Christian Monster

“The Christian god can be easily pictured as virtually the same as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of the people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.” [letter to his nephew Peter Carr]

This quote is so outrageous and does such damage to the foolish concept of Christianity that I want to be absolutely sure it is genuine. I have done considerable internet research, but am still in doubt as to its authenticity.

I found and checked about 20 different websites that have the quote, but none of them states when Jefferson wrote the letter (year, month, and day) to his nephew Peter Carr, or where he was at the time that he wrote it. The more information you have like that, the easier it is to find an official source for the quote. I checked the Snopes urban legend website, and they have nothing on this particular quote. Also none of the 20 websites with this quote said anything about its possibly being bogus.

Thomas Jefferson wrote about 18,000 letters during his lifetime, beginning around 1760 when he was 17 and ending in 1826, when he died at the age of about 83. I have no idea how many of the 18,000 have been preserved, let alone made available on the Internet. The University of Virginia, which Jefferson founded and which has more incentive than any other academic institution to find and preserve his original works, has about 1,700 documents of his with parts of their text available online. I found about 40 letters on their website that he wrote to Peter Carr during the 66 years when he was actively writing letters. This website does not have the entire letters in searchable form online. They have another data base of 9,000 online quotes from these 1,700 writings of Jefferson, and I checked this data base for the word “monster”. Only five such quotes were found, and none of them was from any letter to Peter Carr.

I found a Dutch website with the complete text from a large number of Jefferson’s letters, but they only had three that he wrote to Peter Carr. I searched all three of these for the word “monster”. Again no hit.

The bottom line is that I have no proof that the quote is genuine. On the other hand, I have also not found any proof, and not even a claim, that it is bogus. Since if it were bogus it would be of such great advantage to Xtians to refute this quote and since I have found no such refutation, I believe the quote is genuine. On the other hand, since it is such a powerful anti-Christianity quote, I would have expected to see more Internet articles from anti-Christians, atheists, and other revisionistic unbelievers quoting and promoting it.

It would be nice if all 18,000 of Jefferson’s letters were available online with machine-searchable text, but such is not the case. This is one of the problems facing a serious researcher into historical accuracy; namely, the lack of access to a readable copy of all original source documents that are now 200 or more years old.

Whether Jefferson did indeed write these words in a letter to Peter Carr, the contents of the quote certainly ring true from everything else we know about Christianity, other ancient religions, and the historical results of nations’ believing in the Biblical fables upon which Christianity is based. The fruits of Christianity have been the adoption of this religion by about one billion people today, most of whom do not sincerely and literally practice the teachings of Christ, especially those given in the Sermon on the Mount. Most of the one billion Christians today are nominal Christians only. They give lip service to Christ and do whatever they please. They call him Lord but do not do what he said to do and instead they do what he said not to do. So today we have close to one billion people who are not real Christians but claim to be. Many of them may have been rendered more compassionate towards other people because of what they believe to be Christ’s teachings, but they could just as easily have been rendered more compassionate by following the teachings of Buddha, Confucius, Islam, Mithraism, or Isis and Osiris. Certainly the global increase of compassion is a worthy goal, but Xtianity does not have a monopoly on such gentle teachings.

Another historical result of Christianity has been the enslavement of Europe beginning with Constantine’s edict enforcing the Christian religion throughout the Roman Empire and ending with the Renaissance. As people began to think more and more for themselves and less and less according to the dictates of their local priest or the Pope, Europe and its colonies all over the world have become more and more prosperous and highly educated. The world no longer lives in a Dark Age with near-universal serfdom, poverty, illiteracy, superstition, and ignorance.

Another long-term fruit of Christianity has been the continual bloodbath in Europe as nation after nation has waged war on one another for centuries, always invoking the name of the Lord in order to whip up popular support for the masses to provide the cannon fodder and for wealthy power-lusters to provide the funds and military leadership. Most of these wars were confined to Europe, but some of them spilled over onto other continents, like the Crusades and both World Wars of the 20^th century.

So the bottom line of 2,000 years of Christianity’s being given a shot at helping humanity as it has been imposed over more and more nations is exactly what we would expect from a cruel, vengeful, capricious, and raging three-headed monster – death, destruction, squalor, poverty, ignorance, slavery, stupidity, disease epidemics, and a lifetime of hopeless misery for most believers at the bottom level. What does it take to believe in such a system? You have to be either a fool (i.e., a true believer in the empty superstitions, or someone incapable of learning anything from history) or a hypocrite, which is what all the Christian leaders have been. They know the system is evil, corrupt, monstrous, fraudulent, empty, and based on lies, yet they pretend it is true so they can be at the top of the food chain, wield power over the masses, and reap the financial windfall when large numbers of people are hoaxed into donating part of their wealth to their religious leaders out of fear, intimidation, and stupidity.

It is obvious that Christianity has been an utter failure to bring peace and prosperity to the world. Christian believers and apologists counter this accusation by saying that true Christianity (i.e., the pure teachings of Christ) has never been tried. I agree with their counter-argument. But I counter their explanation by asking them why. WHY HAS CHRISTIANITY NEVER BEEN TRIED? And when will it ever be tried? The fools and hypocrites who practice Christianity have had 2,000 years now to get it right. And it is still wrong. It still doesn’t work, and it still has never been tried. So quit using that for an excuse. If Christianity is such a great belief system, why not try it somewhere? I think it should be obvious that if you really think about the true teachings given in the sermon on the mount, you will find that they are just as impossibly unworkable as pure Marxism-Leninism and Communism were in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, and all other nations where a utopian belief system has been forced on masses of people who were incapable of obeying the belief system. Pure Christianity IS UNWORKABLE. But brutal, fake Christianity is workable. What you do instead is wage war, enslave and murder those opposed to you, kill, butcher, rape and plunder OTHER PEOPLE who are not Christians, and pretend that you are obeying the sweet little baby Jesus who told us all to love one another. So the masses delude themselves into thinking they are Christians while the hypocritical leaders use the foolishness of the masses to stay in power.

Why was Communism unworkable, and why is Christianity just as unworkable? Because they are both based on the false belief that naturally selfish human nature can be educated somehow into becoming that which it is not – naturally unselfish. Communism decreed that if you needed X amount of money, food, clothes, etc., to survive but yet you were somehow able to produce far more than X for yourself, then you should willingly give all your surplus to the others who were not able to provide X for themselves. If you continue doing that for very long, you will start to lose all your incentive to produce even the X amount you need, let alone any more than that. And if the others who are receiving your surplus continue receiving it for very long, they will lose all their incentive to try to produce anything at all. So pretty soon no one is producing anything. Also Communists thought you could improve yourself by studying the teachings of Karl Marx. His ideas have been proven worthless by the national collapse of the Soviet Union and the whole international Communist movement.

The same happens in Christianity. Christianity tells us that human nature can be improved by studying the teachings of Jesus and receiving continual doses of God’s Holy Spirit. Both of these activities are useless and fraudulent. We were taught to pray and ask God to give us his holy spirit. How can I say this is fraudulent? Because I never had any other prayers answered. God did let Herbert W. Armstrong go very badly astray. The great end-time work was a colossal failure. There has been no Armageddon, no triumphant returning Jesus Christ, no Kingdom of God set up. These prophecies were all lies, just as were Armstrong’s ideas on when they would take place (certainly with 3 to 5 years from now, this is the gun lap, and all his other verbal vomit)..

When you are commanded to pray for and love your enemies, turn the other cheek when attacked, give twice as much as is demanded, etc., you are being set up to be taken to the cleaners by unscrupulous leaders. The generosity and mercy expected from Christians is exactly like what Marx expected from true Communists – to give freely of their surplus. Such a policy might possibly be allowable for a serious emergency situation of a very short duration, but human nature will never change, and these emergency situations always seem to continue forever. Once a law is passed enabling any kind of socialized payments during an emergency, our legislators always seem somehow to forget to terminate that legislation when the emergency is over. Or our presidents have always forgotten to issue a proclamation when the emergency ended.

This quote of Jefferson’s, whether bogus or genuine, is certainly true in what it says. Christians are all either fools or hypocrites. And their god is a murderous, raging monster, a foul beast belching out pure evil wherever it goes and on everything it touches.

Bill -- I might have some argument concerning your choice of words on that last paragraph, but the more important issue is one you've addressed head-on: when coming across these 'sources' of material, these quotes, etc, it's more important that WE validate them as authentic than the Other Side. As you've correctly pointed out, it's up to us, and, as our friend Jim Baldwin stated so well --

It's important that we are correct in our facts and sources, and I only wish the Other Side was as diligent as you in policing their OWN material.

--PT

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Follow-up from Bill concerning my above comments:

Don’t know what you mean by “argument concerning your choice of words on that last paragraph”. I reread my last paragraph twice and didn’t see anything inappropriate in it. Whatever. Thanks. No rocks will be thrown. J

The real bogosity of this quote was proven by the other email I sent you with the link to Positive Atheism, where someone wrote the Jefferson Archives (at the U. of Va., I suppose) and they checked their voluminous files and could not find the alleged quote. So there were two points to my big email: (1) be very careful about the veracity of quotes and/or anything else you read on the Sewernet; and (2) my little rant about how Xtianity really is a toxic monster regardless of the bogosity of this alleged quote.

Bill

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Here's the other email from Bill to which he is referring:

Mike,

I think by now you have seen Jim Baldwin's great email on the bogosity of the Jefferson quote. Here's a little more from the Positive Atheism website which you might want to add editorially in case you post my previous long email on this quote.

Bill

Questionable Thomas Jefferson Quotation

After receiving several inquiries from atheists and others in a matter of a few days, we inquired of the Jefferson Library as to the veracity of the following alleged quotation.

Quote Graphic Rule

The Jefferson Presidential Library has searched for the following alleged quotation and cannot find it within their collection of known and verified Jefferson writings. Therefore we think this quotation is probably a forgery and recommend its removal from all quotes collections.
-- Positive Atheism Magazine

Quote Graphic Rule

Quotation 'Not Found'
"The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites."
-- Quotation 'Not Found,' popularly alleged to have been in a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/jeffphony.htm

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