Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man
From Thomas Jefferson Wiki
This quotation has so far not been found in any of the sources available to us. However, it may possibly be a misleading paraphrase of the following:
"...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, & perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in church & state: that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man has been adulterated & sophisticated, by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth & 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 & 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." - Thomas Jefferson to William Baldwin, 19 January 1810 (draft - never sent)[1]
Also seemingly contradicting the quotation in question is the following:
"No doctrines of [Jesus'] lead to schism. It is the speculations of crazy theologists which have made a Babel of a religion the most moral and sublime ever preached to man, and calculated to heal, and not to create differences. These religious animosities I impute to those who call themselves his ministers, and who engraft their casuistries on the stock of his simple precepts. I am sometimes more angry with them than is authorised by the blessed charities which he preached." - Thomas Jefferson to Ezra Stiles Ely, Monticello, 25 June 1819[2]
Footnotes
- ↑ PTJ:RS 2:157. The draft copy can be found at the Library of Congress, at http://memory.loc.gov/master/mss/mtj/mtj1/044/0500/0530.jpg, mistakenly labeled "Mr Samuel Kercheval."
- ↑ Polygraph copy at the Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Papers: http://memory.loc.gov/master/mss/mtj/mtj1/051/0600/0654.jpg.
