What religion are you?

The fact that Jefferson admired Christ's ethic and worked well with the majority of Christians he was surrounded by did not make him a Christian in any modern evangelical sense of the term. While Jefferson believed in an afterlife and never called himself a Deist, he was a Unitarian-- which in America and England of the time was pretty much the same, a branch within liberal Protestantism. Unitarians rejected the Trinity, Original Sin, etc. And other Gnostic beliefs.

To quote Jefferson, "I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other."

Jefferson's own writings prove how he thought about pushy controlling man made religions based on mystical nonsensical notions so feel free to follow the link if you ever care to read his words vs, taking cheap shots at me every time I mention his name on SH.

The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia: A Comprehensive Collection of the Views of Thomas Jefferson (1900)
http://books.google.com/books...

Jefferson was definitely not an Atheist but he was most certainly not a traditional Christian by any modern evangelical sense of the term.

First, let me backup, I use the term Jeffersonian Deist not so much to claim that Jefferson himself ever claimed to be a Deist but to say that Jefferson believed in reaching his beliefs about God and the universe thru the use of reason and not revelation. Jefferson also used the common terminology of a 19th century Deist, and as I pointed out in my first response, Jefferson was a Unitarian which, in his day, was practically the same thing as being a Deist, and it was certainly a lot closer to what would be commonly classified as a traditional Christian.

Jefferson was a man highly interested in God, Reason and Morals, he loved the ethics of Christ and he believed -- thru reason -- in a universal natural Creator. Jefferson's writings clearly show that he felt nothing but contempt for the corrupt old religious Orthodoxy and what he considered a bastardized bible which only twisted Christ's real world meaning.

Not to be disrespectful but IMHO, the supernatural aspects of the bible are nothing more than the churches collectivist device for benefiting -- Insert Ruler -- itself thru enslaving the masses in the darkness of a mystical welfare system for the soul. And while I do not mean to paint with too broad a brush, mysticism has historically been the common tool used by most religions to circumvent real world observations and logical debate concerning the true nature of God.

While I personally do not see natures creator as an entity with any sort of special personal interest in mankind's welfare there is certainly nothing inconsistent with a Deist doing so if that is the conclusion they reach thru their application of reason. Deism is anything but a one size fits all belief system and I personally see it as more as a decentralized approach to understanding natures creator and the universe we exist in.

I also disagree that Jefferson ever had, for one second, any Calvinist anti-reason notions about the way to personal salvation in the eyes of God.

"The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors."
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823