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In reply to the discussion: The Christian Right does not want you to know about this day… [View all]Laxman
(2,419 posts)12. Just A Couple Of Quotes From Jefferson To Ponder....
that seem to be lost on the religious right while they're busy worshiping the Founding Fathers. The first from Query XVII of Notes on the State of Virginia:
"The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. ... Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error.
and the second from a letter to John Adams:
1823 April 11. (Jefferson to John Adams). "The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for 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. 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."
A remarkable man. Sometimes so wrong but mostly so right.
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