http://groups.google.com/group/sci.med.cardiology/msg/9c5c55fcace06864?

<><

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.med.cardiology/msg/4128be9f9918d825?

Thomas Jefferson was a deist who despised religion. A deist believes in
a creator only - not a god - that creator started the process of the
beginning of the universe and life- and then let it go on its own.

Quotes:

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be
one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of
blindfolded fear.

-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of
Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we
have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.

-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any
party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in
anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an
addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789

They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will
be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for
I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form
of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from
me: and enough, too, in their opinion.

-Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Sept. 23, 1800

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people
maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of
ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always
avail themselves for their own purposes.

-Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813.

The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and
doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such
tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other
books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to
entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New
Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded
from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of
very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick
out diamonds from dunghills.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to
liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses
in return for protection to his own.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814

f we did a good act merely from love of God and a belief that it is
pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? ...Their
virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.

-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814
My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had
never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the
purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence
and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that
system only what is really there.

-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Mrs. Samuel H. Smith, August, 6, 1816

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his
biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality,
and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much
ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and
imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should
have proceeded from the same being.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, April 13, 1820

To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the
human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or
that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but
I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and
Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of
immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy
it certainly is.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the
supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with
the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may
we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United
States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us
the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of
human errors.

-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Apocalypse],
and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy
nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to General Alexander Smyth, Jan. 17, 1825