Thomas Jefferson: Quotes on Christianity and god

Many Christians today are so ignorant they imagine that any time anyone uses the word "god" they mean the personal Christian god that so many American Christians believe in. They seem to be unaware that the term "god" can have countless other meanings - some of which have nothing at all in common with their own rather extreme concept of god.

Not to even mention that there are millions of other gods in other religions throughout human history. Some religions, like Buddhism, have no god at all. Their concept of Ultimate Reality is basically Consciousness itself, not a being that is separate from you.

This confusion in the minds of many Christians has caused some of them to claim that men like Thomas Jefferson were Christians according to their own idea of what that should mean. But Jefferson was clearly NOT a Christian in that sense. His idea of "god" resembled that of the god of deism, or Nature's god. Here are a few quotes that clearly show Jefferson did not share the beliefs about god that the typical fundamentalist Christian does today:

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
- Thomas Jefferson



Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.
- Thomas Jefferson

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
- Thomas Jefferson

We find in the writings of his biographers ... a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications.
- Thomas Jefferson (referring to the New Testament gospels)

 That sect had presented for the object of their worship, a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.
- Thomas Jefferson (referring to the god of the Jews under Moses)

His [Calvin's] religion was demonism. If ever a man worshiped a false god, he did. The being described in his five points is ... a demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious, attributes of Calvin.
- Thomas Jefferson (referring to the god of Reformation leader John Calvin)

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] 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.
- Thomas Jefferson (referring to the wildly different depictions of Jesus by the New Testament writers) 

[Creeds] have been the bane and ruin of the Christian church, its own fatal invention, which, through so many ages, made of Christendom a slaughterhouse, and at this day divides it into castes of inextinguishable hatred to one another.
- Thomas Jefferson

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God.
- Thomas Jefferson

[Quotes from source 1, source 2, source 3]