"Morals were too essential to the happiness of man, to be risked on the uncertain combinations of the head. Nature laid their foundation, therefore, in sentiment, not in science. "
Your thoughts please....
2007-01-04 13:50:55 · 6 answers · asked by Myaloo 5 in Society & Culture ➔ Religion & Spirituality
Morals means alot in any subject, without morals we'd be in a constant war. We can do wrong and suffer for it because of morals but without them we wouldn't ever stop to think about it.
How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
Woody Allen
2007-01-04 13:56:13 · answer #1 · answered by Sean 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
Thomas Jefferson
sentiments..hmmmm
I suppose he made the observation that morals (which are usually determined by those in power) became too much the focus and resulted in a lack of happiness or luck...science was the opposite of sentiment by nature...hmmmm
Work is your Salvation - communism?
2007-01-04 21:56:17 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
While Jefferson admired the values and moral teachings of Jesus, he felt that they were immediately corrupted by those who turned the religion of Jesus into a religion about Jesus. Jefferson spent much of his life striving to expose what he saw as the debauchery of Christianity.
Jefferson thought the miracles and supernatural stories in the Bible were worse than the mere superstition he knew they were, Jefferson saw them as the tools of a wicked an evil Christian priesthood to control and abuse mankind and to deny the freedom that Jefferson thought was the right of every man.
Your quote, from his 1786 letter to Maria Cosway, is part of a hypothetical debate between the heart (faith) and the mind (reason). In truth, the general thrust of this imaginary discussion is a rather serious and severe critique of Christianity.
Jefferson struggled to find faith through reason (which he valued more highly (your quote if from the ‘heart’s side of the conversation). He felt that Christianity (the corrupt bastardization of Jesus’ morality) did not, and could not, stand up to the test of reason.
Jefferson summarized these [Jefferson’s] thoughts in the following paragraph from a letter written to William Baldwin in 1810:
----"That but a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in church and state: that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man has been adulterated and sophisticated, by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves, that rational men not being able to swallow their impious heresies, in order to force them down their throats, they raise the hue and cry of infidelity, while themselves are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, and do in fact constitute the real Anti-Christ."
2007-01-04 22:52:53 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
One cannot separate the parts of existence, they are all part of the puzzle and all have value. The true nature of mankind is good
and wholesome and quite heroic if we use our hearts as our guiding organ and not our mind we will know that to be true
2007-01-04 21:56:38 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
This is too brief and needs a context, including the target audience.
2007-01-04 21:53:36 · answer #5 · answered by NHBaritone 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
what man feels in his heart is more important than what he thinks in his head. Knowledge (head) can be decieving and misleading, but feelings (heart) are true.
2007-01-04 21:53:50 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋