Wirt,


I am questioning a few of your statements: "Martin Luther being a
Calvinist". Martin wanted to 'reorganise' the Roman Catholic Church, he was
convinced that The Church miss used one of their fundamental instruments to
rais funds for the Vatican (the sacrament". He did question the way the
Church acted, and had some questions about the way The Word was spread, but
he did not want to fight The Church. It was The Church that started the
fight. Luther political vision became that The State ruled and determined
which Religion would be leading 'State Church'.

John Calvin (Jean Calvin) on the other hand, a younger man in a country
where The Church was nearly synomim to The State was fighting The Church as
The Instrument that had tried to ruin a Great Thinker and his master Martin
Luther. He stated that a fundamental change in thinking was needed. Finally
he went to a political vision The Church State were his followers would rule
The State and enforce their Religion.

Whether Voltaire was a Deist in his heard or not is hard to reconstruct. In
France of his days, a revolutionary thinker was nearly automatically an
enemy of The State and The Church. So if you where questioning the rule of
The State, The Church would attack you.

The attacks on the Church doctrine in England were already made by The
State, the sacredness of Marridge was 'demolized' as the Anglican Church was
introduced.

Germany had his Lutheran Church, it was build on the fundament that The
Church had made mistakens and The Doctrine that The Roman Catholic Church
was The Only Christian Church was broken by that.


Regards,


Jan Gerrit

"Wirt Atmar" <[log in to unmask]> schreef in bericht
news:95de06028aa@enews1.newsguy.com...
> 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."
>
>
> 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."
>
>
> 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
>