Was Thomas Jefferson An Atheist? (meaning, believe, scientific, virtual)

[MontanaGuy]

It would be virtually impossible for an atheist to be elected President of the United States in this day and age but there's a great deal of evidence that one of the greatest Presidents in American history, Thomas Jefferson, was in fact an atheist. What he said in public was often much different than what his private letters to various individuals revealed about his true philosophy. I've included a link that has compiled some of his writings.

Thomas Jefferson quotes

[Tricky D]

I don't think that Thomas Jefferson, or Albert Einstein, are atheists.
But it is obvious to me that they just ain't Christians.

[b. frank]

Hey, this is one of my favorite subjects. Thomas Jefferson is one of the many fascinating US founders and I wrote my thesis paper on him in college. I read so much about and by Jefferson, that I was pretty sick of them by the time I graduated. But he may be the first important liberal in US and colonial history. And, yes, it is valid to say that he was an atheist. He never claimed that but there is evidence.
However, if Jefferson ever expressly did not believe in God, he never wrote it down. And nobody else ever wrote that he did as far as I know.
Now, my thesis had nothing to do with religion; it was about Jefferson's attitude towards slavery. Basically: If he hated slavery as much as he claimed to in his writings, then why was he a lifelong slaveowner who never truly stood up for abolition? (And, no, the answer is not that he was unwilling to give up his love-slaves, although that may be true). The answer is that his nature prevented him from ending slavery, even though he was probably the best candidate to do so. He just could not fully escape the traditions of his privileged upbringing. Slavery was a part of him that he could not escape, and even he admitted that he literally did not know how to live without it. Maybe Christianity/religion was the same. Maybe he didn't even believe in God. And maybe this was such a "hot topic" for him that he dared not write it down (he also knew that any writing of his would be published as soon as anyone got their hands on it, and he was influential enough that anything he wrote might affect the stability of the country. So...we'll never really know if TJ was an atheist.
My guess is that the man was too much of a free-spirited hippie at heart to deny the existence of God. He wrote a lot about seeing divinity in nature, which he loved. So I believe him when he says he is a Deist.

[cncracer]

Originally Posted by Tricky D

I don't think that Thomas Jefferson, or Albert Einstein, are atheists.
But it is obvious to me that they just ain't Christians.

Tricky,
If you read much on either one you will see they are both atheist in what they wrote. I think times were different and people would call it free thinking in the Jefferson period. With Einstein religion was just not worthy of his time.

[Tricky D]

Originally Posted by cncracer

With Einstein religion was just not worthy of his time.

Einstein had as much faith in his theories as the clergy have in their biblical studies.
I just see no difference between a philosophy and a religion.
They are either true, or not.

[cncracer]

How many knew that Abe Lincoln was an out spoken Atheist. I knew many of the founding father were, but some how had never found how out spoken he was against both god, and religion in general. Has anybody else found Presidents who had issues with religion?

[Tricky D]

I've been watching the TV series The Tudors ( King 'takes' Queen & Its good to be the king) where Thomas More is portrayed as a Humanist.
Since then I've been wondering if there would be a difference between a Christian Humanist and an atheist Humanist?
I mean, wouldn't Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein not be Humanists also?

[Haaziq]

Originally Posted by Tricky D

Einstein had as much faith in his theories as the clergy have in their biblical studies.

Comparing scientific theories that have evidence to support them to biblical stories is completely absurd.

[Tesaje]

Originally Posted by Tricky D

Originally Posted by Haaziq To a scientist everything he doesn't understand would be absurd.
A scientist cannot scientifically explain beauty, does this mean that beauty is absurd?
Besidez, having knowledge is not the same as having wisdom.

This is simply untrue. To a scientist, everything he doesn't understand is a research project. What he calls absurd is believing in that which cannot be shown to exist at all. Big, big difference.

And Beauty is a quark. Science is teasing out what constitutes beauty, and other emotions as well - mapping out brain activity and chemistry. It is not fully understood, but it is a research project, as an example.

No, having knowledge is not the same as having wisdom. But it is hard to have wisdom without knowledge. The converse is not necessarily true.

Yes, Lincoln was an avowed atheist and disliked the emerging evangelical movement as well as the entrenched tyranny of the older churches.

While it is true that Jefferson never explicitly disavowed the existence of god, he wrote much that indicated he had no use for organized religion at all and considered it as bad or worse than the tyranny of King George. But he also wrote many lines that could be read as meaning he didn't believe in a deity at all. If he was not an atheist, he was close to it.

Thomas Paine was an anti-religionist and atheist. The tyranny exercised over society by the religionists was current and fresh in the minds and experience of those people. It was not very long ago then when the Puritans held sway and exercised their own brand of religious tyranny both in the Colonies and in England. Ben Franklyn also.

[Wendell Phillips]

Thomas Jefferson was a deist (not a christian), who had no compunction to taking his razor to cut out those passages of the gospels that didn't comport with his philosophy.