Epicurus – Jefferson's Favorite

Another philosophy that focused on how one should live was Epicureanism. Its founder was Epicurus, who was younger than Pyrrho the Skeptic by 19 years, and older than Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, by 8 years. Epicurus was from the island of Samos. He went to Athens at the age of eighteen to confirm his Athenian citizenship – the year before Alexander died. Later he took up residence in the city of Mytilene, and there, at the age of thirty, he acquired recognition as a philosopher.

Like the Cynics and Stoics, Epicureans believed it best to purge oneself of the appetite for power or fortune, and they too favored withdrawal from the corruptions of society. Nevertheless, they wished to keep the wealth and possessions that helped make life pleasant, and Epicureans, it seems, were people who had accumulated some wealth.

Epicureans believed in community. They were political insofar as they saw that it was in the best interest of society for people to carry out agreements that promote fellowship. This implied a contractual form of government. But Epicureans and his followers did not advocate group action for social change. Their approach to politics suited those who wished to continue living comfortably under authoritarian rulers. They advocated civic tranquility and a search for peace of mind. They advocated living unnoticed, abstaining from public life and from making enemies.

Epicurus addressed the ultimate question about life by claiming that life was worth living. He saw life as possibly joyous – if one had an adequate sensitivity to the world of beauty and good friendships, good health and freedom from drudgery. He believed in the pleasures of contemplation, physical beauty and attachments to others.

Epicurus believed that the driving force of life is the avoidance of pain. He believed that the essence of virtue is avoiding inflicting pain upon others. He believed that the avoidance of pain for oneself and others should take precedence over the pursuit of pleasure. He advocated self-control to avoid painful consequences. Pleasure, he said, should be adjusted to the equilibrium in one's body and mind. Excessive devotion to the gratification of appetites, he said, produces misery rather than happiness and therefore should be avoided.

On the issue of happiness, he differed from Plato in that he accepted pleasure as a meaningful part of life. Plato believed that virtue is incompatible with pleasure, that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Epicurus was compatible with modern psychology in his view that seeking pleasure is rational. He believed that seeking pleasure can be accompanied by virtue if one learns to make choices that fit with well-being.

Stoics, as men of God, distorted Epicureanism by associating it with lust and hedonism. And they denounced Epicureans as atheists.

Epicurus was influenced by the materialism of Democritus. He believed that humanity created its destiny without interference from capricious gods. Religion, he complained, unnecessarily frightened people by describing them at the mercy of gods and demons. He escaped from the unpopularity of atheism by speaking of gods as if they were nature rather than nature's creators. The gods, claimed Epicurus, should be worshiped with neither fear nor hope. And do not fear death, he said, for death is but eternal sleep and the dead feel no pain or torment.

Epicureans questioned various methods of arriving at truth. They championed an empirical approach, a process of confirmation and disconfirmation. For example, when a person from afar comes closer and closer, you confirm or reject that it is the person you expected it to be. It was an idea compatible with humanity getting closer to reality with the microscope and telescope.

Epicureanism was to be the avowed philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, who must have found Epicureanism compatible with the Deism popular in his day, which also placed God outside of human affairs. Jefferson was to describe Epicureanism as the most rational philosophical system of the ancients. And his Epicureanism was to find expression in his contribution to the American Declaration of Independence, in its phrase "pursuit of happiness."

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Ethan Allen From Philosopedia

Ethan Allen From Philosopedia

Allen, Ethan [Colonel] (21 January 1738 - 12 February 1789)

A hero of the American Revolution, Allen in 1784 wrote, “I have generally been denominated a Deist, the reality of which I have never disputed, being conscious that I am no Christian, except mere infant baptism makes me one; and as to being a Deist, I know not, strictly speaking, whether I am one or not.” He found trinitarianism “destitute of foundation, and tends manifestly to superstition and idolatry.”

His deistic views were similar to those of Franklin and Jefferson (and to rituals of the Masonic Lodge) as shown in his Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1784). Like a watchmaker, the deists hypothesized, the Supreme Architect created his work, then moved on. Analogously, people who have a watch care little who designed their watch and have no way of determining who actually made it; it is to their benefit to keep the watch repaired and working well–life’s purpose is therefore not to find out which individual or committee made an object, deists explained. They rejected claims of supernatural revelation and of formal religion. With such a philosophy, they skirted the need for a Church of America (inasmuch as the enemy George III could hardly continue to be accepted as God’s representative on earth) and wrote a Constitution placing the onus on man, not outside forces, to rule himself under law.

Reason, the Only Oracle of Man was the first openly anti-Christian book published in North America, and Allen credited many of its ideas to his fellow nonconformist in religious thought, Dr. Thomas Young. The two planned upon writing the book together, but Young died before they could finish it. The book was widely used by Universalists. Shortly after the printing, a fire broke out in the printer’s warehouse and the fearful printer would not agree to publishing any further freethought books. “Ethan Allen’s Bible,” as the book was called among his neighbors, although it may in part have been written by Young, hit hard at Calvinist theology.

Allen “in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress” defeated the British at Fort Ticonderoga, and he was a popular contributor to the secularization and dechristianizing of early American intellectual thought.

The story is told by Valery Countryman, a St. Louis author, that Allen defied a state statute that prohibited smallpox inoculations because they were said to be “a sin against God.” At a local tavern Allen convinced his physician, Thomas Young, to publicly inoculate him. Allen was then quickly arrested for the crime of blasphemy. During the trial he cursed the judge by saying, “May (you) be in Hell a thousand years and every little insipid Devil shall come by and ask why.” Ms. Countryman also describes Allen’s decision to remarry after the death of his estranged spouse. “Do you promise to live in agreement to God’s law?” the officiating judge inquired. “Hold on!” Allen complained. “Whose god are you talking about?” The judge eventually was persuaded to amend the offending phrase to “laws as written in the Book of Nature.”

A little-known section of Israel Potter (1855) by Herman Melville describes Allen during his period of captivity by the British, when he was displayed in the port of Falmouth, “Samson Among the Philistines”:

• Like some baited bull in the ring, crouched the Patagonian-looking captive, handcuffed as before; the grass of the green trampled, and gored up all about him, both by his own movements and those of the people around. Except some soldiers and sailors, these seemed mostly townspeople, collected here out of curiosity. The stranger was outlandishly arrayed in the sorry remains of a half-Indian, half-Canadian sort of dress, consisting of a fawnskin jacket–the fur outside and hanging in ragged tufts–a half-rotten, bark-like belt of wampum; aged breeches of sagathy; bedarned worsted stockings to the knee; old moccasins riddled with holes, their metal tags yellow with salt-water rust; a faded red woolen bonnet, not unlike a Russian night-cap, or a portentous, ensanguined full-moon, all soiled, and stuck about with bits of half-rotted straw. He seemed just broken from the dead leaves in David’s outlawed Cave of Adullam. Unshaven, beard and hair matted, and profuse as a corn-field beaten down by hailstorms, his whole marred aspect was that of some wild beast; but of a royal sort, and unsubdued by the cage.

According to legend, Allen’s wife called for a preacher as he lay dying. The man, although he knew Allen had once stated, “That Jesus Christ was not God is evident from his own words,” attempted to persuade Allen to pray. “Angels are waiting for you,” Allen was told. “Waiting, are they?” Allen retorted. “Well, God damn them, let them wait!”

Vermont eventually erected a forty-two-foot high granite memorial topped by an eight-foot angel decades after Allen’s death and at a site where no one was sure where the body lay. A previous marker had been blasted away by lightning sixty-six years earlier.

 

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Debunking the Christian Democracy Myth Thomas Jefferson [3rd President (1801-1809)]

Christian Democracy Myth Thomas Jefferson [3rd President (1801-1809)] wrote: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.” “The serious enemies are the priests of the different religious sects to whose spells on the human mind its improvement is ominous.” “I join you [John Adams], therefore, in sincere congratulations that this den of the priesthood is at length broken up, and that a Protestant Popedom is no longer to disgrace the American history and character.” “In every country and in every age the priest [any and every clergyman] has been hostile to liberty; he is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.” “I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition [Christianity] one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies.” “His [Calvin's] religion was demonism. If ever man worshiped a false God, he did.” “Their [Presbyterian’s] ambition and tyranny would tolerate no rival if they had power.” “It is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist.” “It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” “If by religion, we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your [John Adams’] exclamation on that hypothesis is just, ‘that this would be the best of worlds if there were no religion in it’.” Christianity neither is, nor ever was apart of the common law. Feb. 10, 1814 “Christian creeds and doctrines, the clergy's own fatal inventions, through all the ages has made of Christendom a slaughterhouse, and divided it into sects of inextinguishable hatred for one another.” (Letter to Thomas Whittemore, June 5, 1822) In support of Thomas Paine: “No writer has exceeded Paine in ease and familiarity of style, in perspicuity of expression, happiness of elucidation, and in simple and unassuming language.” “That you may live long to continue your useful labors, and reap the reward in the thankfulness of nations, is my sincere prayer. Accept the assurances of my high esteem and affectionate attachment.” (letter to Thomas Paine written after publication of Age of Reason) SOURCE: http://monotheism.us/

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Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans

Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.

How much do you know about religion? Try answering a sampling of questions asked in a phone survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible,

Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life. On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith. Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences. “Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew. That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair. “I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge.

I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.” Among the topics covered in the survey were: Where was Jesus born? What is Ramadan? Whose writings inspired the Protestant Reformation? Which Biblical figure led the exodus from Egypt? What religion is the Dalai Lama?

Joseph Smith? Mother Teresa? In most cases, the format was multiple choice. The researchers said that the questionnaire was designed to represent a breadth of knowledge about religion, but was not intended to be regarded as a list of the most essential facts about the subject. Most of the questions were easy, but a few were difficult enough to discern which respondents were highly knowledgeable.

 On questions about the Bible and Christianity, the groups that answered the most right were Mormons and white evangelical Protestants. On questions about world religions, like Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, the groups that did the best were atheists, agnostics and Jews. One finding that may grab the attention of policy makers is that most Americans wrongly believe that anything having to do with religion is prohibited in public schools. An overwhelming 89 percent of respondents, asked whether public school teachers are permitted to lead a class in prayer, correctly answered no. But fewer than one of four knew that a public school teacher is permitted “to read from the Bible as an example of literature.” And only about one third knew that a public school teacher is permitted to offer a class comparing the world’s religions.

 The survey’s authors concluded that there was “widespread confusion” about “the line between teaching and preaching.” Mr. Smith said the survey appeared to be the first comprehensive effort at assessing the basic religious knowledge of Americans, so it is impossible to tell whether they are more or less informed than in the past. The phone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish in May and June.

There were not enough Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu respondents to say how those groups ranked. Clergy members who are concerned that their congregants know little about the essentials of their own faith will no doubt be appalled by some of these findings.

 Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation.

Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.

Forty-three percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the foremost rabbinical authorities and philosophers, was Jewish. The question about Maimonides was the one that the fewest people answered correctly. But 51 percent knew that Joseph Smith was Mormon, and 82 percent knew that Mother Teresa was Roman Catholic. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: September 29, 2010 An article on Tuesday about a poll in which Americans fared poorly in answering questions about religion misspelled the name of a beatified Roman Catholic nun and Nobel Peace Prize winner. She was Mother Teresa, not Theresa. A version of this article appeared in print on September 28, 2010, on page A17 of the New York edition.

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: September 28, 2010

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Andrew Dean Wrote Thomas Paine a Letter and His Response Is Perfect

This Letter Offers a Rare Glimpse Into the Brilliant Mind of One of the Founding Founders of Deism

Respected Friend,

I received your friendly letter, for which I am obliged to you. It is three weeks ago to day (Sunday, Aug. 15,) that I was struck with a fit of an apoplexy, that deprived me of all sense and motion. I had neither pulse nor breathing, and the people about me supposed me dead. I had felt exceedingly well that day, and had just taken a slice of bread and butter for supper, and was going to bed. The fit took me on the stairs, as suddenly as if I had been shot through the head; and I got so very much hurt by the fall, that I have not been able to get in and out of bed since that day, otherwise than being lifted out in a blanket, by two persons; yet all this while my mental faculties have remained as perfect as I ever enjoyed them. I consider the scene I have passed through as an experiment on dying, and I find that death has no terrors for me. As to the people called Christians, they have no evidence that their religion is true. There is no more proof that the Bible is the word of God, than that the Koran of Mahomet is the word of God. It is education makes all the difference. Man, before he begins to think for himself, is as much the child of habit in Creeds as he is in ploughing and sowing. Yet creeds, like opinions, prove nothing.

Where is the evidence that the person called Jesus Christ is the begotten Son of God? The case admits not of evidence either to our senses or our mental faculties: neither has God given to man any talent by which such a thing is comprehensible. It cannot therefore be an object for faith to act upon, for faith is nothing more than an assent the mind gives to something it sees cause to believe is fact. But priests, preachers, and fanatics, put imagination in the place of faith, and it is the nature of the imagination to believe without evidence.

If Joseph the carpenter dreamed, (as the book of Matthew (i) says he did,) that his betrothed wife, Mary, was with child by the Holy Ghost, and that an angel told him so, I am not obliged to put faith in his dreams; nor do I put any, for I put no faith in my own dreams, and I should be weak and foolish indeed to put faith in the dreams of others.

The Christian religion is derogatory to the Creator in all its articles. It puts the Creator in an inferior point of view, and places the Christian Devil above him. It is he, according to the absurd story in Genesis, that outwits the Creator in the garden of Eden, and steals from him his favorite creature, Man, and at last obliges him to beget a son, and put that son to death, to get Man back again; and this the priests of the Christian religion call redemption.

Christian authors exclaim against the practice of offering up human sacrifices, which, they say, is done in some countries; and those authors make those exclamations without ever reflecting that their own doctrine of salvation is founded on a Human Sacrifice. They are saved, they say, by the blood of Christ. The Christian religion begins with a dream and ends with a murder.
As I am now well enough to sit up some hours in the day, though not well enough to get up without help, I employ myself as I have always done, in endeavoring to bring man to the right use of the reason that God has given him, and to direct his mind immediately to his Creator, and not to fanciful secondary beings called mediators, as if God was superannuated or ferocious.

As to the book called the Bible, it is blasphemy to call it the word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions, and a history of bad times and bad men. There are but a few good characters in the whole book. The fable of Christ and his twelve apostles, which is a parody on the Sun and the twelve signs of the Zodiac, copied from the ancient religions of the Eastern world, is the least hurtful part. Every thing told of Christ has reference to the Sun. His reported resurrection is at sunrise, and that on the first day of the week; that is, on the day anciently dedicated to the Sun, and from thence called Sunday -- in Latin 'Dies Solis,' the day of the Sun; as the next day, Monday, is Moon-day. But there is no room in a letter to explain these things.

While man keeps to the belief of one God, his reason unites with his creed. He is not shocked with contradictions and horrid stories. His bible is the heavens and the earth. He beholds his Creator in all his works, and everything he beholds inspires him with reverence and gratitude. From the goodness of God to all, he learns his duty to his fellow-man, and stands self-reproved when he transgresses it. Such a man is no persecutor.

But when he multiplies his creed with imaginary things, of which he can have neither evidence nor conception, such as the tale of the garden of Eden, the Talking Serpent, the Fall of Man, the Dreams of Joseph the Carpenter, the pretended Resurrection and Ascension, of which there is even no historical relation, -- for no historian of those times mentions such a thing, -- he gets into the pathless region of confusion, and turns either fanatic or hypocrite. He forces his mind, and pretends to believe what he does not believe. This is in general the case with the Methodists. Their religion is all creed and no morals.

I have now, my friend, given you a 'fac simile' of my mind on the subject of religion and creeds, and my wish is, that you make this letter as publicly known as you find opportunities of doing.

Yours, in friendship,

Thomas Paine

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Deism's Relationship with Christianity

I thought it would be interesting to consider what Deism shares with the Christian religion. This topic could be a bit tricky because Deists have no set of codified beliefs. We consider ourselves to be free-thinkers, so we don’t tell each other what to believe. But, in a nutshell, Deists believe in God as revealed in nature, and then use reason to determine for ourselves our other personal beliefs and practices. This makes me reluctant to speak for all Deists everywhere, so I’ll just share the similarities that I know of.

 In the first place, modern Deism grew out of Christianity. The earliest Deists, at least in America, were members of churches, usually Anglican. They believed in God. They appreciated and tried to follow Jesus’ teachings, especially the Golden Rule and the importance of loving God and others (something I still hold to). But they also realized that the Church held to many beliefs which just didn’t seem to line up with progressive human understanding. For instance, they questioned the doctrine of the Virgin Birth because everyone knows it takes a male and a female to produce a child. They didn't believe that God impregnates people. They questioned the Christian doctrine that everyone is born evil (Original Sin). They also rejected the doctrine of Substitutionary Atonement, the notion that Jesus had to die in order for God to forgive our sins. So while the Deists affirmed the reality of the Creator and the core teachings of Jesus Christ, they dared to question whether or not Church doctrines or biblical doctrines really line up with reality, with how we know the world really works. But they still affirmed, along with Christians, that God is real and that Jesus taught us how to live good lives.

 Another strong tie that Deism has with what Jesus taught is a reverence for nature. Many, if not most, of Jesus’ parables concerned nature – plants, seeds, tree, water, fire, farming, the sun, the wind. He was quite the “country boy” and used stories about nature to illustrate what human relationships to God and to each other should look like. Like Jesus, Deists looked around them at nature and found, not only evidence for God, but spiritual lessons that can teach us how to love, appreciate, and care for one another.

 Many Deists consider Jesus to be a great teacher, perhaps an extremely enlightened person who had keen insight into how to relate to God as a Father and to humanity as brothers and sisters. Deists also strongly believe in Jesus’ social gospel of helping others. And many Deists, though not all, believe in some sort of afterlife, another subject that Christianity focuses on.

 If Christianity consisted only of the central teachings of Jesus concerning loving God and others, many Deists might consider themselves to be Christians. But Christianity has added many, many other doctrines to its religion over the years that go far beyond what Jesus taught, and Deists find many of these added doctrines to often be irrational, superstitious, and sometimes harmful. Because of all the “extra baggage” that Christianity currently has, most Deists would probably not choose to self-identify as Christians.

 As I mentioned in Part 1, Deism in America began in the Church, within Christianity. But it also had a bit of a “love/hate” relationship with Christianity that has not quite abated. Deists affirmed, along with Christians, that God is our Creator and that the creation is good and shows God’s handiwork. And it also often affirmed the central teachings of Jesus about loving God, loving others, and making our world a better place. But it didn’t agree with the Church that all knowledge was confined to the Bible. It didn’t agree with the Church that we had nothing left to learn about ourselves or our universe other than what the Church or the Bible says. Deists embraced the “new knowledge” of the Enlightenment, advances gained in the fields of science, medicine, astronomy, sociology, and even psychology. Deists strongly felt that God was the source of all truth and that God has continued to lead us into truths that people in the Bible days just weren’t privy to. Can you imagine trying to explain to a Roman soldier or a Jewish peasant how an inoculation shot works? Deists embraced these advances in the sciences and in the arts, even in theology (how we think about God), and felt that humanity needed to grow up and out of some of the superstitions of the past.

The Church, to a large degree, was extremely slow in accepting any new knowledge. It felt that everything God wanted us to know was either found in the Bible (for Protestants) or found in the Vatican (for Catholics) or found in the Church Fathers (for Eastern Orthodox). Granted, the Church has made some strides over the last few decades, but let’s be honest, it only recently allowed for inter-racial marriages and it still is opposed to gays “because the Bible says so.” Deists don’t feel that all knowledge is confined to the Bible or the Church. They feel that God teaches us through everything in life and that we should never stop growing. Our beliefs, think most Deists, should come from what we think, given the information and wisdom available to us now, not just residual knowledge held onto simply because people 2000 years ago believed they knew all truth.

So this is where the relationship between Deism and Christianity can sometimes be strained. Deism accepts and incorporates new knowledge wherever it finds it, using reasoning as a measuring stick to judge truth. Christianity looks primarily to the past for what it believes is truth, to the way people thought and believed from 2000 to 4000 years ago. If you were sick, would you want to go to a doctor that only had the medical training from the first century? Or would you want a doctor with the latest in medical training? Similarly, if you want to understand God, would you consider only what people 2000 years ago had to say? Or would you want to consider other sources? Granted, some things from the past, many things in fact, are worth holding onto. But not if it no longer makes sense (like keeping women out of church pulpits) or if it is superstition (like believing God impregnates people) or if it is harmful, as many of the supposed commands of God in the Bible are.

Nevertheless, Deism usually does not wish to be “anti-Christian”. Christianity is a good religion, as far as it goes. But not everything in Christianity is good. And Deism wants to be known more for what it is for than what it is against.

By Bill McCracken 

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