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Old 02-15-2010, 08:41 PM   #7
BoboStin

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
376
Senior Member
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seand,

That last quote in your sig line, from Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G Spafford....do you know who Spafford was? The name is familiar to me because he was a Protestant preacher of the day, who also wrote a number of hymns.

Do you wonder why Jefferson said "priest" and did not include "minister"?

The quote was intended to be anti-Catholic, not necessarily anti-all religion.

Not only was Jefferson a white supremacist and slave owner, he was also anti-Catholic.
Another saner way to put this is that Jefferson was vehemently sceptical "official religions" as the Catholic church had historically been throughout large parts of European history. You may remember the whole bit with the Popes of Avignon where there were two competing popes supporting to rival political powers.

A more accurate take might be that not only did most of our founding fathers strongly distrusted the mixing of church and state (because it was bad for politics), but at the time many American Prostestant religious leaders (some anti-Catholic, some not) also shared that distrust (because they thought it was bad for religion). Now by contrast, many Protestant evangelicals (who tend even today to also be viciously anti-Catholic if you scrape the surface) all want to not just rewrite the Founding Father's historical perspective, but the perspective of their own church elders as well.
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