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>From: "Peter McWilliams" <peter@mcwilliams.com>
>Subject: The faith of our fathers
>Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 06:20:42 -0700
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>
>Dear Sheriff McDougal,
>
>You are obviously in a great deal of pain, and it grieves me to see you
>such. Kindly read my words, from a fellow Irishman, with the sincere desire
>to ease your suffering with which they are intended. You are struggling with
>inaccurate historical facts combined with an interpretation of God that I do
>not believe is shared by the person who you, as a Catholic, consider the
>ultimate living spiritual authority, Pope John Paul II.
>
>Where on earth did you get the notion that the Founding Fathers shared your
>religious views? In the first place, you must acknowledge that none of them
>were Catholic. Secondly, none of them were even Bible-believing Christians.
>They were, in fact, Deists. This is an accepted, historical fact. To quote
>from the Encyclopedia Britannica [full text of the entry at the end of this
>letter]:
>
>"By the end of the 18th century, Deism had become a dominant religious
>attitude among intellectual and upper class Americans. Benjamin Franklin,
>the great sage of the Colonies and then of the new republic, summarized in a
>letter to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, a personal creed that
>almost literally reproduced Herbert's five fundamental beliefs. The first
>three presidents of the United States also held Deistic convictions, as is
>amply evidenced in their correspondence."
>
>If you find the Encyclopedia Britannica too contaminated by "liberals," I
>suggest you contact any historian who is an expert on the religious beliefs
>of the Founding Fathers. There are many views of God, but there is only one
>history.
>
>The Founding Fathers, as Deists, would differ profoundly with your
>interpretation of God and His will:
>
>"The Deists were particularly vehement against any manifestation of
>religious fanaticism and enthusiasm. In this respect Shaftesbury's Letter
>Concerning Enthusiasm (1708) was probably the crucial document in
>propagating their ideas. Revolted by the Puritan fanatics of the previous
>century and by the wild hysteria of a group of French exiles prophesying in
>London in 1707, Shaftesbury denounced all forms of religious extravagance as
>perversions of true religion. These false prophets were directing religious
>emotions, benign in themselves, into the wrong channels. Any description of
>God that depicted his impending vengeance, vindictiveness, jealousy, and
>destructive cruelty was blasphemous. Because sound religion could find
>expression only among healthy men, the argument was common in Deist
>literature that the preaching of extreme asceticism, the practice of
>self-torture, and the violence of religious persecutions were all evidence
>of psychological illness and had nothing to do with authentic religious
>sentiment and conduct. The Deist God, ever gentle, loving, and benevolent,
>intended men to behave toward one another in the same kindly and tolerant
>fashion."
>
>I'm afraid it was precisely to keep such extreme views as yours from
>becoming public policy  that the Founding Fathers built, as Jefferson
>phrased it, "a wall of separation" between church and state. You will soon
>learn about this wall of separation when you are forced to remove your
>religious beliefs from a state-sponsored web page.
>
>Frankly (and I'm sorry I cannot find a softer way of saying this), your
>ignore-ance of history and your failure to acknowledge the absolute power of
>God has you between a rock and a hard place. The rock--the constitutional
>separation of church and state--will not change, as you will soon learn when
>you are forced to remove your religious beliefs from a state-sponsored web
>page. Since the rock will not change, I suggest, then, that you alter your
>hardfast interpretation of God's will, for only in that way will the hard
>place become a warm embrace.
>
>It is not God's will, but your own, that the "perverse" world is refusing to
>follow. Is your God omnipotent or not? Unless you believe in a pathetically
>impotent God, then, truly, if He wanted things to be the way you want them
>to be, He could easily make them so. To believe otherwise is the profoundest
>form of atheism.
>
>Might I suggest you show your "wake up" letter, and this letter, to your
>priest and see what he has to say?
>
>Most sincerely,
>
>Peter McWilliams
>peter@mcwilliams.com
>
>===============
>
> >From the Encyclopedia Britannica:
>
>Deism; an unorthodox religious attitude that found expression among a group
>of English writers beginning with Edward Herbert (later 1st Baron Herbert of
>Cherbury) in the first half of the 17th century and ending with Henry St.
>John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, in the middle of the 18th century. In
>general it refers to what can be called natural religion, the acceptance of
>a certain body of religious knowledge that is inborn in every person or that
>can be acquired by the use of reason, as opposed to knowledge acquired
>through either revelation or the teaching of any church. (See Bolingbroke,
>Henry Saint John, 1st Viscount, Baron Saint John of Lydiard Tregoze.)
>
>Nature and scope
>
>Though an initial use of the term occurred in 16th-century France, the later
>appearance of the doctrine on the Continent was stimulated by the
>translation and adaptation of the English models. The high point of Deist
>thought occurred in England from about 1689 through 1742, during a period
>when, despite widespread counterattacks from the established Church of
>England, there was relative freedom of religious expression following upon
>the Glorious Revolution that ended the rule of James II and brought William
>and Mary to the throne. Deism took deep root in 18th-century Germany after
>it had ceased to be a vital subject of controversy in England.
>
>At times in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the word Deism was used
>theologically in contradistinction to theism, the belief in an immanent God
>who actively intervenes in the affairs of men. In this sense Deism was
>represented as the view of those who reduced the role of God to a mere act
>of creation in accordance with rational laws discoverable by man and held
>that, after the original act, God virtually withdrew and refrained from
>interfering in the processes of nature and the ways of man. So stark an
>interpretation of the relations of God and man, however, was accepted by
>very few Deists during the flowering of the doctrine, though their religious
>antagonists often attempted to force them into this difficult position.
>Historically, a distinction between theism and Deism has never had wide
>currency in European thought. As an example, when encyclopaedist Denis
>Diderot, in France, translated into French the works of Anthony Ashley
>Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury, one of the important English Deists, he
>often rendered "Deism" as théisme. The term is not in current usage as a
>metaphysical concept, and its significance is really limited to the 17th and
>18th centuries.
>
>The English Deists
>
>In 1754-56, when the Deist controversy had passed its peak, John Leland, an
>opponent, wrote a historical and critical compendium of Deist thought, A
>View of the Principal Deistical Writers that Have Appeared in England in the
>Last and Present Century; with Observations upon Them, and Some Account of
>the Answers that Have Been Published Against Them. This work, which began
>with Lord Herbert of Cherbury and moved through the political philosopher
>Thomas Hobbes, Charles Blount, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Collins,
>Thomas Woolston, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, Thomas Chubb, and Viscount
>Bolingbroke, fixed the canon of who should be included among the Deist
>writers. In subsequent works Hobbes usually has been dropped from the list
>and John Toland included, though he was closer to pantheism than most of the
>other Deists were. Herbert was not known as a Deist in his day, but Blount
>and the rest who figured in Leland's book would have accepted the term Deist
>as an appropriate designation for their religious position. Simultaneously,
>it became an adjective of opprobrium in the vocabulary of their opponents.
>Bishop Edward Stillingfleet's Letter to a Deist (1677) is an early example
>of the orthodox use of the epithet.
>
>In Lord Herbert's treatises five religious ideas were recognized as
>God-given and innate in the mind of man from the beginning of time: the
>belief in a supreme being, in the need for his worship, in the pursuit of a
>pious and virtuous life as the most desirable form of worship, in the need
>of repentance for sins, and in rewards and punishments in the next world.
>These fundamental religious beliefs, Herbert held, had been the possession
>of the first man, and they were basic to all the worthy positive
>institutionalized religions of later times. Thus, differences among sects
>and cults all over the world were usually benign, mere modifications of
>universally accepted truths; they were corruptions only when they led to
>barbarous practices such as the immolation of human victims and the
>slaughter of religious rivals.
>
>In England at the turn of the 17th century this general religious attitude
>assumed a more militant form, particularly in the works of Toland,
>Shaftesbury, Tindal, Woolston, and Collins. Though the Deists differed among
>themselves and there is no single work that can be designated as the
>quintessential expression of Deism, they joined in attacking both the
>existing orthodox church establishment and the wild manifestations of the
>dissenters. The tone of these writers was often earthy and pungent, but
>their Deist ideal was sober natural religion without the trappings of
>Catholicism and the High Church in England and free from the passionate
>excesses of Protestant fanatics. In Toland there is great emphasis on the
>rational element in natural religion; in Shaftesbury more worth is ascribed
>to the emotive quality of religious experience when it is directed into
>salutary channels. All are agreed in denouncing every kind of religious
>intolerance because the core of the various religions is identical. In
>general, there is a negative evaluation of religious institutions and the
>priestly corps who direct them. Simple primitive monotheism was practiced by
>early men without temples, churches, and synagogues, and modern men could
>readily dispense with religious pomp and ceremony. The more elaborate and
>exclusive the religious establishment, the more it came under attack. A
>substantial portion of Deist literature was devoted to the description of
>the noxious practices of all religions in all times, and the similarities of
>pagan and Roman Catholic rites were emphasized.
>
>The Deists who presented purely rationalist proofs for the existence of God,
>usually variations on the argument from the design or order of the universe,
>were able to derive support from the vision of the lawful physical world
>that Sir Isaac Newton had delineated. Indeed, in the 18th century, there was
>a tendency to convert Newton into a matter-of-fact Deist--a transmutation
>that was contrary to the spirit of both his philosophical and his
>theological writings. (See rationalism, teleological argument.)
>
>When Deists were faced with the problem of how man had lapsed from the pure
>principles of his first forebears into the multiplicity of religious
>superstitions and crimes committed in the name of God, they ventured a
>number of conjectures. They surmised that men had fallen into error because
>of the inherent weakness of human nature; or they subscribed to the idea
>that a conspiracy of priests had intentionally deceived men with a "rout of
>ceremonials" in order to maintain power over them.
>
>The role of Christianity in the universal history of religion became
>problematic. For many religious Deists the teachings of Christ were not
>essentially novel but were, in reality, as old as creation, a republication
>of primitive monotheism. Religious leaders had arisen among many
>peoples--Socrates, Buddha, Muhammad--and their mission had been to effect a
>restoration of the simple religious faith of early men. Some writers, while
>admitting the similarity of Christ's message to that of other religious
>teachers, tended to preserve the unique position of Christianity as a divine
>revelation. It was possible to believe even in prophetic revelation and
>still remain a Deist, for revelation could be considered as a natural
>historical occurrence consonant with the definition of the goodness of God.
>The more extreme Deists, of course, could not countenance this degree of
>divine intervention in the affairs of men.
>
>Natural religion was sufficient and certain; the tenets of all positive
>religions contained extraneous, even impure elements. Deists accepted the
>moral teachings of the Bible without any commitment to the historical
>reality of the reports of miracles. Most Deist argumentation attacking the
>literal interpretation of Scripture as divine revelation leaned upon the
>findings of 17th-century biblical criticism. Woolston, who resorted to an
>allegorical interpretation of the whole of the New Testament, was an
>extremist even among the more audacious Deists. Tindal was perhaps the most
>moderate of the group. Toland was violent; his denial of all mystery in
>religion was supported by analogies among Christian, Judaic, and pagan
>esoteric religious practices, equally condemned as the machinations of
>priests.
>
>The Deists were particularly vehement against any manifestation of religious
>fanaticism and enthusiasm. In this respect Shaftesbury's Letter Concerning
>Enthusiasm (1708) was probably the crucial document in propagating their
>ideas. Revolted by the Puritan fanatics of the previous century and by the
>wild hysteria of a group of French exiles prophesying in London in 1707,
>Shaftesbury denounced all forms of religious extravagance as perversions of
>true religion. These false prophets were directing religious emotions,
>benign in themselves, into the wrong channels. Any description of God that
>depicted his impending vengeance, vindictiveness, jealousy, and destructive
>cruelty was blasphemous. Because sound religion could find expression only
>among healthy men, the argument was common in Deist literature that the
>preaching of extreme asceticism, the practice of self-torture, and the
>violence of religious persecutions were all evidence of psychological
>illness and had nothing to do with authentic religious sentiment and
>conduct. The Deist God, ever gentle, loving, and benevolent, intended men to
>behave toward one another in the same kindly and tolerant fashion.
>
>Deists in other countries
>
>Ideas of this general character were voiced on the Continent at about the
>same period by such men as Pierre Bayle, a French philosopher famous for his
>encyclopaedic dictionary, even though he would have rejected the Deist
>identification. During the heyday of the French Philosophes in the 18th
>century, the more daring thinkers--Voltaire among them--gloried in the name
>Deist and declared the kinship of their ideas with those of Rationalist
>English ecclesiastics, such as Samuel Clarke, who would have repudiated the
>relationship. The dividing line between Deism and atheism among the
>Philosophes was often rather blurred, as is evidenced by Le Rêve de
>d'Alembert (written 1769; "The Dream of d'Alembert"), which describes a
>discussion between the two "fathers" of the Encyclopédie: the Deist Jean Le
>Rond d'Alembert and the atheist Diderot. Diderot had drawn his inspiration
>from Shaftesbury, and thus in his early career he was committed to a more
>emotional Deism. Later in life, however, he shifted to the atheist
>materialist circle of the Baron d'Holbach. When Holbach paraphrased or
>translated the English Deists, his purpose was frankly atheist; he
>emphasized those portions of their works that attacked existing religious
>practices and institutions, neglecting their devotion to natural religion
>and their adoration of Christ. The Catholic Church in 18th-century France
>did not recognize fine distinctions among heretics, and Deist and atheist
>works were burned in the same bonfires.
>
>English Deism was transmitted to Germany primarily through translations of
>Shaftesbury, whose influence upon thought was paramount. In a commentary on
>Shaftesbury published in 1720, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a Rationalist
>philosopher and mathematician, accepted the Deist conception of God as an
>intelligent Creator but refused the contention that a god who metes out
>punishments is evil. A sampling of other Deist writers was available
>particularly through the German rendering of Leland's work in 1755 and 1756.
>H.S. Reimarus, author of many philosophical works, maintained in his
>Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes ("Defense
>for the Rational Adorers of God") that the human mind by itself without
>revelation was capable of reaching a perfect religion. Reimarus did not dare
>to publish the book during his lifetime, but it was published in 1774-78 by
>Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, one of the great seminal minds in German
>literature. According to Lessing, common man, uninstructed and unreflecting,
>will not reach a perfect knowledge of natural religion; he will forget or
>ignore it. Thus, the several positive religions can help men achieve more
>complete awareness of the perfect religion than could ever be attained by
>any individual mind. Lessing's Nathan der Weise (1779; "Nathan the Sage")
>was noteworthy for the introduction of the Deist spirit of religion into the
>drama; in the famous parable of the three rings, the major monotheistic
>religions were presented as equally true in the eyes of God. Although
>Lessing's rational Deism was the object of violent attack on the part of
>Pietist writers and the more mystical thinkers, it influenced such men as
>Moses Mendelssohn, a German Jewish philosopher who applied Deism to the
>Jewish faith. Immanuel Kant, the most important figure in 18th-century
>German philosophy, stressed the moral element in natural religion; moral
>principles are not the result of any revelation but originate from the very
>structure of man's reason. English Deists, however, continued to influence
>German Deism. Witnesses attest that virtually the whole officer corps of
>Frederick the Great was infected with Deism and that Collins and Tindal were
>favourite reading in the army. (See Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd
>Earl of, Baron Cooper of Pawlett, Baron Ashley of Wimborne St. Giles.)
>
>By the end of the 18th century, Deism had become a dominant religious
>attitude among intellectual and upper class Americans. Benjamin Franklin,
>the great sage of the Colonies and then of the new republic, summarized in a
>letter to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, a personal creed that
>almost literally reproduced Herbert's five fundamental beliefs. The first
>three presidents of the United States also held Deistic convictions, as is
>amply evidenced in their correspondence. "The ten commandments and the
>sermon on the mount contain my religion," John Adams wrote to Thomas
>Jefferson in 1816.
>
>Bibliography
>
>John Leland, A View of the Principal Deistical Writers . . . , 3rd ed., 3
>vol. (1754; also 1837 ed.), the first historical account of Deism; Fritz
>Mauthner, Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande, 4 vol.
>(1921-23), a complete history; Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der
>Aufklärung (1932; Eng. trans., The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 1951), a
>description of Deism and its philosophical background; Harold G. Nicolson,
>The Age of Reason (1960), on the nature of 18th-century Rationalism and its
>connection with Deism; James Collins, God in Modern Philosophy (1959), a
>full history of Deism, here called "theism," from Nicolas of Cusa to
>contemporary theological theories; John Orr, English Deism: Its Roots and
>Its Fruits (1934); Gotthard V. Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus
>(1841), the first full history after the end of Deism; Herbert of Cherbury,
>De Veritate (1624; Eng. trans. by Meyrick H. Carre, On Truth, 1937), the
>first English translation of the reputedly "first" classic expression of
>Deism; Mario M. Rossi, La vita, le opere, i tempi di Edoardo Herbert di
>Chirbury, 3 vol. (1947), and Alle fonti del deismo e del materialismo
>moderno (1942), two works that describe Herbert's life and Deistic thought
>against the background of the history of Deism and the attitude of the
>church. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 2nd ed. with
>suppl. (1947), the beginning of the Deist's self-criticism; Thomas Paine,
>The Age of Reason, 3 pt. (1794-1811), the work most influential on the Deism
>of common people; John S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to
>Voltaire (1960), on French Deism; Henry E. Allison, Lessing and the
>Enlightenment (1966); Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der
>blossen Vernunft (1793; Eng. trans., Religion Within the Limits of Reason
>Alone, 1947), the classic work of the last stage of German Deism; G.W.F.
>Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. by Thomas M. Knox and Richard
>Kroner (1948), early writings to show Hegel's indebtedness to Deistic
>polemics.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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