings and beliefs that were at the center of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Now if you remove such beliefs, then you end up with a very different kind of religion. And since Deism, like most movements, had wings, some Deists were more thoroughgoing in their rejections of these traditional teachings than others.
But all tended to call them into question one classic five-point program of Deism for example went as follows:. Now this program is far from atheism its author an Englishman was far more certain on these matters than some people are who are in the pews or pulpits today. That's why it was so silly of Teddy Roosevelt to speak later of Tom Paine in famous words as quote, "a filthy little atheist," end quote.
Paine's age of reason shows that Paine was far more certain of the existing, of the existence of God than are some practicing Jews or Christians perhaps today. I mean today we look out into the natural world and we see tsunami's and earthquakes and hurricanes and tornadoes and volcanic eruptions and epidemics and nature red, tooth, and claw.
But Paine and other Deists looked at nature and saw the handy work of a benevolent God. So we can't call this minimalist program of religion 'Atheism. But it's equally hard to call Deism Judeo-Christian precisely because it omits such central beliefs as the chosen people; the revelation of Moses; the incarnation of God and Christ the saving death on the cross of Christ; or the role of synagogues and churches.
There was no mystery in Deistic religion, no need for revelation beyond that given by nature and by that supreme gift of God human reason. So Deism to conclude was the kind of belief that tended inevitably to undermine personal religion with such an understanding of existence. After all, why pray. Why be baptized or confirmed why go through a Bar Mitzvah? Why receive holy community?
During the late Colonial and early National periods this Deistic school was very strong among the male, Episcopalian gentry in Virginia. It was cutting edge thought.
And so the center of deism in Virginia was William and Mary, then an Episcopal institution. And in New England its center was Harvard, a Congregationalist college that was in the process of becoming Unitarian. As for Jefferson he seems clearly to have been a moderate representative of the deistic school. One who believed roughly in the five points of Deism, but along with other American Deists he added to these five points a belief in God as an overriding providence who guided the destinies of nations, and unlike some Deists, as the years went on he also came to believe that prayer had a purpose.
So that's the fourth characteristic of his religion. And now a fifth. Jefferson's religion was monotheistic and Jesus centered. He revered Jesus Christ as a moral exemplar. He thought Jesus had been wrong on some points, but he believed his teachings embodied the "most sublime system of morals" in the whole world. In a letter written from Monticello Jefferson praised quote, "the innocence of Jesus' character, the purity and sublimity of his moral precepts, the eloquence of his inculcations, the beauty of the epilogues in which he conveys them that I so admire," end quote.
It's not surprising that Jefferson saw Jesus through a Deistic lens. He thought the teachings of Jesus could pretty well be summed up in three points. Online User and Order Help.
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