Tag: thomas jefferson

Thomas Jefferson Every Day Until July 4

For fun, and to promote Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President, I am going to post a quote or event from Thomas Jefferson’s life each day until July 4, the day Jefferson died in 1826.
To kick this off today, June 15, I have taken a brief section of a letter from Jefferson to John Adams written on June 15, 1813:

One of the questions you know on which our parties took different sides, was on the improvability of the human mind, in science, in ethics, in government etc. Those who advocated reformation of institutions, pari passu, with the progress of science, maintained that no definite limits could be assigned to that progress. The enemies of reform, on the other hand, denied improvement, and advocated steady adherence to the principles, practices and institutions of our fathers, which they represented as the consummation of wisdom, and akme of excellence, beyond which the human mind could never advance.

Jefferson and Adams were political opponents on several matters after Adams became president. Here Jefferson described to Adams one of the matters of difference. In general, Jefferson’s party saw human nature as malleable for the better and sought to enhance education as a means of human improvement. Adams aligned with interests which were viewed by Jefferson as more traditional.
The series of letters between Jefferson and Adams give an insight into the political differences but also shows how time and mutual respect helped to blur those differences.

David Barton Still Pitching His Discredited Jefferson Lies

Recently, David Barton spoke at Knightdale, NC at the Faith Baptist Church. He spoke on Saturday and then again on Sunday morning. In previous posts, I described his false teaching on HIV and his faulty claim that 50% of students at Christian colleges abandon their faith.
In the third session of his Saturday workshop, Barton makes many of the same claims he made in his book The Jefferson Lies. Because of those errors, Barton’s book was pulled from publication by Christian publisher Thomas Nelson. Michael Coulter and I debunked those claims in Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President. In the following video, watch from 17:50 through 29:30 to hear the bogus claims about Jefferson.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/O1Qgg-v3AZQ[/youtube]
I have covered the stories about chaplains at the University of Virginia, the Thompson Hot Press Bible, the Virginia Bible Society and the Jefferson Bible on the blog. We cover them more extensively in our book. In this speech, Barton rehashed The Jefferson Lies for his audience, without correcting the book’s flaws.
On his website, he has not corrected the false claim that The Jefferson Lies will be re-published by Simon & Schuster. The publisher has no plans to publish the book.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised but I still am amazed that Barton peddles these misleading and false claims in church.

Institute on the Constitution Posts Spurious Thomas Jefferson Quote

The Institute on the Constitution just can’t seem to get quotes right.
On their Facebook page, the neo-Confederate organization periodically features quotes they claim come from the founders. However, the quote are often spurious.  The most recent one attributed to Thomas Jefferson was posted earlier this month:
 

How fitting for the times we are in!www.theamericanview.com
Posted by Institute on the Constitution on Tuesday, April 7, 2015

This appears to be derived from Ayn Rand, but not said by Jefferson; so says Monticello.
This isn’t the first time. IOTC has promoted other false quotes (see here, and here).  If they can’t get easy stuff right, makes you wonder what they teach in their trainings. Actually, I don’t have to wonder since I have seen the video presentation of it. Not recommended (e.g., see here, and here)

Happy Birthday Thomas Jefferson

In honor of our third president, I can suggest a worthy gift given to anyone in his name.
jeffersonbookcover
 
Written mostly to debunk David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies, the book stands on its own as an examination of Jefferson’s views on religion, the Bible, and slavery.
Barton spent a lot of time at the Faith Baptist Church telling the audience that the founders all followed Blackstone’s ideas that our government was based on the Bible. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t impressed with that argument as this letter to John Adams shows. Here’s just a bit that sounds like what David Barton would like us to do:

it is not only the sacred volumes they have thus interpolated, gutted, and falsified, but the works of others relating to them, and even the laws of the land. we have a curious instance of one of these pious frauds in the Laws of Alfred. he composed, you know, from the laws of the Heptarchy, a Digest for the government of the United kingdom, and in his preface to that work he tells us expressly the sources from which he drew it, to wit, the laws of Ina, of Offa & Aethelbert, (not naming the Pentateuch.) but his pious Interpolator, very awkwardly, premises to his work four chapters of Exodus (from the 20th to the 23d) as a part of the laws of the land; so that Alfred’s preface is made to stand in the body of the work. our judges too have lent a ready hand to further these frauds, and have been willing to lay the yoke of their own opinions on the necks of others; to extend the coercions of municipal law to the dogmas of their religion, by declaring that these make a part of the law of the land.

Historian Thomas Kidd on Deism During the Founding Era

This brief primer by Thomas Kidd in how deism was understood during the founding era is well worth reading.
Kidd cuts through the fog often generated by Christian nationalists (e.g., David Barton) and the new atheists regarding the religious beliefs of the founders. A brief sample:

So what was deism? In spite of all its diversity, deism was a strain of rationalist religion – many of its advocates, like Jefferson, would have called themselves Christians – which focused on the ethical, rational requirements of true faith and criticized the authority of ministers and institutional churches. Many of them, especially in England and America, believed that there was a true core of Christianity that one could recover through attention to Jesus’s teachings alone. One important aspect of deism that we often miss is that its adherents could hardly imagine a world not organized on theistic moral categories, such as the inherent goodness of charity. Most deists really did consider themselves serious theists, and many considered themselves devotees of Jesus and his teachings. Their deism was not just a convenient cloak for atheism.

I have read more by Jefferson than the other founders and believe Kidd to be on target.