alt.education

On Apr 6, 11:09 am, buckeye wrote:
> Nick...@Click.com wrote:
> >:|On Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:34:24 -0400, Bob LeChevalier
> >:| wrote:
> >:|
> >:|>Nick...@Click.com wrote:
> >:|>>It is "mere" when the central "god" is the same
> >:|>>
> >:|>>Are you suggesting the "god" is different?
> >:|>>
> >:|>>You'll have to explain that......
> >:|>
> >:|>Thomas Jefferson said "I am a Christian". He also said that
> >:|>Calvinists were "demon-worshippers". It sounds like HE thought that
> >:|>they worshipped a different God than he did.
> >:|
> >:|That's nothing more than rhetoric
>
> False
>
> "In am a Christan" is shown in the Jefferson Bible, i.e. shown in what he
> seelcted to include in it, read and study the rest of his life. It was a
> form of "primitive" Christianity See below:
>
> ". . . To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed opposed; but
> not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the
> only sense in which he wished any one to be, sincerely attached to his
> doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every
> <> excellence; and believing he claimed no other. . ."
>
> He also once said
> " You say you are a Calvinist. I am not. I am of a sect by myself, as
> far as I know. "
> -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Ezra Stiles Ely, June 25, 1819
>
> What that meant was that while he leaned heavily towards Dr. Joseph
> Priestley's brand of Unitartism, he didn't fully embrace all of that
> either. He had his own unique religion hence his comment, ". . . I am of
> a sect by myself, as far as I know. "
>
> As far as he was concerned Paul, the early church fathers, Greeks, Calvin
> etc bastardized/corrupted the teachings of the man Jesus.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

He was also against slavery and refused to release any of his slaves.
He kept a mulatto slave who was his wife's half-sister as his mistress
during all his remaining years after his wife's death. He did and
said a lot of things that were contradictions to his professed
beliefs, so we will never know the "truth" unless we take his
correspondence at it's word. Which in my opinion is agnostic. Other
than that, nobody will really know what he thought, we can only see
what he accomplished, which was astounding. Regards, Ken Hogan