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1 Comments
- parisii, on 10/29/2008, -0/+1okay, let's go with this. I want to become a teacher and post these quotes from the founders in my classroom. Since you are in support of greater religious freedom, you will obviously vigorously support the right of any teacher to post these in a classroom as well. I think they are especially appropriate for a classroom. At the very least, the teacher would certainly support a student's right to note these quotes that illustrate the founders' view of religion.
"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."
--Ben Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758
"Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects."
--James Madison, letter to William Bradford, January 1774
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect."
--James Madison, letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774
"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 blind-folded fear."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter, 1787
"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
--Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794
"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, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
"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, letter to Alexander von Humboldt, 1813
"Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he has known nothing but what has passed under his own eye." —Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Cooper, 1823
and more!!
The Christian God is a being of terrific character- cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust
-Thomas Jefferson
To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say there are nothing, or that there is no soul, no angels, no god. I cannot reason otherwise...I am satisfied, sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which we have no evidence
-Thomas Jefferson
Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone upon man
-Thomas Jefferson
During fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been it its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolences in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution
-James Madison
The sad thing about this incident is that this teacher is probably too stupid to even know the reality of the founders' views.
