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Thomas Jefferson
Our founding fathers had very definite ideas of the various topics that concern us today. Do you know Jefferson's? :) in working this page up, though, I find most of the quotes I liked best concerned the tenet of Freedom of Religion, guaranteed by the First Amendment. And the... ahem, contention the subject of belief/non-belief faced, even in his own time. Read on, and see if your memory serves you correctly...
"We have no right to prejudice another in his civil enjoyments because he is of another church."
--Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Religion, 1776.
"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."
-Thomas Jefferson, 1782
Courtesy of no beliefs.com
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity
one redeeming feature. 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 classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
Thomas Jefferson
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1, 1802
Courtesy of no beliefs.com
"Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle." --Thomas Jefferson to Richard Rush, 1813.
"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 Samuel Kercheval, 1810.
More Jefferson quotes to be found through the "Page 2" link on our ...
Reason Seekers site map
References:
A Nation Founded on Christian Principles?
quotes 2 and 4 courtesy of the folks at No Beliefs.com
Quotes 1, 5, & 6 courtesy of Jefferson on Politics & Government: Freedom of Religion
more to come...
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