The (Masonic)
Nation – United States of America.
Continued
from Earlier Masonic Influences in USA
The following profiles demonstrate
the commitment of the most prominent and influential founding fathers to
Freemasonry, deism and/or theism.
Thomas
Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson, a
Deist, wrote the Declaration of Independence, which opens with a statement of
rights deriving, not from the God of Holy Scripture, but Nature's God and the
Natural Law.
"When in the Course
of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political
bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of
the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's
God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires
that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
Compare the above with
seating arrangement –
“His masters Place ?? ..
… …. .
Why is he placed
there ?? .. … … ….. .. … …. .”
Deism links not only Franklin and
Washington, but also Thomas Jefferson as well – although the available evidence
suggests that he was not a Freemason. Jefferson created his own personal Bible
from the New Testament, by omitting the supernatural sections and leaving only
the philosophical teachings intact. This unique compilation became known as the
‘Jefferson Bible’ – in the early 1900s approximately 2,500 copies were printed
for the United States Congress.
In The Jefferson
Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus, Jefferson describes his views of Jesus
Christ, the Christian religion, and his own religious beliefs. In a Syllabus
which he appended to his Bible, he compared the teachings of Jesus to those of
the earlier Greek and Roman philosophers, and to the religion of the Jews of
Jesus' time. The following excerpt is from a letter discussing the Syllabus. Of
significance is his statement, "...(Jesus) preaches the efficacy of
repentance towards forgiveness of sin; I require counterpoise of good works to
redeem it..."
"But while this
syllabus is meant to place the character of Jesus in its true and high light,
as no impostor Himself, but a great Reformer of the Hebrew code of religion, it
is not to be understood that I am with Him in all His doctrines. I am a
Materialist; he takes the side of Spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of
repentance towards forgiveness of sin; I require counterpoise of good works to
redeem it, etc., etc. It is the innocence of His character, the purity and
sublimity of His moral precepts, the eloquence of His inculcations, the beauty
of the apologues in which He conveys them, that I so much admire; sometimes,
indeed, needing indulgence to eastern hyperbolism. My eulogies, too, may be
founded on a postulate which all may not be ready to grant. Among the sayings
and discourses imputed to Him 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. I separate, therefore, the gold from the
dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of
some, and roguery of others of His disciples. Of this band of dupes and
impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corruptor of the doctrines
of Jesus. These palpable interpolations and falsifications of His doctrines,
led me to try to sift them apart. I found the work obvious and easy, and that
His past composed the most beautiful morsel of morality which has been given to
us by man. The syllabus is therefore of His doctrines, not all of mine. I read
them as I do those of other ancient and modern moralists, with a mixture of
approbation and dissent..."
While historians point out that
there is no evidence to tie Thomas Jefferson officially to any Masonic
organization, it is a matter of fact that he had great sympathy for the cause. In
a letter to Bishop James Madison in 1800, Jefferson relayed his thoughts on
Adam Weishaupt and his much-maligned Illuminati group. In what amounts to a
defense of both Masonry and Weishaupt’s Illuminati, against the conspiracy
charges laid by the writers Barruel and Robison, Jefferson’s allegiances
clearly lie with the Utopian and Masonic ideals rather than Church and
monarchies:
[Weishaupt of Illuminati] is among
those…who believe in the indefinite perfectibility of man. He thinks he may in
time be rendered so perfect that he will be able to govern himself in every
circumstance so as to injure none, to do all the good he can, to leave
government no occasion to exercise their powers over him… Weishaupt believes
that to promote this perfection of the human character was the object of Jesus
Christ. That his intention was simply to reinstate natural religion, and by
diffusing the light of his morality, to teach us to govern ourselves. His
precepts are the love of god & love of our neighbor. And by teaching innocence
of conduct, he expected to place men in their natural state of liberty and
equality. He says, no one ever laid a surer foundation for liberty than our
grand master, Jesus of Nazareth. He believes the Free Masons were originally
possessed of the true principles and objects of Christianity, and have still
preserved some of them by tradition, but much disfigured.
…As Weishaupt lived under the
tyranny of a despot and priests, he knew that caution was necessary even in
spreading information, and the principles of pure morality. He proposed
therefore to lead the Free masons to adopt this object and to make the objects
of their institution the diffusion of science & virtue…This has given an
air of mystery to his views, was the foundation of his banishment, the
subversion of the Masonic order, and is the color for the ravings against him
of Robison, Barruel and Morse, whose real fears are that the craft would be
endangered by the spreading of information, reason and natural morality among
men…if Weishaupt had written here, where no secrecy is necessary in our
endeavors to render men wise and virtuous, he would not have thought of any
secret machinery for that purpose.
Jefferson was the primary author
of the Declaration of Independence, and as well as being the third President of
the United States also served at various times as Vice-President, Secretary of
State and ambassador to France. During his travels to France he accompanied his
good friend Benjamin Franklin to the ‘Nine Sisters’ Masonic lodge. Many of his
closest associates and confidantes were Freemasons.
Thomas Paine
It is widely
believed that Paine was a Freemason. After his death an essay was published,
said to be a chapter from Part III of Age of Reason, titled “The Origins
of Freemasonry”. Whatever his official status was, Paine certainly had access
to information about the Craft:
The Entered Apprentice knows but
little more of Masonry than the use of signs and tokens, and certain steps and
words by which Masons can recognize each other without being discovered by a
person who is not a Mason. The Fellow Craft is not much better instructed in
Masonry, than the Entered Apprentice. It is only in the Master Mason’s Lodge,
that whatever knowledge remains of the origin of Masonry is preserved and
concealed.
Paine believed that Masonry had a
different origin than is stated in the myths of the Craft. He promoted his own
view that Freemasonry was derived from the remnants of the Druidic religion,
which was the most recent culture to bear a line of mystical knowledge which
also passed through the hands of the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians and Chaldeans.
And ultimately, according to Paine, Masonry was based on the worship of the
heavens, and in particular, the Sun.
Paine claimed that the veil of
secrecy which Masons worked under was in order to avoid persecution by the
religion which took over the worship of the Sun – Christianity:
The natural source of secrecy is
fear. When any new religion over-runs a former religion, the professors of the
new become the persecutors of the old. We see this in all instances that
history brings before us…when the Christian religion over-ran the religion of
the Druids in Italy, ancient Gaul, Britain, and Ireland, the Druids became the
subject of persecution. This would naturally and necessarily oblige such of
them as remained attached to their original religion to meet in secret, and
under the strongest injunctions of secrecy…from the remains of the religion of
the Druids, thus preserved, arose the institution which, to avoid the name of
Druid, took that of Mason, and practiced under this new name the rites and
ceremonies of Druids.
Paine’s enmity against
Christianity has meant that to a large extent, his role in the independence of
the United States has been swept under the proverbial carpet. Theodore
Roosevelt inaccurately called Paine “a dirty little atheist” (being a Deist,
Paine actually did believe in a supreme being), and in 1925 Thomas Edison
conceded that “if Paine had ceased his writings with The Rights of Man
he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures
of the Revolution…The Age of Reason cost him glory at the hands of his
countrymen.”
Thomas Paine, published his pamphlet "Common Sense" in
January of 1776, which turned the tide of public opinion in favor of declaring
independence. Paine's arguments against all forms of monarchy dissolved any
lingering attachment to Great Britain. On July 4, 1776, the Continental
Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence declaring the colonies free
and independent states. Although Paine quoted Scripture to denounce the concept
of monarchy, his later work, Age of Reason, is a treatise on the implausibility
of the Bible and the irrationality of Christianity. Paine believed in one God,
but rejected all religions, saying:
"My own mind is my
own church." His pamphlet, Origin Of Free-Masonry, proposed that Masonry's
embodiment of the sun worship of ancient Druidism was a legitimate alternative
to Christianity. He notes that Freemasonry's god, "...Osiris and Isis, theologically
represented the Supreme Being and universal Nature
Born and bred in England, Paine
didn’t move to the colonies until his late thirties, only a matter of years
before the Declaration of Independence. He emigrated on the advice of Benjamin
Franklin, whom he had met in London. Barely a year after arriving, he published
the massively influential Common Sense on January 10th 1776, which is
said to have sold more than 600,000 copies in a population of only three
million. His words inspired George Washington to seek the route of independence
from Great Britain, and Thomas Jefferson partly based the Declaration of
Independence upon Paine’s statements. Paine also has the honor of being the
person to suggest the name of the United States of America.
This revolutionary thinker was
sentenced in absentia in Great Britain for sedition, and despite his support
for the French Revolution in his Rights of Man, was imprisoned and sentenced to
death by the revolutionaries for arguing against the execution of Louis XVI.
Miraculously, his life was spared when the executioner marked his door
incorrectly. Many Americans would be surprised to know that the man who coined
the name of the United States, and had such a profound impact upon its
independence, had strong feelings against Christianity. In his Age of Reason
he wrote:
The opinions I have advanced…are
the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and
the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account
of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of
God, and of salvation by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions,
dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty; that the only true
religion is Deism, by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God,
and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called
moral virtues.
We have seen that a number of the
Founding Fathers of the United States were ambivalent, if not downright
hostile, towards Christianity.
Kaps.
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