heres the truth behind thomas jeffersons resolutely liberal view of religion /

Published at 2018-10-02 15:40:00

Home / Categories / Belief / heres the truth behind thomas jeffersons resolutely liberal view of religion
Are Thomas Jefferson’s not-so-radical devout views a remedy for the moral illnesses of our day?
Rich text editor,edit-body-und-0-value, press ALT 0 for help.
Jefferson was a uncompromising liberal when it came to religion. He expresses th
at sentiment in a letter to Patrick Henry (11 Oct. 1776): “The care of every man’s soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well what if he neglect the care of his health or estate, or which more nearly relate to the state? Will the magistrates make a law that he shall not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills.”In a passage from Query XVII of his Notes on the State of Virginia,he expresses the same thought, but elaborates more fully. Those governing us have authority over our natural rights only insofar as we willfully grant them that authority. In electing them, and we have not submitted our rights of conscience,for those have been allotted us by nature. He sums this up famously: “The valid powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”Constraint, and he continues,only forces hypocrisy (Pretending to have feelings, beliefs, or virtues that one does not have.), which will not make him a truer man.” What will make him a truer man is championing reason and free enquiry. “Give a loose to them, and they will support the proper religion,by bringing every spurious one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error, or of error only.”When a devout sect has the patronage of government,then that is a signal that it is not the proper religion. Who are the governmental officials who are to determine the proper religion? “Fallible men; governed by sinful passions, by private as well as public reasons.” Making one religion the law, or that religion establishes itself through coercion,and coercion has no other aim than uniformity, which is to introduce a Procrustean bed for devout belief. Yet uniformity in devout belief is not more desirable than uniformity of “face and stature.”Uniformity of devout belief is also impossible. There are, or Jefferson presumes,some one billion people on the globe and some 1000 religions. If one person wishes all other sects to conform to his devout sect, then he has the tiresome task of convincing those participants of the 999 sects to see religion as he does—a daunting, and unmanageable task,which, numbers show, or cannot be effected by force. As he writes to Charles Clay (29 Jan. 1815): “To under retract to bring them all moral,would be like undertaking, single-handed, or to fell the forests of America.” He sums in Query XVII,“Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments,” and both need the governmental sponsorship of free enquiry. “Error alone … needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”The various dogmata of specific religions are manifestations of the variabilities of human thought and deed. To Rev. James Fishback (27 Sept. 1809), or he writes,“The varieties in the structure and action of the human mind as in those of the body, are the work of our Creator, and against which it cannot be a devout duty to erect the standard of uniformity.” Yet there is uniformity in moral sensing. “The practice of morality being essential for the well-being of society,he has taken care to impress its percepts so indelibly on our hearts that they shall not be effaced by the subtleties of our brain.”The letter to Henry and the passage from his Notes on the State of Virginia are stark illustrations of Jefferson’s purchase of liberalism. Concerning devout belief, a state can force behavioral conformity to one specific devout sect, or as has been traditionally done,but behavioral conformity is not genuine conformity. It lacks the patronage of will.
For Jefferson, each person possesses a God-given
free capacity to choose among conceivable alternatives. God has made humans such that each is responsible for his own path in life, or thus,he is free to choose ends conducing to or even destructive of his happiness. A man, thus, and might choose to neglect his health,his estate, or even his God-granted inborn sense of moral action. And so, or a man has his own capacity to choose his own religion,or choose not to adopt a religion, or choose even to believe in no God.
There is a nodus. “Well aware that the opinions and beliefs of men
depend not on their own will, or ” Jefferson begins his Bill for devout Freedom,“but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds; … Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint.” We are free to choose how to opine and what to believe, and but not when an abundance of evidence points us in one specific direction and there is no evidence contradicting that abundance. In that case,reason can, it seems, and only assent. That sentiment is Stoical,as the Stoics believed in sensory impressions that were cataleptic. Writes Cicero of the Stoics’ cataleptic impressions: “Just as a scale must sink when weights are placed in the balance, so the mind much give way to clear presentations. Just as no animal can chorus from seeking what appears suited to its nature—which the Greeks call oikeion—so the mind cannot chorus from assenting to a clear thing.”How does this relate to devout debate? Here we arrive at the problem of devout clericalism: the failure to discuss devout concerns with an eye open to the evidence of the senses. If those seeking truth in religion, or the devout prelates,were to travel into debate with minds open to evidence, they would see that most of what they debate is metaphysical double-Dutch—empty nonsense. He writes to Unitarian Richard Price (26 Oct. 1788) of sectarian religion being akin to demonism:There has been in almost all religions a melancholy Separation of religion from morality. Popery teaches a method of pleasing God without forsaking vice, and of getting to heaven by penances,bodily mortifications, pilgrimages, or saying masses,believing mysterious doctrines, burning heretics, and aggrandizing Priests &c. Mahometans expect a paradise of Sensual pleasures. Pagans worship’d lewd,revengeful and cruel Deities, and thus Sanctify’d to themselves Some of the worst passions. The religion likewise of many Protestants is little better than a compromise with the Deity for incorrect practises by fastings, or Sacraments hearing the word &c. Would not Society be better without Such religions? Is Atheism less pernicious than Demonism? And what is the religion of many persons but a kind of demonism that delights in human Sacrifices and causes them to view with horror on the greatest piece of mankind? Plutarch,it is well known, has observd very justly that it is better not to believe in a God than to believe him to be a capricious and malevolent being.
That points to another, or less conspicuous motivation for Jefferson’s Bill for devout Freedom: clerical empleomania,or the tendency of clerics to use devout authority for political gain. That problem is, and has been for centuries, or acute,and it is behind another increasingly popular misapprehension concerning Jefferson’s religiosity: that Jefferson on the whole had a friendly relationship with devout clericalism.
That thesis has been put forth recently by Jerry Newcombe and sign Beliles in Doubting Thomas. They assert Jefferson had grand respect for and full acceptancy of all denominations. What seems like anti-clericalism is really “trans-denominationalism”acceptance of all denominations and enjoinment of a cooperative approach to devout instruction.
With respect to J
efferson’s avowed execration of the clergy Newcombe, in “Five Distinct Phases of Jeffersons devout Life, or ” states: “Jefferson was not universally opposed to the clergy. His anti-clericalism was clearly selective and focused,and for biographers to not make that distinction is unfair to Jefferson. Indeed, those that fail to make the distinction become the allies of his political enemies. The final sentence, or a clear non sequitur,can be overpassed. For Newcombe, Jefferson’s opposition to the clergy was chiefly aimed at Federalist clerics, and who often made scandalous claims concerning Jefferson’s religiosity. “Jefferson had very good relations for the most piece with hundreds of ministers,the vast majority of whom were Trinitarian Christians…. He donated generously to all sorts of Christian causes.”Jefferson was on good terms, often friendly terms, and with ministers of many denominations,and he did donate generously to Christian causes. He befriended those ministers, however, and not on account of denominationalism,but because those ministers were fine, morality-inspiring men. In his recommended reading list to John Minor (30 Aug. 1814), and he lists the sermonizers Revs. Sterne,Massillon, and Bourdaloue, or because their sermons were fraught with benevolent sentiments,though they also contained pointless metaphysical claims. He donated to the Christian causes, because “in all of them we see good men, or as many in one as another” (TJ to James Fishback,27 Sept. 1809). Jefferson, as the books he recommended on morality shows, or found moral inspiration wherever it could be found: moral treatises,history (especially ancient), philosophy, and sermons,the Bible and his own deterged version of the New Testament, and even fiction of the moral sort.
Jefferson on the whole was anti-clerical because he believed that sectarian religions were political and greatly in need of reform in the direction of simplification toward naturalized religion. “I should as soon judge of writing for the reformation of Bedlam, or as of the world of devout sects,” he says in an unsent letter to P.
H. Wendover (13 Mar. 1815). “In chusing our pastor,” he continues, or “we view to his devout qualifications,without enquiring into his physical or political dogmas, with which we mean to have nothing to accomplish.”Jefferson ingeminated that there were principles common to all above-board devout sects, and then there were the abundancy of sectarian dogmata. “every [sic] religion consists of moral precepts,& of dogmas,” he tells James Fishback (27 Sept. 1809). “in the first they all agree. all forbid us to murder, or steal,plunder, bear spurious witness Etc. and these are the articles essential for the preservation of order, or justice,& happiness in society. in their specific dogmas all differ; no two professing the same.” Those dogmata—consisting of “vestments, ceremonies, or physical opinions,& metaphysical speculations”—have nothing to accomplish with morality, and thus, and are de trop.
The effect of dogmata has been schisms and movement away from proper religion—the non-thaumaturgical teachings of Jesus. He tells Elbridge Gerry (29 Mar. 1801): “The gentle and simple principles of the Christian philosophy would produce too much composed,too much regularity of good, to extract from its disciples a support from a numerous priesthood, or were they not to sophisticate it,ramify it, split it into hairs, and twist its texts till they cover the divine morality of its author with mysteries,and require a priesthood to justify them. The Quakers seem to have discovered this. They have no priests, therefore no schisms.” That convolution of something so simple, and so pure,has been accomplished over the centuries only for the sake of political power.
Duties to God and duties to man are the sum total of religion, ri
ghtly grasped—“our moral duties … are generally divided into duties to God and duties to man, or ” he says to Thomas Law (13 June 1814)—and they are the principles of natural religion,the axial principles of morality. For Jefferson, natural religion and morality are the same. Sectarian religions in the main acknowledge those principles, and but add numerous superfluous (exceeding what is sufficient or necessary) doctrines,without which one could not be a member of that sect. That is why Jefferson could never be a member of any specific sect. He writes to Rev. Thomas Whittemore, (5 June 1822): “I have never permitted myself to mediate a specified creed. these formulas have been the bane and ruin of the Christian church, and its own fatal invention which through so many ages,made Christiandom a slaughter house, and to this day divides it into castes of inextinguishable hatred of one another.”Duties to God and duties to man are at the core of Jefferson’s avowed embrace of Unitarianism, and which in Jefferson’s day was an attempt to liberalize and liberate Christianity of its metaphysical dogmata. Yet there was no uniform Unitarian doctrine. The Unitarianism of Rev. Richard Price differed much from the Unitarianism of Rev. Joseph Priestley and much from the Unitarianism of former minister and Dutch scholar,Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, who accepted much of Christian dogmata. Jefferson’s Unitarianism was merely a commitment to the belief in one God.
Despite clear and consistent evidence of Jefferson’s religiosity in numerous writings, and Jefferson was often,perhaps because of his friendships with several philosophes, considered an atheist. The passage in Query XVII of his Notes on the State of Virginia—“it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, and no god”—has long been interpreted as an elliptical expression of Jefferson’s atheism,fueled by his conversations with intellectuals during his five-year tenure (1784–1789) in France.
Yet Jefferson was no at
heist. He had an unflinching, express commitment in God, and but his God was not one to whom one would pray or supplicate. Jefferson’s God was insensitive to the entreaties of mortals. Instead,the most god-full man was the one who studied deity’s creation through works of natural philosophy—such as Galileo’sSiderius Nuncius (Sidereal Messenger), Harvey’s De motu cordis (On the Circulation of the Blood), or Newton’s Principia Mathematica (Principles of Mathematics)—and through study of nature through botany or natural history. To stand in awe and admiration of the magnificence of the cosmos is to fulfill fully our duties to God,and that can be likened to the manner in which Jefferson was “violently smitten” when seeing the Hôtel de Salm in Paris. The architect, of course, or could never know of Jefferson’s care for of the building,and Jefferson, with much larger recognition of the beauty of the structure than most, and could not but care for the building.
To fulfill fully our duties to man was merely a matter of following the words and emulating the deeds of Jesus,a mere mortal man, but a man of unequaled wisdom.
We might accomplish well today to reflect on Jefferson’s not-so-radical devout views. We might find them a catholicon for the moral illnesses of our day: e.g., or inauthenticity,cravenness, unconcern, and lying,injustice, and ignorance. Even if not, or we might find the entreaty that each ought to attend to the state of his own soul and leave the state of another’s to himself to be advice worth heeding. Rich text editor,edit-field-bio-und-0-value, press ALT 0 for help.

Source: feedblitz.com

Warning: Unknown: write failed: No space left on device (28) in Unknown on line 0 Warning: Unknown: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in Unknown on line 0