Dennis writes:
> Many of the founding fathers were first generation descendants of colonist
> that came to America because of religious persecution, but at the same time
> almost every one of the founders was "God fearing".
That statement is not correct, at least in its implications, and worse, it
offers the opportunity for the worst kind of historical revisionism: a
propagandist view that turns actual fact on its head.
The Founders of the American Revolution were intellectuals, and they were
very much men of their times. They were all products of the Enlightenment,
and because of that, they were overwhelmingly in the majority Deists. Indeed,
you cannot read nor fundamentally understand the writings of Thomas Paine,
Ethan Allen, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams or George
Washington without first understanding what deism is.
While there are any number of religious philosophies (animism, naturalism,
polytheism, etc), let me only concentrate on the differences between three of
them: atheism, deism and calvinism. Their very differences make their
distinctions clear, simply because these three ideas are exaggerated
endpoints on graduated scale.
CALVINISM
Calvinism arose as a direct result of the Protestant Reformation in Europe,
espoused first by Martin Luther and then, in a greatly more exaggerated form,
by John Calvin. Under Calvinism, God is an immanent God, a personal God, a
God that carries you through the worst of times and watches over your every
movement.
Calvinism is the underlying philosophy of the American fundamentalist
Christian community. Luther and Calvin both derived their views from the
teaching of St. Augustine, which was further developed by St. Thomas Aquinas
both in theology and philosophy. Aquinas argued that Will is rational
appetite. Man necessarily desires beatitude, but he can freely choose between
different forms of it. Free will is simply this elective power. Under
Calvinism, the Concept of Free Will is outrightly rejected in favor of God's
providence.
Under Aquinas' philosophy, Infinite Good was not visible to the intellect in
this life. There are always some drawbacks and deficiencies in every good
presented to us. None of them exhausts our intellectual capacity of
conceiving the good. Consequently, in deliberate volition, not one of them
completely satiates or irresistibly entices the will. In this capability of
the intellect for conceiving the universal lies the root of our freedom. But
God possesses an infallible knowledge of man's future actions.
The question becomes then: How is this prevision possible, if man's future
acts are not necessary? The answer is that God does not exist in time. The
future and the past are alike ever present to the eternal mind as a man
gazing down from a lofty mountain takes in at one momentary glance all the
objects which can be apprehended only through a lengthy series of successive
experiences by travellers along the winding road beneath, in somewhat similar
fashion the intuitive vision of God apprehends simultaneously what is future
to us with all it contains.
In the Calvinist extrapolation of the Thomasian philosophy, God's omnipotent
providence exercises a complete and perfect control over all events that
happen, or will happen, in the universe.
Picking from the Scriptures, and particularly from St. Paul, the texts which
emphasized the importance and efficacy of grace, the all-ruling providence of
God, His decrees of election or predestination, and the feebleness of man,
the followers of Calvin have drawn the conclusion that the human will,
instead of being master of its own acts, is rigidly predetermined in all its
choices throughout life. As a consequence, man is predestined before his
birth to eternal punishment or reward in such fashion that he never can have
had any real free-power over his own fate.
DEISM
This Calvinist perspective is completely antithetical to the Deist
philosophy. If God exists, God only created the Universe, its rules (which
are determinable and understandable through rational inquiry), and then
withdrew, leaving man to make either an earthly paradise or a hellish inferno
of his world.
Further, under Deism, all sense of mysticism is expunged from religion. While
Jesus is regarded as an accurate historical figure, he is not seen as the Son
of God.
As to the definitions of Deism, the Encyclopedia Britannica writes this (in
part):
"The proponents of natural religion were strongly influenced by three
intellectual concerns: a growing faith in human reason, a distrust of
religious claims of revelation that lead to dogmatism and intolerance, and,
finally, an image of God as the rational architect of an ordered world.
"Renaissance humanism had rejected the orthodox Christian emphasis upon the
corruption of reason through sin and had affirmed a general faith that human
reason could discern universal religious and moral truths apart from any
supernatural revelation or specific church teachings. Similarly, Deists
argued that behind the vast differences in modes of worship, piety, and
doctrine of the world's religions and the Christian churches lay a common
rational core of universally accepted religious and moral principles. The
early Deists asserted that superficial differences of ritual and dogma were
insignificant and should accordingly be tolerated.
"They rejected the elaborate liturgical practices and complex institutional
trappings of Roman Catholicism as analogous to ancient pagan superstition. In
place of the noxious "enthusiasm" and strict individual piety of the
Protestant sects, they sought to promote the sober moral striving and
tolerance of the religion of reason.
"The chief debate between the militant Deists and the orthodox Christian
thinkers concerned the proper role of appeals to divine revelation as a
disclosure of ultimate religious truth. Many orthodox thinkers argued that,
while natural reason did provide access to religious truths, supernatural
revelation was necessary as a supplement to teach these same truths more
clearly and effectively. Indeed, the Roman Catholic tradition since Thomas
Aquinas esteemed right reason as always in harmony with revealed truth and
capable of disclosing God's natural moral laws. Deists countered that natural
religion alone was certain and free of corruption, and they launched a
vigorous attack upon all of the Christian additions to the simple moral
truths affirmed by reason.
"In place of the orthodox Judeo-Christian conception of God as involved
actively in shaping and sustaining human history, the Deists argued that
after God's initial work of creation, He withdrew into detached
transcendence, leaving the world to operate according to rational natural
rules. Borrowing upon the general prestige of Isaac Newton's vision of the
universe as a mechanism obeying stable rational laws, they propounded
variations on the classic argument from design wherein the existence of a
rational creator is inferred from the evidence of the rational ordering of
the world.
"In England and later in Germany the Deists' attack upon Christian doctrines
remained moderate, but in France, where the political influence of corrupt
Roman Catholic prelates had spawned a strong anticlerical reaction, the
attack became exceedingly impassioned and bitter. In the view of Voltaire,
"every man of sense, every good man, ought to hold the Christian sect in
horror." For many other French Philosophers, Deism was simply a station upon
the road to complete atheism.
"By the end of the 18th century, in addition to becoming a dominant religious
attitude among English, French, and German intellectuals, Deism had crossed
the Atlantic to shape the religious views of upper-class Americans. The first
three presidents of the United States all subscribed to Deist beliefs."
(http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/1/0,5716,30261+1+29775,00.html?quer
y=deism)
Similarly, the Hutchison Family Encyclopedia (an English encyclopedia) writes:
"Deism:
"Belief in a supreme being. The term usually refers to a movement in the 17th
and 18th centuries characterized by the belief in a rational 'religion of
nature' as opposed to the orthodox beliefs of Christianity. Deists believed
that God is the source of natural law but does not intervene directly in the
affairs of the world, and that the only religious duty of humanity is to be
virtuous.
The founder of English deism was Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), and
the chief exponents were John Toland (1670–1722), Anthony Collins
(1676–1729), Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), Thomas Woolston (1670–1733), and
Thomas Chubb (1679–1747). In France, the writer Voltaire was the most
prominent advocate of deism. In the USA, many of the country's founders,
including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, were essentially deists.
Later, deism came to mean a belief in a personal deity who is distinct from
the world and not intimately interested in its concerns.
Deists believed in the light of nature and reason as a sufficient guide in
doctrine and practice. This had much in common with later German rationalism."
(http://ebooks.whsmithonline.co.uk/encyclopedia/60/M0000860.htm)
ATHEISM
Atheism is not the hard-hearted philosophy it is demonized to be. Indeed,
everyone on this list is a practicing pragmatic atheist, regardless of what
beliefs you espouse or hold dear. The same is true for every engineer and
scientist.
No where in anyone's long printouts of massive amounts of code in this group
does anyone put in a line saying "poof, a miracle occurs here, a miracle
beyond our understanding." Nor does any engineer put that notion into his
schematics, or does a professor filling a room full of blackboards with
equations resort to demons, sprites, angles, or unseen agents of any form.
Every step is a logical consequence of the steps before, and every step can
be understood. This is exactly what Laplace meant when he was asked by
Napoleon why God had not been mentioned in his celebrated work, "Mechanique
Celeste." Laplace replied, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis."
Laplace's statement is neither a denial nor an affirmation of either the
existence of God or hand of God, it is simply a statement of the fact that
the imposition of a God-like actor was unnecessary to understand the
mechanism of the planets. Every step was a logical consequence of the steps
before it.
Western Rationalism grew out of the secular humanist movement that was the
Renaissance, and Rationalist thought permeated every philosophical aspect of
the Enlightenment. There was an extraordinary excitment in the air at the
time, and you know their names: Newton, Leibnitz (Leibniz), Voltaire,
Laplace, Descartes, Kant. After a thousand years of darkness, we were
beginning to understand the world and the universe, and its movements, in a
fundamental manner.
Its from this perspective that you must read Paine's "The Age of Reason" and
"The Rights of Man." These are the documents of the American Revolution. And
this is what is meant by these few sentences:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure
these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People
to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..."
The American Revolution was not only an overthrow of the tyranny of kings,
but also the divine right of kings, and the tyranny of religious dogma and
its inevitable intolerances. It was also about the moral obligation that we
hold to ourselves and how we are to treat one another. It was more than
anything about the fact that governments are instituted among men -- and that
they derive their power only from the consent of those governed.
It's difficult now to fully express how radical an idea that was at the time,
and 225 years ago, only a very small sliver of land on the eastern seaboard
of North America was the only place on the planet that held to that idea.
Wirt Atmar
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