Doubting Thomas

Thomas Jefferson actually made his own Gospel by removing the fabulous and mythical elements in the Gospels and keeping only the ethical teachings of Jesus. The resulting Jefferson Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, remains to this day a document which is actually revered by many secularists and non-religious (cultural) Christians.

Behind this book, however, and coupled with a profound respect for the man Jesus of Nazareth and his sophisticated ethical philosophy, lies a profound distrust and antipathy toward organized religion. It's very illuminating to read what this founding father had to say about the Christian Church, especially in light of the current attacks that our secular, liberal and democratic values are suffering by religious fanatics. Here are some quotes:

"The Christian God can be easily pictured as virtually the same as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, evil and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed, beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of the people who say they serve him. The are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites." - Thomas Jefferson

"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man." - Thomas Jefferson

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. - Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt

The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills. -Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford

My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there. - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Mrs. Samuel H. Smith

Priests ... dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live. - Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Correa de Serra

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. - Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short

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. But we may hope that the dawn of reason, and freedom of thought in these United States, will do away all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors. - Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams