“Clipping the Wings of Angels”, Ted Cruz's Senior Thesis
documentcloud.orgIt's a hard read. The scans are bad and it reads like a bible lecture. IMHO Lot of "straw men" in there. Paints the founders as being seriously religious (Jefferson was not religious) and the thesis is incomplete. Only goes to page 48 and it's about a 100 pages
> Throughout his life Jefferson was intensely interested in theology, religious studies, and morality. Jefferson was most closely connected with Unitarianism. He was sympathetic to and in general agreement with the moral precepts of Christianity, believed in an afterlife and in the active involvement, or guidance, of God in the affairs of mankind
That's how it looks to be not religious at all, I suppose.
I site these references:
"The whole history of these books (i.e. the Gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."
Source: Letter of Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 24, 1814.
"The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God, like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs".
Source: Thomas Jefferson, Works, Vol. IV, p. 360.
"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent."
Source: Letter of Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789.