HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh, you guys crack me up.
Hey, Eric: ever considered that the saddest thing about being an atheist, is that you have to lie like a liberal? That is, deny the evidence of your own eyes? Fingers crossed that dichotomy proves jarring enough to wake you from your silliness, one day. Cheers, By
...Washington's religious views were a bit vague...I guess the happiest thing about being ultra-dogmatic is you never have to support your arguments.....LOL.HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh, you guys crack me up.
Hey, Eric: ever considered that the saddest thing about being an atheist, is that you have to lie like a liberal?
"One incident in Dr. Abercrombie's experience as a clergyman, in connection with the Father of his Country, is especially worthy of record; and the following account of it was given by the Doctor himself, in a letter to a friend, in 1831 shortly after there had been some public allusion to it: 'With respect to the inquiry you make I can only state the following facts; that, as pastor of the Episcopal church, observing that, on sacramental Sundays, Gen. Washington, immediately after the desk and pulpit services, went out with the greater part of the congregation -- always leaving Mrs. Washington with the other communicants -- she invariably being one -- I considered it my duty in a sermon on Public Worship, to state the unhappy tendency of example, particularly of those in elevated stations who uniformly turned their backs upon the celebration of the Lord's Supper. I acknowledge the remark was intended for the President; and as such he received it. A few days after, in conversation with, I believe, a senator of the United States, he told me he had dined the day before with the President, who in the course of conversation at table said that on the preceding Sunday he had received a very just reproof from the pulpit for always leaving the church before the administration of the Sacrament; that he honored the preacher for his integrity and candor; that he had never sufficiently considered the influence of his example, and that he would not again give cause for the repetition of the reproof; and that, as he had never been a communicant, were he to become one then it would be imputed to an ostentatious display of religious zeal? arising altogether from his elevated station. Accordingly, he never afterwards came on the morning of sacramental Sunday, though at other times he was a constant attendant in the morning'"
(Annals of the American Pulpit, Rev. Wm. B. Sprague, D.D, Vol. v, p. 394).
The same Dr. Abercrombie told the Reverend Bird Wilson, a noted religious historian of the 19th century, "Sir, Washington was a Deist".
There's no question that Washington believed in God. However, his public words were those not of fundamentalist Christian, but of a Deist. Personally I suspect he wavered between lukewarm Christianity and a devout form of Deism, but one cannot, with historical accuracy, claim that he was a conventional Christian believer.
-Eric