Were any Founding Fathers atheists?

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Why do you try so hard to claim Deists for your “team”? I don’t see how you have anything in common with them that you don’t have with atheists. Whether they believe in a god or not, it is certainly not your god. It is what they often refer to as Nature or some undescribable “higher power.”
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Because they are often claimed for the atheist team. You will not find an atheist website that does not use the founding Fathers to hammer Christianity. The same websites conveniently ignore the fact that the Founding Fathers unanimously hammer atheism.
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I wish to raise a simple objection to all of this - as it is actually one of my largest pet peeves.

Why do we even care if a particular figure is on a “team?”

Take the case of Albert Einstein. A lot of disingenious statements have been made about the man regarding the status of his orientation toward religion.

Taking all of his quotes out of context - can portray the man as a Christian or a Jew.

Much to my dismay, Richard Dawkins also engaged in this game of semantics and attempted to claim that Einstein was being “poetic” about his orientation toward nature and the idea of a god and that he was in fact an atheist.

I find the great irony of course is that Einstein (who by proper historical scholarship ~ ie: People more engaged with rendering his views and not invested in this debate - is in fact a Deist) did have a number of telling remarks against people who engaged in such debates.

To paraphrase him: the Bible is in fact mythical, but nothing to be sneered at as it was man’s attempt to understand the universe - and atheists who waste their time being angry and argumentative have lost the whole narrative (that being the majesty of the universe and attempts to investiage it).

I ask all of you : What profit us if Einstein were a Christian or an atheist?

Or if the Founding Fathers were a cabal of secret Freemasonic Deists? 😉

If Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Benedict XVI, Billy Graham, TD Jakes, etc. all decided to convert to Radical Islam tomorrow and praised Osama Bin Laden as their leader (a most unlikely event :p):

… I would expect everyone here to be unmoved in their positions regarding the existence or non-existence of a deity.

Mind you - i’m sure all of us would be blinking and wondering what the heck just happened ~ and perhaps we could all collectively agree they’ve gone insane.

BUT - the movement of figures to and from “teams” shouldn’t make much of a difference to anyone.

The whole “team model” is predicated on the idea that people who self identify with a religion, or even a philosophy or political ideology have their interactions shaped by only that particular standpoint.

I’m sure the most reflective of us can agree - human interaction is neither that simplistic nor that boring.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Leela

Additional quote from Thomas Paine:
"It is the duty of every true Deist to vindicate the moral justice of God against the evils of the Bible."

Ah, so Paine was not an atheist either.

So is that it? Were there no atheists among the Founding Fathers?

And are Deists supposed to be classified as allies of the Atheists? I don’t think so!
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I’m not sure what you are arguing about. The point is that many of the Founding Fathers were in no sense orthodox Christians–they were Deists. No one is claiming that the U.S. was founded on “atheist principles,” whatever those might be. You’re inventing a straw man for no good purpose that I can see.

Edwin
 
Not exactly.

There were men whose theology would be closer to deism than orthodox Christianity who remained members of recognized Christian denominations. George Washington remained an Episcopalian until the day he died – but his theology was not exactly orthodox.

Also, I think that you’ll find that the philosophy of the Unitarian/Universalist bodies of the time was a deistic philosophy.

Finally, right around the late 18th century, many New England Congregationalist churches became Unitarian in belief and philosophy (including Boston’s “Old North Church”). Both John Adams and John Quincy Adams would fall into this category.
 
It depends on what you mean by “Deists.”

You’re right that these three are the clearest cases, but there were plenty more who, for instance, disbelieved the Trinity, and who seem to have regarded Christianity primarily as a code of morality.

I wish that conservative Christians would spare for their living contemporaries some of the generosity and charity that they shower so freely on the Founding Fathers, who cannot benefit from it (when it comes to defining who is and who is not a “Christian”).

Edwin
 
I wish that conservative Christians would spare for their living contemporaries some of the generosity and charity that they shower so freely on the Founding Fathers, who cannot benefit from it (when it comes to defining who is and who is not a “Christian”).

By the same token, none of the Founders were atheists, a fact that our atheist contemporaries might charitably remember when they cite some of the Founders as severe critics of Orthodoxy.
 
By the same token, none of the Founders were atheists, a fact that our atheist contemporaries might charitably remember when they cite some of the Founders as severe critics of Orthodoxy.
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Charlemagne, why does that even matter?

Hypothetical: Even if every Founding Father was an atheist it does nothing to disprove your religion.
 
I saw this book at my library before spring break that talked about the Founding Father’s religions.

I do not doubt they were all Christians- although I saw a documentary on Jefferson that said he did believe in a God, but not in formal worship.

EDIT: Maybe I should check out that book? 😉
I read the back and it said that the author just looks at private diaries of the Found Fathers to uncover the real truth, and to clear up all of the “dodges” and doubts that they may have been deists, etc.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
By the same token, none of the Founders were atheists, a fact that our atheist contemporaries might charitably remember when they cite some of the Founders as severe critics of Orthodoxy.
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Have you taken a look at the Jefferson Bible?
 
TheAtheist

Charlemagne, why does that even matter?

I should think it would matter a lot. Atheists constantly accuse Christians of hypocrisy, as if they held the higher moral ground. But it’s the height of hypocrisy to use the Deists to slam the Christians (as you will see at every single atheist website) when the Deists were slamming the atheists as a bit lame-brained and given to encouraging immorality and social chaos. If you don’t think so, reread the quotes from Jefferson and Franklin above.
 
And this from French Deist Voltaire, a contemporary of Jefferson:

“The atheists are for the most part impudent and misguided scholars who reason badly, and who not being able to understand the creation, the origin of evil, and other difficulties, have recourse to the hypothesis of the eternity of things and of inevitability….That was how things went with the Roman Senate which was almost entirely composed of atheists in theory and in practice, that is to say, who believed in neither a Providence nor a future life; this senate was an assembly of philosophers, of sensualists and ambitious men, all very dangerous men, who ruined the republic." (from Voltaire’s essay “On Atheism”).
 
Namesake
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Have you taken a look at the Jefferson Bible? *

Yes, I have. Have you? It’s quite a stretch, wasn’t it, for Jefferson to have concluded that Christianity was already corrupted by the time the Gospels were written?

Most Protestants would give Christianity at least until the time of Constantine (4th Century) before charging the Church went off the track.
 
I should think it would matter a lot. Atheists constantly accuse Christians of hypocrisy, as if they held the higher moral ground. But it’s the height of hypocrisy to use the Deists to slam the Christians (as you will see at every single atheist website) when the Deists were slamming the atheists as a bit lame-brained and given to encouraging immorality and social chaos. If you don’t think so, reread the quotes from Jefferson and Franklin above.
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Yeah…and those people (be they Atheists or Christians) are idiots for engaging in that line of argumentation already!

“So and so says your horrible and your beliefs are wrong.” So what?

As i stated before, if every Founding Father was an atheist, what the heck does that prove? Heck, if every Founding Father was a Muslim or Jew, it proves absolutely nothing.

It has NO Effect on the philosophical, metaphysical, and scientific questions that address religion.

At best, such line of argumentation is engaged by people who rely too much on method of authority and have a desire to be in “the big group.”

I really, honestly, can’t understand why Polemical Atheists and Christians (and whatever religion you may have) feel this strange desire to Co-Opt the following groups:

1.) Agnostics
2.) Pantheists
3.) Deists
4.) Irreleventists

Its not like “Because i have more people, i’m right.” This isn’t a political debate.

Furthermore, regarding your concern about Deists - well part of the issue is that Atheists like to contrast them against the Religious precisely because they see in them something similar to themselves. Probably the idea they are devoted to Reason.

But, as Deists, you would expect them to criticize both atheists and the religious.

If you see someone only willing to tell half the story, you shouldn’t get mad.

You should laugh at them - because that’s ultimately pathetic.

They don’t even have the courage to stand on their own two feet and need to borrow the notoreity of others.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
I’m wondering a bit about the reasoning behind this thread. Charles Darwin was a christianist when he developed his theory of evolution. So does that mean evolution was founded on christian principles?

Not at all. But evolution is hardly in the same league with social contracts and laws required for people to get along with each other. For that you need good will, the respect of persons, the consciousness of right and wrong, and the belief demonstrated in the gospels that we are all equal in the eyes of God, and therefore all equal in the eyes of the State. In the absence of those principles, much advanced by Christianity, we may turn out to have what John Adams feared in one of the above quotes … hell on earth.

As De Tocqueville said in 1832 in his book Democracy in America:

“Christianity, which has declared that all are equal in the sight of God, will not refuse to acknowledge that all citizens are equal in the eye of the law . . . Religion . . . is the companion of liberty in all its battles and all its conflicts; the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims.”
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All equal in the eye of the law and God? Are you seriously suggesting that the christianists of the day felt that slaves, women and natives had the same legal rights as white male land owners?
 
Contarini said:
I’m not sure what you are arguing about. The point is that many of the Founding Fathers were in no sense orthodox Christians–they were Deists. No one is claiming that the U.S. was founded on “atheist principles,” whatever those might be. You’re inventing a straw man for no good purpose that I can see.

Edwin
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True since that only atheist principle is that god is unlikely to exist. The U.S. was largely founded on humanistic principles.
 
cerad said:
All equal in the eye of the law and God? Are you seriously suggesting that the christianists of the day felt that slaves, women and natives had the same legal rights as white male land owners?
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Some “chrisianists” as you call us (what is that anyway? is a christianist different from a christian?) believed that slavery was morally justifiable on religious grounds, others strongly disagreed. Take John Brown for example. In Russell Banks’s novel Cloudsplitter he is portrayed as an abolitionist fanatic largely because of his religious beliefs.
 
*Originally Posted by Contarini View Post
I’m not sure what you are arguing about. The point is that many of the Founding Fathers were in no sense orthodox Christians–they were Deists. **No one is claiming that the U.S. was founded on “atheist principles,” *whatever those might be. You’re inventing a straw man for no good purpose that I can see.

If you go to any atheist website, and I’m sure you been to one or two, you will invariably find quotations from Founding Fathers that are highly critical of Christianity. This is hypocrisy, because the same Founders repudiated atheism as illogical and inclined to immorality. Haven’t you read the posts cited above, especially those from Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin? You will never see those posts on atheist websites.

You could at least concede that citing them here was a matter of setting the record straight in case anyone is confused about why atheists seem to claim the Founders for their team.

They have no right to do so and should not complain when others point out what the Founders thought of atheism. 😉
 
Originally Posted by cerad View Post
All equal in the eye of the law and God? Are you seriously suggesting that the christianists of the day felt that slaves, women and natives had the same legal rights as white male land owners?

There are Christians, and then there are Christians. By the time of the Civil War Christians were very much on the side of abolishing slavery. That war was thirty years after DeTocqueville made his famous statement about democracy surviving best in a Christian state.

I wonder if you have noticed at all that democracy was born in Christian Europe, and that the non-Christian countries of the world to this day are still lagging behind the freedoms to be found in the Christian West.

I wonder if you have ever noticed that wherever religion was suppressed, freedoms have also been suppressed, as under Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, and Castro.

How many times does this have to be pointed out to atheists?
 
I don’t think they believed in divine revelation, just natural law. Therefore I’m not sure in what sense an 18th century deist could be called Christian. To be a Christian don’t you need to believe in the divinity of Jesus (at a minimum)?
 
cerad said:
All equal in the eye of the law and God? Are you seriously suggesting …
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Sorry, Cerad, I see you were saying something different from what I thought. (I still want to know what a christianist is, though.)
 
*To be a Christian don’t you need to believe in the divinity of Jesus (at a minimum)? *

Your point is well taken. Yet there are those who, putting Christ’s divinity aside, will still call themselves Christians. Among them was Thomas Jefferson:

“To the corruption of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself; I am a Christian in the only sense he wished anyone to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others.”

Like many Protestants, Jefferson presumed he could privately interpret the Scriptures and still be a Christian. He re-wrote the Gospels as he thought they should have been written in the first place and passed them around for his friends to read. About a hundred years ago Congress had them published and free copies distributed to everyone in Congress. That shows you the freethinking liberal bias of Congress reaching that far back. No wonder the Congress and the Courts have put this country in the mess it is in today.
 
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