Jon Rowe has another excellent essay on the founding fathers and religion, this one focusing on Adams and Jefferson and their shared antipathy for the biblical conception of God. As he points out, and their words make clear, both men rejected the notion of hell and thought the idea of the trinity was nothing short of insane. And both believed that the biblical writers had distorted the conception of God beyond recognition. Jefferson, in fact, argued that Jesus had never claimed to be divine at all and that his own apostles distorted his words to make it appear so.
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Jon Rowe has another excellent essay on the role of religion among the founding fathers. He draws on an op-ed piece by Mark Lilla in the NY Times on the same subject. Lilla rightly hammers the "schlock history written by religious propagandists like David Barton" while pointing to more serious…
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