Thomas Jefferson's View On The Declaration Of Independence

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Thomas Jefferson (the first US Secretary of State, its second Vice President, and third President) and John Adams (the first US Vice President and its second President) are two of the most influential authors on the Declaration of Independence. But their religious views differ greatly. Jefferson believes Jesus ‘perhaps the greatest of history’s moral teachers’ but he doesn’t subscribe to the religiously fundamental view. Or as Schama puts it, Jefferson doesn’t believe Jesus to be a ‘water-walking, corpse-resuscitator’. He believes the new state of America should be guided by the morality of Christianity, but not be regulated by its religion.

“It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my

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