Back To Pure Blogging: Hold Me Closer/Let Me Go Now

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest."

Like surveying the (equally silly) "spiritual but not religious" nation he founded, I never know whether to laugh or cry after reading Thomas Jefferson, seeing how he grasped another man's freedom so firmly.

"We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."

Is it any wonder "I don't care" is construed as a winning argument, today, in the country he birthed?

The country whose citizenry still can't accept "I didn't do anything" as enough to muster a defense, against even internal tyranny, and - still - willingly forces it's citizens to die in it's streets as a result of it?

 What to do? What to do?

Questions: 

 What or who made the wolf "the wolf" back then? 

 What or who makes the wolf "the wolf" now?

Who was "the wolf" really? 

And who was, always, really "the wolf"?

And what is another's freedom, really - to someone lying to himself - but an instrument, invitation (and occasional obstacle) to cultism?

 

"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."

Yeah, it's hilarious how many, even today, somehow miss that,...

 

America's Smartest President

Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper -- alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.

In a letter sent from Monticello to John Adams in 1813, Jefferson said his "wee little book" of 46 pages was based on a lifetime of inquiry and reflection and contained "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."

He called the book "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Friends dubbed it the Jefferson Bible. It remains perhaps the most comprehensive expression of what the nation's third president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence found ethically interesting about the Gospels and their depiction of Jesus.

"I have performed the operation for my own use," he continued, "by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter, which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dunghill."

The little leather-bound tome, several facsimiles of which are kept at the Huntington Library in San Marino, continues to fascinate scholars exploring the powerful and varied relationships between the Founding Fathers and the most sacred book of the Western World.

The big question now, said Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, is this:

"Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, 'I only believe these parts?' "

"He was a product of his age," said Ferrell, whose upcoming book, "The Bible and the People," includes a chapter on the Jefferson Bible. "Yet, he is the least likely person I'd want to pray with. He was more skeptical about religion than the other Founding Fathers."

-- Louis Sahagun, giving us another example of why Jefferson is "The Man," in the Los Angeles Times.

Homeopathy: The Stupid European Pagan "Science" (That Doesn't Work)

"German writers and philosophers were developing the ideas of ’Naturphilosophie’ - a semi-mystical view of science and the world that underlies, for example, much of Goethe’s thought. It is almost certain that the young Hahnemann would have encountered these ideas at university, and though he does not refer to them explicitly in his writings their influence can be detected in his religious and metaphysical outlook. ’Naturphilosophie’, as expounded by its leading philosopher, Schelling, is based on a sense of the Divine as underlying the manifest universe and as giving form to it, but the nature of truth is to be apprehended by thought and intuition rather than through revelation. ’Naturphilosophie’, therefore, is deistic rather than theistic, pagan rather than Christian."

-- From Anthony Campbell's "Homeopathy In Perspective: Myth And Reality".