Reply #3: You may be right on Adams [View All]

[HiramAbiff]

But I don't think so.

God is an essence that we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.
-- John Adams, "this awful blashpemy" that he refers to is the myth of the Incarnation of Christ, from Ira D. Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion, quoted from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief

Numberless have been the systems of iniquity The most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy that ever was conceived by the mind of man was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandizement of their own Order They even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure ... with authority to license all sorts of sins and Crimes ... or withholding the rain of heaven and the beams of the sun; with the management of earthquakes, pestilence, and famine; nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine the flesh and blood of God himself. All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude....

--- John Adams, "A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law," printed in the Boston Gazette, August 1765

John Adams' biographer and the editor of his Works, his grandson Charles Francis Adams, wrote that he rejected, "with the independent spirit which in early life had driven him from the ministry, the prominent doctrines of Calvinism, the trinity, the atonement and election. . . ." And church-state scholar Greg Hamilton states that John Adams once castigated the idea of Christ's divinity as an "awful blasphemy."

In his book 2000 Years of Disbelief, James Haught describes John Adams as "another non-Christian president of the United States," and as a "Deist who rejected the divinity of Christ." Haught also notes that Adams told a friend that he respected lawyers but saw in the clergy the "pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces."



3 is 1 is 3 has never made sense to rationalists.