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Einstein was far from an atheist, but he was certainly no Christian. I can't speak for the rest of those dudes.

I think I want to print out the Venn diagram and secretly hang it up at work, but I am afraid most of the people I work with would find it highly offensive rather than amusing. Therefore, in my non-Christian ways, I am going to refrain.

Yeah, that poster is a bit inaccurate. Einstein, Jefferson, Franklin, Twain, Lincoln, and Darwin were all Deists, for lack of a better term.

As Einstein said, "I am a deeply religious non-believer."

Jefferson said "question even the existence of God, for if there is one and He is just, He will reward people for acting out of reason, rather than out of fear."

And, as Franklin put it so succinctly, "I have always been a deist." heh.

(all quotes are paraphrased, no time to google.)

I believe Jefferson was a Unitarian. MosDef deist.

hey, why let the fatcs get in the way of a good dig at those 'evil" christians.

When trying to categorize founding fathers et al, it's important to remember that they couldn't achieve power/success if they were open about atheism

Is that Shawn Connery and John Kerry?

Shamis wrote:When trying to categorize founding fathers et al, it's important to remember that they couldn't achieve power/success if they were open about atheism

and what has changed today? Name a single person in the House, Senate,Supreme Court or other who says they are an atheist. either they ALL are delusional OR they are liars. so if you vote, then you are supporting this out and out fraud.

Shamis wrote:When trying to categorize founding fathers et al, it's important to remember that they couldn't achieve power/success if they were open about atheism

(shit, this is going to be a long post, but this is a pretty passionate topic of mine, so here goes)

Actually, you were better off being atheist in early America (at least as a politician) than you would be today. Thomas Paine was the only "founding father" (if you could call him that; I would, since his words actually touched many more average Americans than those of Jefferson, Hamilton, or Madison) whom we would call "atheist" today. However, the spiritual views of MOST of the founding fathers, and certainly of all the influential ones, would have rendered them unelectable in today's climate.

We actually miss a lot of points when we differentiate between "Deists" and "Atheists" in the 18th century. Educated people believed in a Deist "prime mover" god (lower case) because that made the most rational sense at the time. Had Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton, Adams, Monroe, Washington, Henry, Hancock, Jay, and even Washington lived in a post-Darwin, post-Hegelian, and modern Space Age World, everything we know about their views and means of inquiry point toward them being atheists. Deism was the best that they had to work with at the time.

I've already mentioned Jefferson's general feeling on religion and belief, but a few other examples:

-Madison explicitly wrote that if all state supports of religion were removed, that people would naturally become deists/unitarians, since that was the most rational viewpoint (unfortunately, we're seeing he was wrong, but you could also make the case that religion has been continuously unfairly supported throughout American history, especially post-Jacksonian period).

-When the word "God" was explicitly left out of the constitution, someone asked Washington why this was. He sarcastically said "we forgot!"

-In a late 1790s treaty with the Muslim Barbary states, Adams explicitly had written "The United States is in no way founded as a Christian nation." This treaty circulated in national newspapers, presumably most literate Americans read it or knew about it, but nobody freaked out. Imagine the brick that fox news would shit if a modern US document said the same thing.

The bottom line, whenever someone is arguing over the beliefs of the Founding Fathers (if we can even cluster all their beliefs together, which is a whole other topic), we know that they were not the equivalents of Dawkins, Hitchens, Sagan, Russell, etc. However, they were NOT what we would call Christians today. Had you asked anyone of them if they believed in the divinity of Jesus, in a literal interpretation of the Old Testament, or even if they accepted Christ as their personal savior, they would have looked at you like you were a complete idiot.

Religiosity, national-level church attendance, and religious language in govt. documents have all been pretty much been increasing SINCE the revolution, through the 2nd Great Awakening and the election of Andrew Jackson in the 1830s, the rise of Christian temperance and abolition movements, the printing of "In God We Trust" on currency in the Civil War, anti-immigrant Protestantism up to the 1920s, the Cold War equation of Christian belief with anti-communism (which put "under God" into the pledge of allegiance, the rise of television preachers in the late 1970s, and most recently the post-9/11 Bush-era evangelical upsurge of 2004.


^^^Nobody is going to read that^^^

Kurt V's church of god the utterly indifferent makes sense. With such a god we need not wonder why tiger shark pups blindly consume some of their litter mates in utero.

Einstein was a Spinozean and Spinoza was an atheist who believed in order in nature, but no god. Young Albert rejected Judism; did not convert to anything else. He also rejected quantum mechanics at first too, but I think he died accepting that experimental evidence largely supported QM, and that is really the most important take home message about Einstein.