too speak out about the absurdities and intolerance of the Christian religion. It's still not safe to run as a candidate for president and not be a believer. We owe alot to Jefferson, and perhaps even more to Tom Paine, the true hero of the revolution.
In this essay about Paine by Bertrand Russell, Jefferson gives an indication to the stress that he was under from the "Athansians" that prevented him from a closer relationship with Paine in the later years. Unfortunately, the Athanasians have won and have taken over the country, but I think in the end, all this nonsense will fall by the wayside.
He had no doubt that all his old friends, except such as were Federalists, would welcome him. But there was a difficulty: Jefferson had a hard fight for the Presidency, and in the campaign the most effective weapon against him unscrupulously used by ministers of all denominations had been the accusation of infidelity. His opponents magnified his intimacy with Paine and spoke of the pair as "the two Toms." Twenty years later, Jefferson was still so much impressed by the bigotry of his compatriots that he replied to a Unitarian minister who wished to publish a letter of his: "No, my dear Sir, not for the world! . . . I should as soon undertake to bring the crazy skulls of Bedlam to sound understanding as to inculcate reason into that of an Athanasian . . . keep me therefore from the fire and faggot of Calvin and his victim. Servetus." It was not surprising that, when the fate of Servetus threatened them, Jefferson and his political followers should have fought shy of too close an association with Paine. He was treated politely and had no cause to complain, but the old easy friendships were dead.
In other circles he fared worse. Dr. Rush of Philadelphia, one of his first American friends, would have nothing to do with him: ". . . his principles" he wrote, "avowed in his Age of Reason, were so offensive to me that I did not wish to renew my intercourse with him." In his own neighborhood, he was mobbed and refused a seat in the stagecoach; three years before his death he was not allowed to vote, on the alleged ground of his being a foreigner. He was falsely accused of immorality and intemperance, and his last years were spent in solitude and poverty. He died in 1809. As he was dying, two clergymen invaded his room and tried to convert him, but he merely said, "Let me alone; good morning!" Nevertheless, the orthodox invented a myth of deathbed recantation which was widely believed.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Bertrand_Russell/Fate_Thomas_Paine_WIANAC.html
"We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select even from the very words of Jesus, paring off the amphiboligisms into which they have been led by forgetting often or not understanding what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, October 13, 1813, clarifying his desire to strip away the myth introduced by the Gospel writers, as his motivation for constructing his Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/qframe.htmThe result was his secular "Jefferson Bible, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth", which came to print in 1904 and was passed out to new members of congress from 1904 until 1957.
http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/
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