Saturday, December 29, 2007

John Adams, Unitarian, Universalist, Rationalist, Syncretist:

The following reproduces a post on John Adams' religion after I got the Adams-Jefferson correspondence where there is a plethora of evidence of John Adams' religious heterodoxy, that indeed he and Jefferson were virtually agreed on God's attributes. And, surprisingly, it was not "Deism" that was the driver of their creed but a warmer faith whose elements included unitarianism, universalism, rationalism, and syncretism, one that believed in a God who intervened in man's affairs and to whom men ought to pray and oft-presented itself under the auspices of "Christianity." This has led to the "Christian Nation" crowd easily taking quotations out of context which seem to demonstrate Adams and Jefferson were "Christians"; but if this is "Christianity" (arguably it is not) it certainly isn't "Christianity" as evangelicals or Catholics understand that term. According to Jefferson, Adams et al. all good men are "Christians," no matter what faith they profess. Accordingly, these men found "Christianity" in such places as Hinduism and pagan-Greco-Romanism. A set of laws supposedly revealed by Athena 600 years before Christ qualified as "Christian" according to their creed.

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