The “Founding Fathers” of American Freethought

1. The “Founding Fathers” of American Freethought WS 2013/14 Hauptseminar: Literatures of US Freethought

2. Literatures of Freethought31.10.2013 Attendance Course blog Journal Sheet Presentation Sign-up? Powerpoint Journal Questions Discussion

3. Madison & Jefferson on Church and State in VA Virginia: the battleground of revolutionary secularism? Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786): A Virginia state law first proposed by Jefferson in 1779. It guaranteed legal equality for citizens of all religions. It was the first law to establish separation between church and state and it became the legal model for the US Constitution. “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments”: James Madison wrote this speech to the VA state assembly as a response to a bill put forth by Patrick Henry that would have taxed all VA citizens for the support of “teachers of the Christian religion.” It received support from over 2000 Virginians, who feared the dominance of any one Christian sect.

4. Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809) • English-American political activist, author, and revolutionary. • His 1776 propaganda pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis were influential in sparking the American Revolution. • Paine later lived in Paris inthe 1790s, and became intensely involved in the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791) as a defense of the revolution against its critics • His reputation was tarnished after publication of The Age of Reason (1793–94),a book that advocates deism, promotes freethinking, and argues against institutionalized faith in general and Christian doctrine in particular. Deism(From The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): The doctrine of creation, for Deists, need not have involved any conception of the existence of God prior to or apart from creation itself, but whatever the understanding of creation, no further need was thought to arise for future activity by God in order to keep things from passing into non-being. Moreover, such future activity beyond creation itself was unwanted, since it posed a concern for the success of scientific attempts to understand the cosmos. Such a conception gains philosophical traction through an argument from analogy with human engineering of complex machines. A good watchmaker, for example, doesn't need to continue to intervene into the product of his efforts, and the need to do so is a mark of imperfection in the watchmaker. Such arguments from analogy, however, are defective. There is a causal and spatiotemporal structure in place which human engineers can exploit to develop machines that continue apart from the continued involvement of the engineer. Without such a structure in place, it is difficult if not impossible to make sense of the idea of a thing continuing to function completely on its own. As a result, it is not clear that a Deist understanding of God's relation to the world has any advantage over theistic understandings.

5. Journal Questions Why does Paine introduce his book with a “Profession of Faith”? What does he actually profess? Where can we find God, according to Paine, and how? What are some of the metaphors he uses to describe the activities of God? How would you describe the tone of Paine’s essay? How would you describe his rhetorical strategies? What is Madison’s argument for religious freedom? Is it connected? Provide examples. Why is Paine so concerned with arguing for a deist conception of God against organized religion? What harm does Madison see in organized religion?