On 7/25/2015 12:42 PM, jmcquown wrote:
> On 7/24/2015 8:38 PM, graham wrote:
The primary leaders of the so-called founding fathers of our nation were
not Bible-believing Christians; they were deists. Deism was a
philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial
intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution. Its major tenets
included belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social
and political problems and belief in a supreme deity who created the
universe to operate solely by natural laws. The supreme God of the
Deists removed himself entirely from the universe after creating it.
They believed that he assumed no control over it, exerted no influence
on natural phenomena, and gave no supernatural revelation to man. A
necessary consequence of these beliefs was a rejection of many doctrines
central to the Christian religion. Deists did not believe in the virgin
birth, divinity, or resurrection of Jesus, the efficacy of prayer, the
miracles of the Bible, or even the divine inspiration of the Bible.

These beliefs were forcefully articulated by Thomas Paine in Age of
Reason, a book that so outraged his contemporaries that he died rejected
and despised by the nation that had once revered him as "the father of
the American Revolution." To this day, many mistakenly consider him an
atheist, even though he was an out spoken defender of the Deistic view
of God. Other important founding fathers who espoused Deism were George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, James
Madison, and James Monroe.