A reader called Quickwrit posted this comment about the clear intent of the Founding Fathers. Based on the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and their own writings, the Founding Fathers left no doubt about the role of religion in the new nation. They wanted the government neither to support it or to regulate it, and they wanted everyone to practice their religion without hindrance. They most certainly did not want a “Christian nation” or government subsidy of religion. These are the conditions required for freedom of religion.
Quickwrit wrote:
Freedom from religion
Right in the very First Amendment of our Constitution, our Founding Fathers outlawed religion in American government at any level. Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, primary author of our Declaration of Independence, explained that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was written to create “a wall of separation” between our government and any religion. The U.S. Supreme Court holds that the Establishment Clause means that “Neither a state nor the federal government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion or all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force…a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.”
Our Founding Fathers also wrote in Article VI of our Constitution that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
In short, our Constitution was written to remove all religion from our government at any level, while also allowing citizens to practice any religion they want. ANY religion.
Our Founding Fathers refused to even include any mention of God in our Constitution.
Why did our Founding Fathers do this?
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and other Founding Fathers and colonists everywhere hated the fact that they had been forced to join the official Christian religion of the British government, the Anglican Church. The penalty for not joining was that the church-controlled British colonial governments would tax their property to the point that would bankrupt them. Our Founding Fathers knew first-hand that a religion-based government led to persecution of anyone who did not share the beliefs of the official government religion. So, they constitutionally banned religion of any kind from every corner of our federal and state governments.
America’s key Founding Fathers — such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin — were NOT CHRISTIANS. They were DEISTS who had been forced to become members of a Christian church. They almost never even used the word “God” but instead used words like “Creator” or “Providence” to refer to what Deists consider to be the Supreme Being.
Thomas Jefferson, whom we honor as the author of our Declaration of Independence, was so greatly angered by the Christian claim that Jesus was God that Benjamin Franklin had to reel him in from publishing a scathing attack on Christianity. So, instead, Jefferson — who admired the social teachings of Jesus — sat down with a New Testament and cut out all references in it to Jesus being God. Then, he published the result as his Bible and it became popular throughout America. The Jefferson non-Christian social Bible also became the official Bible of Congress and for decades was given to each newly-elected member of Congress.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Founding Fathers were very wise. Based on what is going on with Christian religious organizations in the country their wisdom has proven to be right on the mark. Whatever brand of Christian religion organization there they have totally lost the point of what Christianity is supposed to be about. These organizations have lost the values and vertues of Christianity and should not longer call themselves Christians.
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They were also creatures of their times. They did not foresee, for example, utterly ignorant and stupid men and women standing for high office–the likes of Trump and Marjorie Tayler Greene, for example–and so they built into their system no guarantee that a person standing for such office would have even the most basic knowledge or ability to reason. That turns out to have been quite the mistake.
As for the virtues of Christianity, there were certainly some espoused by Yeshua of Nazareth, and Jefferson’s “Philosophy of Jesus” (not “Bible”) attempted to capture those. However, overall, I think, if one looks at what the Christian church did throughout history, one must conclude that mostly it left in its wake, here and worldwide, rivers of the blood of innocents–recurring genocides, pogroms, Crusades, Inquisitions against heretics, slaughter of indigenous nonbelievers, colonial extirpation, wars against all other nations (including the nations of Asia), and so on.
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Totally agree. I think it would be hard to find one war of any size that was not caused by one form of religion or another. The greed and lust for power of religious leaders of all faiths has lead to the deaths of millions of people and the destruction of countries and societies around the world.
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Well said, Bob. Religion is inherently divisive; yet, I respect right of people to worship as they wish. People should not have the right to impose their religious values on others, nor, IMO, spend public funds to forward the agenda of any particular religious group. What happened to a clear delineation between church and state?
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Agreed, RT, though I would choose an alternative for the word “respect” that does not have the connotations of approval in addition to the denotation of acceptance.
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Mr. Shepherd,
You occasionally are a rare thoughtful commenter on this blog, so it’s unfortunate that you have succumbed to anti-Christian bigotry of a type that you wouldn’t apply to, say, Islam. Christianity as practiced by the mass of humanity is a mixed bag, like all other religions. And political ideologies – e.g. Communism and Nazism – have collectively resulted in the deaths of far more innocent people than have traditional religions.
It’s true that many self-proclaimed Christians in their personal lives certainly didn’t and don’t act like believing Christians. But there are countless examples of Christians sacrificing their time, their money, and even their lives in witness to their faith. Just one example is the hundreds of Polish Catholic families who were murdered by the Nazis for sheltering Jews. Catholic hospitals giving free care to the poor. Pro-abolitionist Christians helping escaped slaves. And to this day millions of Christians worldwide without public notice volunteering in many different ways in the spirit of Jesus.
I am a very secular agnostic, but I am dismayed – often disgusted – by the appalling anti-religious bigotry that is a staple of this blog. Apparently Linda has many kindred spirits.
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I agree that there have been many wonderful persons who acted from Christian belief, and I have often, here, held up teachings by Jesus as admirable.. Unfortunately, we live in a time in which there is a great wave of Chrisitan fundamentalism that has almost entirely swamped one major political party, and it is difficult not to ascribe some of the root cause to persistent ancient superstition.
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But I hear what you are saying, Paula, and I shall try to be more measured going forward. I have explained here, in the past, that I am NOT an atheist and reject scentistic materialism. But that’s a whole other discussion.
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scientistic
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To be a nonbeliever in Christian mythology is to be called names (bigot), to be reviled, to be shunned, to be shut up and shut down. Often, throughout history, it has meant being kicked out of a school or profession, having one’s property taken, having ones works confiscated and banned and burned, being arrested, tried, imprisoned, or killed. Merely not believing in this stuff causes one to be accused of “anti-religious bigotry.” Now, explain to me again what is appalling.
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For a long, long time, Paula, having studied a lot of ancient religious texts and learned a lot about the history of religion, I thought that these ancient superstitions were silly. But I believed that as a matter of decorum, I should keep silent about my nonbelief in these. But now I see Leonard Leo and his Federalist Society providing the moronic Trump with names of potential judges and justices and thus stacking the court with True Believers who have taken away women’s rights to their own bodies. I see the same court paving the way for religious indoctrination of children with taxpayer dollars. I see several right-wing organizations doing massive Trump tours, taking their show from church to church across the United States and that this is the most extensive undertaking by any candidate yet in in the 2024 presidential race. It has become clear to me that the persistence of ancient superstition is one of the major reasons why the United States is so far behind the Social Democratic nations of Europe in so many ways. Our country is still in the grips of ancient superstition, and it’s time to throw it off these imaginings from the infancy of human cultures. The texts that they are based on promote offensive, antidemocratic ideas–extreme sexism and authoritarianism, for example. It is no accident that many of the leading figures in emerging American fascism are true believers. Fascism is upon us, wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
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Years ago, the great Harvey Milk gave his moving speech arguing that if you are gay, you must come out. For exactly the same reasons, I have come to believe that if you are a disbeliever in these ancient superstitions, you must come out, clearly. I think that the future of democracy might well depend upon young people throwing off such ancient superstition, which is being used to justify our precipitous slide into autocracy.
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Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.
–Romans 13:1-2
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These texts teach outdated and dangerous belief systems dating to between 3,500 and 2,100 years ago. It’s dangerous to teach that people should live their lives and fashion their governments based on them, just as it would be if we took, say, the ancient Norse sagas as our models of governance (there are rightwing groups in America today that claim to do just that). We live in a country in which six right-wing Catholics on the Supreme Court can uphold bigotry against LGBTQX persons. I think that in such a time, the right thing to do is to stand up and say, without equivocation, these people believe childish nonsense. Literal nonsense. Ancient superstition.
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It’s time for us to take these ancient writing as what they are–reflections of how primitive people, long ago, thought things worked, not as recipes for living and governance today. The young people of America are learning this. Europeans mostly have. Those are trends toward throwing off millennia of mind-forged manacles.
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There are no demons. There is no hell. There is no devil. There are no miraculous resurrections. It’s just fine for people to be homosexuals or to disagree with their rulers. We don’t have to think, anymore, like primitive people thousands of years ago. I understand why this nonsense persists, but aie yie yie. It’s the freaking 21st century. We no longer think that the earth is flat, with pillars that support a firmament in which the stars are stuck like raisins and that behind this is the primordial sea that God separated from the oceans, below, 6,000 years ago.
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And, Ms. Goodman, you need to check your numbers about the relative body counts of, say, Stalin’s purges and Homodor and, say, Christian colonialism worldwide. According to good historical estimates, at the time when European religious zealots arrived in the Americas, there were 65 million indigenous already there, 12 million in what is now North America. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were 1.2 million in all of the Americas and a little over 200,000 in North America. Let’s talk about the Mystic Massacre, shall we?
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One thing I can say for certain, finally throwing off that nonsense is the lifting of an enormous weight. Incredibly freeing intellectually and emotionally.
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The major religions are survivals from the infancy of our civilizations, from a time when we understood NOTHING about how anything worked. They are myths. They are like the folktales that say, for example, that the sea is salty because there is a magical mill grinding away on the sea floor.
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Bob Do you mean there’s not a magical mill grinding away on the sea floor? MTG
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Well, perhaps, like Russell’s teapot, we just haven’t found it yet.
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Bob About the mill grinding away at the bottom of the sea. . . my guess is that that submarine ran smack into it, and that’s why it imploded . . . YOU don’t know. MTG
(Where is Josh when you need him?)
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Haaaa!
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And if you are interested in actually thinking about, speculating about the answers to ultimate questions, looking to the ideas about how the world works of people who lived 3,500 years ago isn’t a very good idea, and you wouldn’t take those ideas at all seriously if you hadn’t been indoctrinated with them when you were too young to be skeptical. If you were even a little older, you would see that the idea of Original Sin, for example, or the Divine Sacrifice is extraordinarily primitive–primitive to the point of lunacy in a modern person.
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If you figure out that you have diabetes, you don’t say to yourself, well, gee, I need to check with folks 3,500 years ago to see how to deal with that. Same with the questions of philosophy. Where do we come from? What justifies belief? What makes for a good person or a good state? On what basis should we make ethical and political judgments? decisions about social roles and structures? What makes humans human? Where did language come from? How does consciousness work? We don’t say to ourselves about the deep structures and neurological and cognitive bases of language, oh, gee, I bet the answers, there, are in the Enuma Elish. or in Isaiah or in Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Francis Child’s English and Scottish Ballads. Accepting answers to such questions based on texts written thousands of years ago is like asking a fish how to build a car. It’s not going to get one anywhere.
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Consider the question, “Why is there anything?” This is a FASCINATING question–one that people have wondered about for as long as we have written records that are more than accounts of the stores in granaries. But if you say, we know from this ancient text that it everything was created by magic by a guy in the sky (or in its modern update, by some invisible entity), then POOF, there is no question. It has been answered. End of discussion. In other words, adherence to an ancient superstition about this question derails any thought about it. If one dares question the magical guy in the sky theory (or its modern version), one is labeled a bigot. END OF ANY FURTHER THINKING.
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So, I think that if you are actually interested in such questions, then you will not embrace answers to them predetermined by primitive peoples thousands of years ago.
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Especially given that there are hundreds and hundreds of variations on the ancient answers, each incompatible with the others, none with any actual claim upon our faculties of reason. It should be a clue to people that humans existed on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years before one tribe of them invented monotheism. The guy in the sky was waiting for what? This is the stuff of children’s stories–literally the same motifs found in fanciful children’s tales worldwide that no one is expected actually to believe. Princesses who sleep one hundred years? Guys who are resurrected after being dead for three days? Folk motifs. Found in thousands of thousands of incompatible versions throughout the centuries, none of them at all credible.
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These days, many who cling to the ancient superstitions have retreated into Vaguism. They can’t actually state any religion-specific proposition in which they believe–e.g., There is one God. He has a body like ours. He can, for example, walk in a garden. Press people on this and you get utter vagueness–well, I believe in a kind of energy . . . that sort of thing. Most folks in much of Europe have thrown over religion altogether, and a lot of churches stand empty. They look on us and shake their heads and can’t believe how gullible we are.
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My strong expectation is that the answers to those profound questions, when we stumble on them, will turn out to be far, far more interesting and beautiful and fulfilling than any of these silly old stories are–the difference between a croissant by a fine French baker and three-week-old commercial hotdog buns.
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Thank you, Paula. It’s sometimes hard to be a person of faith on here. Do NOT get me wrong– Christian Nationalism is TERRIFYING, but there are some of us who operate outside of that garbage. I will call out any person of faith that is a hypocrite, but it’s hard to have my faith bashed, although I mostly ignore it here.
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TOW,
I have a religious identity but I’m not religious. I respect all religions so long as they don’t try to convert or control me. I strongly believe in separation of church and state.
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It is interesting that in this sphere and this alone, we aren’t allowed to have spirited discussion and debate. Consider Behaviorism and Constructivism in Education. We think it perfectly acceptable for people to take strong stances for or against these and for there to be vigorous debate about them in the public sphere. We don’t think it terribly impolite to challenge them. We wouldn’t say, as a Behaviorist, I am extremely offended by this blog. We don’t think taking stances on these questions offensive. We don’t think that those who challenge such belief systems–such collections of interrelated propositions about how nature works–should be censored for being impolite and disrespectful. Why? Because we think with Milton that in a free interchange of ideas, the truth will out. That principle I respect. I do not think of myself as bigoted against religion. Rather:
I’ve spent a lifetime studying and thinking about philosophy and religion. I have come to conclusions based on that study and thought. And one of those conclusions is that ancient people who wrote texts that have become scriptures of major religions didn’t understand very much about how to go about answering the major questions of philosophy and science, such as where did we come from? how should we act and why? etc. And I think one should be able to discuss the reasons for coming to such a position because those reasons are foundational for other thinking.
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Paula missed a lot of memos. One is the research that shows Catholic hospitals serve no more indigent patients than other private hospitals. Paula likes the anecdotes about individual religious who sacrificed to save Jews and slaves. But, the research recently found in the Vatican archives and published in a book, tell us that Mussolini and Hitler had help from the institution and hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Only the blind, can ignore the history of Christian churches legitimizing slavery.
False perceptions about the political and charitable acts of churches compound the substantial problem in the US (a problem that the Pope acknowledges). The American Catholic Church advances the GOP agenda (e.g. USCCB’s amicus brief for Lorie Smith). State Catholic Conferences working in alignment with the Koch network are undermining public schools, women’s rights and the rights of people who are gay.
I am deeply offended by people who are unAmerican when they demand silence in response to an enemy that facilitates the enactment of social and economic regressive laws.
Religious people who don’t want to read the facts that make them uncomfortable are plentiful. Also, plentiful, are those who want a version of events that placates them. If those people are voting Democratic, they can’t be thrown out with the bathwater because their votes are needed to counteract the majority of the religious right who vote GOP.
The leaders of right wing churches use the church’s money and sophisticated political apparatus to defeat the causes of the people. The church members, some of whom defend the indefensible and some of whom, expect deference for religion, refuse to take ownership of the harm they cause, instead wearing shirts of victimhood.
Some authority figure can take their side but, the path to DeSantis’ version of America won’t be changed by an endorsement. There’s only one to way to alter the path. Erode the supporting structure that advances the right wing. At its center, is the USCCB and its political arm, the state Catholic Conferences.
Cover ups have a long history.
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Btw, Paula, taxpayers have made Catholic organizations the nation’s 3rd largest employer. That charity that you attribute to the Church is either outright funded through taxes or it reflects tax avoidance by wealthy people foisting privatization on the nation.
Research found there are parishes that generate more revenue through education vouchers than from the collection plates.
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Diane: I KNOW you respect everyone here. You’re not my concern. And I totally respect Bob and Linda. But the anti-religious tenor on here can sometimes be a bit much. But I respect your living room, Diane, and I know you are supportive.
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Diane and TOW As before, and if I may, I second TOW’s emotion about “tenor,” though of late, I have learned to better appreciate Bob’s viewpoint. CBK
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Thank you, TOW.
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Paula Goodman– “Catholic hospitals giving free care to the poor.” There is truth in that. I read this in the AMA’s Journal of Ethics: “It can be said in general… that Catholic hospitals provide a great deal of free or poorly compensated inpatient care and primary care services through clinics and medical outreach programs for the uninsured. Often, Catholic hospitals become known as a “provider of last resort” for uninsured and underinsured citizens.”
However, there is another side to Catholic hospitals that must be addressed– because it makes them part of the general problem outlined in Diane’s/ Quikwrit’s post. I did so under general comments [way below], to get more margin space.
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Bethree
Please cite the source about Catholic hospitals.
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National Library of Medicine, 11-8-2022, “Influence of not-for-profit hospital ownership…” Charity care at Catholic hospitals- 3.9%, other church affiliated hospitals 5.2%.
Health Affairs site, “Non-profit hospitals: Profits and cash reserves grow, charity care does not” (2022)
Lown Institute 9-4-2020, “Non-profit and for-profit hospitals provide similar levels of charity care.”
As we find more frequently, whitewashing manipulates. An added category, “community benefit” (a category separate from charity care) has been added to some research summaries which appears to be an attempt to elevate some hospitals in the standings- obvious reasons.
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Rewire News Group 6-24-2014
“Dispelling myths about Catholic hospital care…”
Fact: Catholic hospital charity care is at a rate below the average for all hospitals
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Years ago, the great Harvey Milk gave his moving speech arguing that if you are gay, you must come out”
Presumably that also applies if you are trans, including “trans-religious”.
So your logic is impeccable, Bob.
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Not at all sure what you are saying, SomeDAM.
https://prorhetoric.com/harvey-milk-every-gay-person-must-come-out/
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The term sex refers to one’s biological inheritance, which can be male, female, or intersex. And, of course, all males have some female sex hormons, and all females have some male ones. The term gender refers to acquired, learned, and almost exclusively outwardly observable phenomena–behaviors, such as dress, accessories, ways of walking and sitting and talking, activities undertaken, etc., and these depend on phenomena typically associated with a particular sexual group in a particular culture at a particular time and place. So, given that gender is a matter of outward expression, it is entirely a matter of being out. Whatever one presents as is one’s gender. So, no, I don’t think that this applies to being trans. Being trans MEANS being out about behaviors (gender phenomena) that are associated with persons of the opposite sex.
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I think that a lot of the fruitless debate and confusion on this issue on both the left and the right results from people not understanding/not being clear in their own minds about this distinction between sex (inherited characteristics) and gender (adopted characteristics).
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Wittenstein made a name for himself back in the early 20th century by claiming that a lot of the problems of philosophy disappear if one becomes clearer in one’s use of language. This led to what is known as the “linguistic turn” in 20th-century philosophy. I think that getting clear about what these terms mean goes a long way toward dissolving problems related to gender identity being debated in our culture today. Young people need to understand that they can be gender fluid or gender opposite without necessarily changing their sex, that these are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.
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BTW, there is a great book called The Black Book of Communism that details the atrocities committed by national Communist governments worldwide over the years. Such a book needs to be done for world religions: one that gives an exhaustive body count world religions. Ms. Goodman, above, is wrong. Religion has been responsible, over the millennia, for FAR MORE deaths and FAR MORE harm of other kinds than any political ideology ever has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_caetera
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudum_siquidem
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Requirement_of_1513
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The separation of church and state train left with the various rulings by SCOTUS granting tax dollars to private religious schools across America. Religions are losing followers and will continue to try to regain the lost tithing by controlling Congress.
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Nailed it, Arturo
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Well said, Arturo. I’m speculating here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if diminished congregations weren’t plumped back to solvency by establishing associated religious schools. Of course there are tons of them already, even in states that don’t yet have an “expanded” voucher program [i.e., beyond limited ESA’s for poorest &/or handicapped kids]. But more & more states are expanding vouchers in both amount & in family income that qualifies.
NC just passed their 1st voucher expansion, which is miserly compared to a FL or AZ. But it provides a $5k voucher for any income level. This will handily cover their many $3500/yr small conservative-Christian schools [which will no doubt be raising $tuition 😉 ], & most of the cost of a Catholic K-8. [& of course provide a $5k discount for wealthier families already paying private non-sectarian selectives on their own dime]. P.S., every student lost to a $5k voucher extracts $7500+ from its pubschool – the difference goes to $ needed to provide those discounts to families already paying for privsch…
Some families in these states want religious ed; some are just looking for smaller classes than in their local publics & are fine with whatever religious content as long as the 3 R’s are taught. Others are looking for “no black kids!”, & they’ll be happy as well. The overall effect will (as we’ve seen from stats) increase segregation, increase class size at local publics, and increase local publics’ share of most-expensive-to-teach students [SpEd & ESL—which voucher schools are free to reject], bringing them ever closer to bankruptcy.
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Beautifully argued, Ginny
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One gets a bit of the racism of slaveholder and abuser of the enslaved Thomas Jefferson in the concluding portion of the title that the gave his book:
The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, being Extracted from the Account of His Life and Doctrines Given by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; Being an Abridgement of the New Testament for the Use of the Indians, Unembarrased with Matters of Fact or Faith beyond the Level of their Comprehensions
Jefferson, he who lived like Croesus and professed, in his sexist way, the equality of “man.”
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But yeah, the current Repugnican mantra that ours was conceived as “a Christian nation” is ahistorical.
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And, ofc, he was lying when he said that his book was “for the use of the Indians.” He doubtless formulated his title in this way TO PROVIDE AN EXCUSE for having cut the divinity of Jesus from the text other than the fact that he did not believe in the divinity of Jesus. He was doubtless trying by this not-so-subtle means to ward off, peremptorily, the coming attacks on his irreligiosity.
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Bob Not sure about Jefferson’s fears about seeming “irreligious” to some. What is more clear to me in the reading of his surrounding documents is that, having read so much history, he was quite aware of the political power of uncivilized (tribal) religious thought and its danger to democracy. I take that from the explicit references to religion in our founding documents and the relationship of factions in a law-abiding political climate (in the Federalist Papers), and from his little gem of a letter to his nephew Skipwith, and other writings.
Perhaps he was trying to separate the divine aspects of Christianity (which by definition if kept would override the Constitution, the rule of law, and the freedom of religion) from the political aspects and, by doing so, keep the political intact, and law in power, by drawing what moral guidance he could from Jesus’ teachings, and so not go “cold turkey” politically and culturally. In this way, he could shore up the foundations of a newly secular culture while also distancing ideas of divinity from it. Happy Fourth. CBK
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Same to you, CBK. TJ offered a flimsy rationale for his book. Sounds like plausible deniability to me.
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Bob I had to laugh . . . because I’m “not sure” what you mean. Sorry to be such a dork, but would you explain briefly? Thanks, Catherine
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Jefferson was constantly worried about his own reputation, his own standing. He was about to go to press with a book in which he had reworked these ancient texts to remove from them any references to the divinity of Jesus. His reasons for having done this work is that he, personally, rejected the idea of divinity and the possibility of miracles, but he typically did not express these views baldly in public because he lived in a time when one could suffer extreme consequences for professing what others considered to be atheism. So, typically, in public, he hemmed and hawed. He would grab at notions like that of “god” meaning “natural law.” This was common in his day. So, he was about to go to press with this book that went further–that approved of the teachings of Jesus but cut out any suggestion that he was divine, but he gave it a title that suggested that he did so not BECAUSE HE THOUGHT JESUS WAS NOT DIVINE but because he was making the teachings of Jesus more understandable by Indians, with their limited ability to comprehend high matters like theology. So, by this means, he could, wink, wink, have his cake and eat it too–publish a book erasing the divinity portion of this Christian teaching while giving it a title suggesting a different reason for what he had done than “I don’t believe in the divinity of this guy, though I respect his teaching.” Plausible deniability.
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Bob Still dorky here; so don’t pay attention if you don’t want; but where are your sources for this Jeffersonian thinking? CBK
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“I am a Christian in the only sense in which he [Jesus] wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human [as opposed to divine] excellence, & believing he never claimed any other.” –Letter to Benjamin Rush
“The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and preeminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained.”
–Letter to John Adams
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Bob Thank you for supplying the quotes, which support what I wrote about Jefferson’s reasons for developing the Jefferson bible. CBK
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What he did was remove from the texts any references to miracles and to the divinity of Christ because he didn’t believe in those (not because he wanted to make the texts readable by Indians).
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Bob About writing for Indians . . . I think you are confusing my notes with someone else’s here. CBK
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CBK, I stated, up front, that Jefferson’s title is clearly an attempt to provide plausible deniability. You asked what I meant by that. I explained that he did this work because of what he believed, not in order to make these texts accessible to Indians. You didn’t accept that explanation, though God knows why. I don’t think you make much effort to follow the reasoning in my posts. I tried to answer your questions. Jefferson says in that one letter quite clearly that he accepts the teachings of Christ in so far as they are human. But not divine.
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Bob I was asking about your point that he cut and pasted the bible in order to protect his reputation. The rest of what you say about his view of Jesus and Christianity is supported in his writings. CBK
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I NEVER MADE THE CLAIM THAT HE CUT AND PASTED THE BIBLE TO PROTECT HIS REPUTATION. I DID NOT MAKE THAT CLAIM. NOWHERE DID I DO THAT.
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Bob I stand corrected . . . the argument then goes to the Why of the title. Again, if the reputation thing ABOUT THE TITLE is supported somewhere, I’m all ears. CBK
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But I did explain this, CBK. It was THE GENERAL CONDITION when a nonbeliever put something forward to the public at large–this sort of equivocation and provision for plausible deniability. Lucretius did the same thing in De rerum natura. It’s a book that presents the argument that all that exists is atoms and the void (a view I vehemently deny), but he felt he had to paste on, at the beginning, that invocation to Venus. Why, when this contradicts all the rest of his book? To save himself from the charge of impiety.
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Bob Sheesh. I already explained that I was looking for evidence, not speculation. But never mind. CBK
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Establishing that there was a Zeitgeist that lasted for centuries and certainly existed in Jefferson’s time IS evidence.
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I gave the examples of Lucretius, Descartes, Einstein, and Jefferson all doing the same thing: expressing their disbelief in ways that gave them an out. Evidence of a trend among nonbelieving thinkers over the centuries. And the argument seems to me obvious. Nonbelievers had really good reason to be cautious about what they said given that happened to them. After Emerson gave his Divinity School Address, there were calls in Boston newspapers to hang him. Because he had suggested that Jesus was making a claim for everyone–you are all sons and daughters of god–not for himself in particular.
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I thought when I provided a modern audience with Jefferson’s complete title, above, that that alone would be sufficient evidence, for the reason he gives is prima facie ludicrous–obviously not the real reason for his having made the book.
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I suspect that what Jefferson was trying to do with that “Philosophy of Jesus” (not Bible; Jefferson doesn’t call it that) is to say, “Look, you can have your Christian morality without the superstition.”
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My claim was that he tacked on that title in order to protect his reputation because he realized that people would consider his book impious.
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Bob And I merely asked how you knew that (“tacking on” the title for that reason) and found the answer unconvincing. If there is text to support that view, I’m all ears. CBK
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As I explained at length, it is obvious from Jefferson’s private correspondence that he did not believe in miracles and that he did not believe in the divinity of Christ. It is also obvious that his “Philosophy of Jesus” was an attempt to present Jesus’s philosophy without the miracles and the claim to divinity. I also explained, at length, that it was common for nonbelievers to do things like what Jefferson did with his title in order to protect themselves, to provide cover, as plausible deniability that they were out and out atheists. I gave the examples of Descartes and Einstein doing the same thing. Nonbelievers have always had this problem. It’s in the nature of things. If one dares express nonbelief, one is, typically, widely censured, and often in the most extreme possible terms, so in the past, many people, including Jefferson, tried to mitigate the damage beforehand.
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I am in perpetual moderation now. CBK
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I said that Jefferson’s belief was my own. I have to qualify that. Jefferson only once, to my memory, make the suggestion that Christ was making a claim for everyone, not just himself, when he spoke of his divinity.
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CBK, no comments by you are in moderation.
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Diane Thank you! CBK
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Jefferson’s view is my own. See this:
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and this:
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Bob Thank you for the links. But you are answering questions I did not ask. CBK
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Bob Gone to moderation. CBK
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This is getting ridiculous, CBK. Enough.
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Jefferson was extremely careful about what he would say in public, so one has to read him closely. The public pronouncements contain a lot of hemming and hawing, not outright denials. In order to deal with the cognitive dissonance resulting from what he had to believe in order to be accepted by his peers and his own lack of belief in the supernatural (e.g., in miracles and the divinity of Christ), he fell back on a Spinozalike reinterpretation of the term “God” as “natural law.” So, that in hand, he would blithely reference God in his public pronouncements.
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Einstein did exactly the same thing, but living at a later time, he was honest about doing that. he would say, for example, sometimes, flat out, that he did not believe in anything like a personal God but that he did believe in universal natural law, which one might think of as like reading God’s mind.
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Why all this equivocation on the part of famous thinkers with regard to religion? Well, the answer to that is obvious: throughout the centuries, people who were straight up about their disbelief were shunned, had their possessions confiscated, had their books burnt and banned, were arrested and tried and tortured and killed, by the followers of the Prince of Peace.
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Bob I’ll explain:
I just thought you might be able to provide something from Jefferson’s writings to support what you say about his thinking besides what we know about how people thought during Jefferson’s time, or he about his reputation.
I don’t doubt the different ways of thinking that were prevalent in that time period, or even that he probably feared those who thought differently about the country’s religious foundations. However, I also think that, without some specific writings, or even reputable historians’ arguments, what you say is speculative, at best and, even if true, certainly not enough to be the only thinking that went into the cut-and-paste version of the Jefferson bible.
You make it sound like he made all that effort just to protect his reputation? And, if we are to make reasonable guesses, which is all I’ve seen so far, based on his and other democracy-supporters’ writings at the time (as I suggested in my earlier note) mine would be that it was much more substantial than that, and that he was working out of a much higher horizon than is implied by merely protecting one’s reputation. CBK
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“he made all that effort just to protect his reputation”
I did not say that he made his cut and paste in order to protect his reputation. I said that he titled his book as he did in order to protect his reputation.
And please read those two passages from Jefferson’s letters more closely, CBK. My position here is not controversial. Most historians agree that Jefferson did not believe in miracles and did not believe in the divinity of Christ but, rather, strongly held the view that he was a man–a good man, but a man.
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Bob Thanks. Because you are you, I’ll look the other way. CBK
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You are kind, CBK. I suspect that you learned that from your Mom and Dad and from Yesha of Nazareth.
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Bob Doubtful. (You really do like to jump to conclusions.) But it just sort of showed up; and I’m not interested that much in having the last word, especially when most of the content is actually speculation anyway. CBK
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sigh
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Writers who didn’t buy Christian ideas had to do this for centuries. Descartes, for example, makes his famous argument from doubt and comes to a conclusion for the foundations of philosophy that leaves out God altogether, so, as an afterthought, he tacks on his own flimsy ontological argument for god’s existence, followed by the suggestion that a good god wouldn’t give him ideas that aren’t true, which utterly undermines and destroys his own primary argument, the Cogito ergo sum. Why would he do such a thing? Because otherwise, he would have been widely denounced as a heretic. So, he added at the end material enabling plausible deniability. Same phenomenon.
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Bob & CBK– I find these illuminations on Enlightenment philosophers’/ political actors’ take on religion fascinating, thanks for the insights. They seem to have been straddling a huge change in cultural outlook as best they could. It reminds me of the divide between the Iliad and the Odyssey—all supposedly written by one great mind. The great warrior Achilles who prized honorable death meets the innovating adventurer who prizes the vicissitudes of life– both recorded in an era when we were passing from oral to written history. The mid-to-late 18thC seems to have been likewise a reverberating passage in Western human civilization.
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They seem to have been straddling a huge change in cultural outlook as best they could. Oh yes!
Vastly different sorts of books, aren’t they? I think it odd that they were ever attributed to a single author, given these vast differences in conceptualization and structure. The Odyssey is almost novelistic in its treatment of the characters of Telemachus and Odysseus. Both are informed by the motivations of the individuals and pretty closely hew to their stories. And parts of The Odyssey are a very much episodic marvelous traveler’s tales woven together by what seems very much like a single intelligence. The Iliad is broader (Despite starting with the whole Wrath of Achilles bit, it seems to be more about the war as a whole than about a couple of main characters). And with regard to motivation, it is much weirder, much less modern than is the Odyssey. Characters do not seem to act from their own motivations so much as to be vessels for the actions of gods THROUGH them. This is the ancient Greek concept of the Ate–the spirit of the god that infuses the person and uses him or her as a vessel for carrying out the God’s will, not the man or woman’s PERSONAL, HUMAN will. The focus is not on the characters so much as on the broader story–what happens to nations because of how the gods choose to use humans. It seems to reflect much more primitive thinking. So, I suspect that they originated more than a hundred years apart and then were both retold for centuries by the same tellers.
The same is true of the Indian Iliad (the rambling story of an ancient battle), known as the Mahabharata, or Great War, versus the Indian Odyssey (the focused story of the actions of Rama to retrieve his stolen wife, Sita), known as the Ramayana. BTW, the retelling by William Buck of the Ramayana is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. His Mahabharata is pretty great, too.
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Bob—I am interested that you vehemently deny Lucretius’s “all that exists is atoms and the void.” Why? To me it is just another way of looking at reality—a sort of artistic interpretation, like Wyeth vs Picasso vs Rothko [to keep it brief], i.e., choose your palette and brushes and show me what’s in the human mind and what (if any) reality exists outside of the human mind…
I spend a lot of time sitting outside from a vegetation-screened spot, watching how other live animals view, react to, register what goes on around them. Dogs, who only see B&W but smell everything, deer who are visually impaired & “see” with their ears, chipmunks & ordinary birds (who knows exactly what they’re registering). I had a son whose mind worked like a computer: deficient in that perception was binary, yet prescient due to the speed of operation. Perhaps Lucretius was another odd human brain, whose POV adds, not subtracts, and should be included.
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Lucretius is very much in a line of thinking that runs down through the centuries to Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, who had a deterministic, materialist worldview famously formulated as follows: that if you had a capacious enough mind to know the positions and velocities of all particles, you could perfectly predict everything that would occur thereafter. But I have long believed the consciousness is NOT reducible to physical actions in the brain. That is, I have long rejected Physicalism. It seems to me something differing in kind, not in quality, from stuff. And as bizarre and inexplicable as consciousness is, I think we have to sit down before the facts like a small child, to borrow Huxley’s phrase, and accept that we have thoughts AND toes and that having the two things are very different kinds of things, more different than any other objects of our naming faculty are.
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I love, love, love what you have written here, Ginny–both that you have taken the care to be so observant and that you recognize and value the existences of differing Kinds of Minds. But I think that Lucretius’s materialism is wrong. That’s all I meant in saying that I vehemently reject it.
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See also
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And this:
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And this:
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My beagle, Beauregard, used to think me a great Idiot because I could not smell a rabbit 3 miles away. He had me pegged! He had 100 million sensory receptor sites in his nasal cavity as opposed to my 6 million.
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“All our endeavour or wit cannot so much as reach to represent the nest of the least birdlet, its contexture, beautie, profit and use, no nor the web of a seely spider.”
contexture: its “with texture,” or intricate braiding or weaving–a word I wish we hadn’t lost from our language
seely: silly
–Michel de Montaigne, Of the Caniballes, from the breathtakingly beautiful English translation by John Florio published in 1603
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I also very much appreciate the kindness of your POV, Ginny, and the lovely analogy that you used. a sort of artistic interpretation, like Wyeth vs Picasso vs Rothko [to keep it brief]. I have a tendency to express my views vigorously, and this can sometimes seem overbearing, as though I thought myself a know it all, which is so, so, so not the case.
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My view is that our science is still extremely primitive and that there is much that we don’t understand yet, that we don’t have the prostheses, yet, to give us the access to reality that would enable us to understand.
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Interestingly, Bob, in The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist suggests with interesting evidence that Descartes may have been schizophrenic.
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I really have to break down and buy this book despite its cost.
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My hesitation is related not only to the breathtaking cost of The Matter with Things but also to McGilchrist’s being a popularizer of notions about lateralization of brain function. While such lateralization does exist–the left being the seat of significant language functions not found int he right, for example–the differences between the two hemispheres tend to be drawn far more sharply in popular works on the subject than in the actual scientific literature on it.
As far as Descartes’s mental condition goes, have you read the Discourse on Method and the Meditations? These seem clear enough–hardly the ravings of a madman. Descartes is also famous, of course, for the introduction of Analytic Geometry, but there one encounters in the work itself, or so I have read (I haven’t read his La Géométrie myself), something quite bizarre. Mathematicians tend to strive toward clarity of exposition, but in this work, instead, Descartes is PURPOSEFULLY obscure and leaves a lot out, as though he wanted to HINT AT his own brilliance but not provide the reader with the tools to do what he has done. There is a lot of speculation about the perversity of that. Paranoid schizophrenia? Who knows. I haven’t studied this carefully. Descartes, btw, also held one major work back from publication because it embraced heliocentrism, and he feared condemnation by the church of the kind that Galileo experienced.
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Hello Bob,
McGilchrist absolutely is NOT, I repeat NOT!!! a “popularizer of notions about lateralization of brain function.” He categorically DENIES this and takes great pains to describe the intricacy of brain function and vehemently rejects and scientifically argues AGAINST the popular notion of lateralization. As for Descartes, that’s a big conversation. All I can say is that I think you would find his book and arguments quite striking and beautiful. 🙂
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Ah, good to know. This was a hesitation of mine. Thank you. I shall go ahead and bite the bullet.
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Once you’ve read it, Bob, I will be interested to know your impressions. Although, I don’t know if Diane’s blog will be able to take that conversation!!! 🙂
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haaa!
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Interestingly, knowing nothing of his work, I, too, have come to the notion that it might well be the case that consciousness is ontologically fundamental, as you will see if you read that essay “The Vast Unseen and the Vast Unseeable: Reconciling Belief and Nonbelief” that I linked to above.
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Bob—thanks for the context on Lucretius. The Zombies essay is great. It corresponds to my impatience with scientific pronouncements such as one I remember hearing decades ago: dreams are caused by random release of something-or-other from the brain stem. Which is doubtless just a little teeny part of some very complex process that even when completely understood will not explain the experience of dreaming, nor its role in “faring well.” My favorite line in your essay: “We are like a child, confined to a room throughout her life, looking through a particular window at a particular courtyard and taking that courtyard for the world.”
Just ordered that Montaigne essay en français! No doubt had to read an excerpt of it in college, but I regret to say my attitude toward ye olde French philosophers then was such that I had pet names for each [DesCrappes, Pissecal, etc].
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Haaaa!!!!
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Thank you so much, Ginny! Very much appreciate your comments. Montaigne! Oh lord, there’s some great stuff! Here, a take on dreams, with some necessary background on storytelling, first:
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Bob,
Your comment on lateralization got me thinking a bit more, and I just wanted to clarify that McGilchrist argues against many of the popular notions of what each hemisphere does. But his book IS about hemisphere difference and HOW each hemisphere does what it does. That is more important than WHAT it does. It’s a bit complicated. He includes a plethora of scientific information about the differences of the brain hemispheres. Further, he does not argue that the brain gives rise to consciousness. What is truly beautiful is the way he discusses the implications of brain hemisphere difference in our lived experience. Even more interesting to me is that he posits that “the nature and structure of the brain must be reciprocally related to the nature and structure of consciousness.” That’s fascinating to me because it implies that consciousness and matter are two sides of the same coin!! One that our friend Jung spoke of right at the beginning of the discovery of quantum mechanics (synchronicity!) Anyway, I do hope you enjoy the book.
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Hi Bob,
In response to your comment that consciousness may be ontologically fundamental…do you know the work of Bernardo Kastrup and the Essentia Foundation? Some interesting stuff there. His video series on Analytic Idealism is really good.
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/analytic-idealism-course/
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/author/?user_id=12
Mamie
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No, Mamie. I don’t. Thanks for the links.
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Mamie, these links are requiring that I change my browser privacy settings in ways that are invasive. This is the kind of thing that extremely iffy/suspicious websites do. Your take?
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I found their Youtube channel, which doesn’t require this kind of privacy violation.
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But that’s a BIG red flag.
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Yes. You can get them on YouTube, too. Also Bernardokastrup.com has no privacy changes.
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It’s interesting to me that Kant nailed the fundamental insights here almost 300 years ago. What a mind he had!
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Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia was just reopened yesterday after a fire set by an arsonist on Christmas eve more than a year ago. Carpenter’s Hall was the host to the First Continental Congress. It was restored to its original design and furnishings. It is much visited today as it is in the heart of Old Philadelphia, the birthplace of our Democracy, the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
Perhaps its renewal could be a symbol of a much needed renewal of our shared values and the original intent and meaning of the Constitution and all of the Amendments along our way. Our founders were not perfect people but they lit the spark for the path toward a more perfect union. They knew what they did would need to be improved upon along the way. They knew it would not be easy.
I believe there are far more good people in America than not so good people. The path to success is paved with many stones of failure. So today, let’s just celebrate the good and share the hope that we all can share.
I love Old Philadelphia and Independence National Historical Park and walk through it often. It is filled with symbols of who we really are.
https://www.ushistory.org/tour/carpenters-hall.htm
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I was happy to see Philly protest The Moms for Liberty event, but I didn’t see any coverage about it on the national news. In contrast, corporate news had lots of coverage on the M4L screaming at and threatening school boards.
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Assume for a moment there was intent to hold “religion” as a foundation somewhere in the new country. Race and gender certainly had their places defined at the time. Do we need an amendment to include all religions and no religion?
America has changed. Evolved. Grown. Opened it’s doors well before the 21st century version. But – – don’t dare use the words “diversity” and “inclusion” in schools.
The GOP crowd are as disrespecting of religion as they are of their constituents – they put religion in the “culture war” category. Stir up the base with their pre-determined (not pre-destined) “beliefs.”
What we see like their other “values” issues – they “do as I say, not as I do” – – What do they do on Saturday or Sunday mornings – or Oaths to office? Go inside, cross their fingers behind their backs, and then go out into their version of the world?
Hypocrisy and Gerrymandering 1. America 0.
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I think it is a very shaky platform that is built on what one man thinks another holds deep within his heart. We cannot be completely sure of what a person believes, even if we watch the individual swear in church his fealty to the stated ideals of the church. Jesus said this another way: not every one who says “lord, lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven.
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He was a smart cookie, that Jesus.
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Well said, Roy. Precisely the reason we should not be building laws around what a person supposedly “believes,” period—whether religiously or otherwise. Laws should simply be about what works best for the public good of society.
We decide as a group that “marriage/ family” stabilizes society. We evolve to a point where we recognize that “marriage/ family” doesn’t have to = a heterosexual couple with natural-born children; it is equally stabilized by any two consenting adults and the children they commit themselves by law to raise. That enlightenment helps us tame/ include the 10% other-than-heterosexual couples who also want nothing more than the emotional stability of family.
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The Foundering fathers should have just said “Religion of all shapes and forms shall be kept out of government entirely”.
Then there would not have been any room for misinterpretation.
If they wanted to provide for free exercise, they could have started a free National health club.
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final paragraph- I’m laughing
Was spandex invented in the 1770’s?
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SDP: Haaaaa!!!!
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Happy 4th, should be celebrating this for a month not pride month.
Founders were very clear on having a SMALL government not this large insane one we have now. They also wanted people to serve only for a little amount of time, not like Pelosi, Feinstein, Waters, Mcconnell.
Clearly understood freedom of speech not censoring! right to bear arms knowing the government would try and take them away for tyranny. I agree all guns should not be sold to public.
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Freedom of speech. Interesting. Like having the state determine what can be taught and who can work as a professor as in DeFascist’s Flor-uh-duh?
BTW, I agree with you that in a sense, every month is pride month. Get over it, Josh. Your archaic POV is not shared by the generation coming up. They find it appalling.
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Reminded me of a great song by a high school classmate of Lily Allen:
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GREAT tune!
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Psychologists speculate that people writing at blogs who have views like Josh’s are psychopaths. The commenters get off on their perception that they are harming others with their comments.
If that’s not true of Josh, the curiosity is why he would want to interact with the world to show his opinions are worthless. For example, why would he write Harris is the worst VP in history when an internet search would provide him with a source and he could make a credible comment instead?
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What he said
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Josh—haven’t seen any Founders’ writings on “small government,” but do link cites if you have any. Population of US in 1791 was 4million. Today it’s 330 million. Is govt more than 83x bigger today?
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Ginny, I bet government is more than 83x as big, but it has far more functions than the government in 1791. Social Security, Medicare, the military, the national parks, environmental protection, etc. Which of these should be cut?
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You still had to get that “not Pride Month” thing in there.”
Ever wonder why there are all these “Months” but no “White Guys” Month?
We have…
Black History Month
Women’s Day and Women’s Month
Hispanic Heritage Month
Disabilities Awareness Month
Asian Pacific Heritage Month
Filipino Heritage Month
There are numerous days and months dedicated to particular religions-“in America” months
There are dozens of awareness raising months dedicated to diseases and illnesses, safety, food groups, livestock, professions, and many others. (There’s a National Reading Month and National Poetry Month but they are at risk).
The Founders, the Framers, and even the Post-wars leaders left room to expand on the America they knew to include and respect people who are different from one another and things yet to be discovered or uncovered.
Still, we need to have all these months for the purposes of raising public awareness on an array of topics and peoples and educating the public on differences in people.
Without a restrictive Constitution and a definition of “American,” the Framers had in mind the need for a little empathy or “walk-in-their-shoes” perspectives. Heck we even have tv specials for all that and… wait for it… WORKPLACE AND EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS programs and book groups and trainings to illustrate our DIVERSITY and need for INCLUSION.
So what’s up with all these books and campaign speeches about “Being Manly!” and Make America the Fifties Again.
It definitely explains their fear of diversity and inclusion programs and commercials (except beer now) celebrating those months.
Fear not. Maybe they will propose a month just for them since they’re feeling poked and like they’re not sitting at the cool kids table anymore.
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It’s not pretty to explain the average, male GOP voter.
The policies of the GOP increase his reason for
grievance which he acts upon in self-destructive ways. It’s seen in his attacks against women and Black people but, it’s also, turned inward. Three out of 5 gun deaths are suicide. Men kill themselves by guns at about 7 times the rate as women.
GOP policies and talking points make men vulnerable.
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Now we know why the GOP [and some Dems] don’t want to fund public schools! They don’t want to promote intelligence and have intelligent voters.
Let us by wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties.
—James Monroe
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I love that quote! That is exactly why in Pennsylvania we put in our state Constitution that the legislature must provide for a “thorough and efficient” system of public education. “Efficient” meant “effective.” Its purpose was to enable all of our citizens to participate and be productive in our democracy.
Our Commonwealth Court recently ruled in our fair funding lawsuit that the present way that our legislature is funding our public schools is unconstitutional because it creates inequities for the poorer school districts. Our schools are largely funded by real estate taxes in each separate school district.
The plaintiff districts testified that they can not afford to hire reading specialists for those who need them.
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Linda often covers the bases here on the RC Church’s largely successful lobby for charter (and now voucher) schools, but I wanted to put in a word about Catholic hospitals– spurred by Paula Goldman’s kudos to them for providing free service for the poor. That is mostly true, to their credit. But they are very much part of the religious intrusion on our public goods, using tax support to provide health services that are limited by their religious convictions.
According to a WaPo 10/10/22 article, Catholic hospitals control 1 in 7 US hospital beds [some sources say 1 in 6]. “The role of Catholic doctrine in U.S. health care has expanded during a years-long push to acquire smaller institutions… Four of the nation’s 10 largest health systems are now Catholic… The 10 largest Catholic health systems control 394 short-term, acute-care hospitals, a 50% increase in two decades. In AK, IA, SD, WA and WI, 40 % or more of hospital beds are in Catholic facilities.” The article lists several ongoing mergers/ acquisitions that will continue to limit reproductive services— including in NYS & CT.
“The Catholic health-care facilities follow directives from the USCCB that prohibit treatment it deems ‘immoral’” including vasectomies, tube-tying, contraception, abortion—which can limit treatment options for obstetric care during miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. A consultant to USCCB says “The directives are not just a collection of dos and don’ts. They are a distillation of the moral teachings of the Catholic Church as they apply to modern health care. As such, any facility that identifies as Catholic must abide by them.”
“The directives were updated in 2018… to ensure that Catholic doctrine prevails after mergers and acquisitions… They limit options for referring patients to secular facilities …employees must not ‘manage, carry out, assist in carrying out, make its facilities available for, make referrals for, or benefit from the revenue generated by immoral procedures.’” “…Interpretation of the directives varies among hospital ethics committees. But decisions ultimately rest with the local bishop, who is to be kept informed…”
Catholic hospitals, like most US hospitals, are tax-exempt non-profits, so we’re all supporting them financially despite their limited reproductive care. As another, admittedly biased source [Catholics for Choice] puts it: “Unlike other medical facilities and health systems, …Catholic hospitals lobby federal and state governments to carve out huge exceptions in federal prohibitions against discrimination. By using their status as religious nonprofits to refuse care to the LGBTQIA+ community and those in need of abortions or contraception, Catholic hospitals have succeeded in having their cake and eating it too. These institutions rely on government funding while defying federal and state bans on discrimination.”
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Thank you for echoing the concern.
Comparison of public hospital indigent care vs. Catholic hospitals?
The same forces privatizing schools are working to take away veterans hospitals and public hospitals.
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