deism

He derived the ideas, in fragmentary fashion, from Bolingbroke, who was an amateur Deist and optimist of the shallow eighteenth century type, and so far was Pope from understanding what he was doing that he was greatly disturbed when it was pointed out to him that the theology of the poem was Deistic rather than Christian [Footnote: The name Deist was applied rather generally in the eighteenth century to all persons who did not belong to some recognized Christian denomination.

As was the case for many of his contemporaries (including the deists), Edwards's "encounter with others often amounted to self-congratulation and self-projection rather than reliable description of the other" (10).

The "deists were more consistent in their use of the abstract principles that inspired arminians" and others, M.

Catholic orthodoxy, then, saw itself as threatened in the early 1620s by searchers into "the secrets of natural causes" who, practicing one or another form of Hermetic and cabalistic magic or alchemy, at the same time appropriated Christian doctrine for their own purposes; by deists and libertines, whose reaction against the hard doctrines of Jean Calvin led them to scoff at all of the more punitive tenets of Christianity; and also, increasingly, by Pyrrhonist skeptics, who threatened not so much the faith as its appendages of rational theology and scholastic philosophy.

While in England, he sustained "a fair character for integrity and honesty," though he reportedly frequented a club of deists. He emigrated to America in 1762, settling initially in Stratford, Connecticut, then successively moving to Darby, Fairfield (where he married and remained for some years), and finally Wethersfield in about 1772.

Lycas tells of his visit to the Sophians, an imaginary rational community where there is no institutional government, property, or marriage, and society is based on the cultivation of the fine arts and the worship of nature in the manner of eighteenth-century Deists. Memmo is speedily converted to the Sophians' faith in rational liberty, and Part 1 ends with a passage openly defying current governmental revession of radical activities: |freedom and virtue, although depressed, are not extinct .

Born in Boston, Mather was one of the most remarkable men in America, a prodigy who entered Harvard at twelve, expert theologian, learned controversialist, determined Puritan, precursor of American deists, indefatigable author, able critic, researcher in superstition, man of scientific temperament who nevertheless was inclined to believe in witchcraft, and educational theorist.

In The Religious Beliefs of America's Founders, Frazer argues that the most influential founders were neither Christians in the traditional sense nor deists, as often assumed, but "theistic rationalists." The term is his own, not one used in the late 18th century, but he makes a persuasive case for its heuristic value.

Right-wing fundamentalist who contend that the US is and has always been a Christian nation, and that (their version of) Christian values should be the foundation of government are frustrated with the historical record that the founders of the republic were deists who believed that the government should not depend on anyone's religions beliefs.

Although she acknowledges that many of the elite Founders were Christians, Brooke Allen characterizes Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and (at times) Hamilton as deists and freethinkers, indeed "the very prototypes" of the "East Coast intellectuals we are always being warned against by today's religious [R]ight" (xvi).

The framers of the Constitution were men of various religious persuasions--Christians, Unitarians, deists, theists and possibly some agnostics and atheists.

The first viewpoint is that of the deists, who claimed that there is evidence that there is a God who created the universe but God left the world to function on its own without God's further involvement.