On Thu, 8 May 2008 08:15:59 -0700 (PDT), shape29285@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
>
>
>Read it, Pass this on. The founders of freedom in the United States
>tried to eliminate the problem but unfortunately the problem is an
>incurable cancer.
>Freedom From Religion
>
The anthropoid apes have complete freedom from religion. Are they
faring any better than we homo sapiens sapiens? I don't think I would
want to trade places with them.
If humans fare so much better in a nation without religion, why have
none of those non-religion based governments been successful?
>
> "What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments
> had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect
> a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on
> many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of
> political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians
> of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert
> the public liberty may have found an established clergy
>convenient
> auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and
>perpetuate
> it, needs them not."
>
> - James Madison
> "A Memorial and Remonstrance", 1785
>
> "Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments,
> instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have
> had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has
> the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has
> been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and
>indolence
> in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both,
> superstition, bigotry and persecution."
>
> - James Madison
> "A Memorial and Remonstrance", 1785
>
> "As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a
> revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables,
> tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian
> revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that
> ever existed?"
>
> - John Adams
> letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27,
>1816
>
> "I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal
> example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has
> preserved--the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of
> grief has produced!"
>
> - John Adams
> letter to Thomas Jefferson
>
> "What havoc has been made of books through every century of
> the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels, condemned as
>spurious
> by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are the forty wagon-loads of
> Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope,
> because suspected of heresy? Remember the 'index expurgatorius',
> the inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter and the
> guillotine."
>
> - John Adams
> letter to John Taylor
>
> "The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly
>monopolized
> learning. And ever since the Reformation, when or where has
>existed
> a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE
>INQUIRY?
> The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence,
> the most yahooish brutality, is patiently endured, countenanced,
> propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision
> with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and
> you will find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will
>swarm
> about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes."
>
> - John Adams
> letter to John Taylor
>
> "In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile
> to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot ... they
> have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into
> mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore
> the safer engine for their purpose."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> to Horatio Spafford, March 17, 1814
>
> "Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women
> and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been
> burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an
> inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion?
> To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.
> To sup****t roguery and error all over the earth."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> from "Notes on Virginia"
>
> "Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which
> weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her
> seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion.
> Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if
> there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than
> that of blindfolded fear.
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787
>
> "It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend
>they
> believe in the Platonic mysticisms that three are one, and one
> is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the three are
>not
> one. But this constitutes the craft, the power and the profit of
> the priests."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> to John Adams, 1803
>
> "But a short time elapsed after the death of the great
>reformer
> of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from
>by
> those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted
>into
> an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their
>oppressors
> in Church and State."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> to S. Kercheval, 1810
>
> "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 political as well as
> religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own
> purpose."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> to Baron von Humboldt, 1813
>
> "On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral
> principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to
> this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing
> one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and
> to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the
> human mind."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> to Carey, 1816
>
> "But the greatest of all reformers of the depraved religion
> of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is
> really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily
> distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers,
> and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill,
> we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality
> which has ever fallen from the lips of man. The establishment
> of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent
> morality, and the rescuing it from the imputation of imposture,
> which has resulted fro artificial systems, invented by
> ultra-Christian sects (The immaculate conception of Jesus,
> his deification, the creation of the world by him, his
> miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his
> cor****eal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin,
> atonement, regeneration, election, orders of the Hierarchy, etc.)
> is a most desirable object."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> to W. Short, Oct. 31, 1819
>
> "It is not to be understood that I am with him (Jesus Christ)
> in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist; he takes the side of
> Spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentence toward
> forgiveness of sin; I require a counterpoise of good works to
> redeem it.
> Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him 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.
> I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore him to
> the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, the
> roguery of others of his disciples. Of this band of dupes
> and imposters, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and the first
> corruptor of the doctrines of Jesus."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> to W. Short, 1820
>
> "The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation,
> is ever more dangerous. Jesus had to work on the perilous
> confines of reason and religion; and a step to the right or
> left might place him within the grasp of the priests of the
> superstition, a bloodthirsty race, as cruel and remorseless
> as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham,
> of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. That Jesus
> did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God,
> physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of
> men more learned than myself in that lore."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> to Story, Aug. 4, 1820
>
> "The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the
> happiness of man. But compare with these the demoralizing
> dogmas of Calvin.
> 1. That there are three Gods.
> 2. That good works, or the love of our neighbor, is nothing.
> 3. That faith is every thing, and the more incomprehensible
> the proposition, the more merit the faith.
> 4. That reason in religion is of unlawful use.
> 5. That God, from the beginning, elected certain individuals
> to be saved, and certain others to be damned; and that no crimes
> of the former can damn them; no virtues of the latter save."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> to Benjamin Waterhouse, Jun. 26,
>1822
>
> "Creeds have been the bane of the Christian church ... made
> of Christendom a slaughter-house."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> to Benjamin Waterhouse, Jun. 26,
>1822
>
> "The truth is, that the greatest enemies of the doctrine of
> Jesus are those, calling themselves the expositors of them, who
> have perverted them to the structure of a system of fancy
> absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his
> genuine words. 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."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> to John Adams, Apr. 11, 1823
>
> "The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and
> of Calvin, are, to my understanding, mere lapses into polytheism,
> differing from paganism only by being more unintelligible."
>
> - Thomas Jefferson
> to Jared Sparks, 1820
>
> "I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy
> is more regarded than virtue. The scriptures assure me that at
> the last day we shall not be examined on what we thought but
> what we did."
>
> - Benjamin Franklin
> letter to his father, 1738
>
> "I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite
> Father, expects or requires no wor****p or praise from us,
> but that He is even infinitely above it."
>
> - Benjamin Franklin
> from "Articles of Belief and Acts
> of Religion", Nov. 20, 1728
>
> "I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good
> works ... I mean real good works ... not holy-day keeping,
> sermon-hearing ... or making long prayers, filled with flatteries
> and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of
> pleasing the Deity."
>
> - Benjamin Franklin
> Works, Vol. VII, p. 75
>
> "If we look back into history for the character of the present
> sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their
> turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The
> primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the
> Pagans, but practiced it on one another. The first Protestants
> of the Church of England blamed persecution in the Romish Church,
> but practiced it upon the Puritans. They found it wrong in
>Bishops,
> but fell into the practice themselves both here (England) and
> in New England."
>
> - Benjamin Franklin
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