“The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Google “Thomas Jefferson Bible” and you will find “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” In 1803, Jefferson removed the miracles from the Biblical Gospels but kept the morals teachings of Jesus. Our fifty-seventh Congress liked it so much they had an edition published in 1904. Mr. Jefferson’s Bible ends with no resurrection. “There laid they Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher, and departed.” (Life and Morals, 132)

Jefferson, along with most of our founding fathers, was a Deist. He believed God was like a watch maker who designed the universe, wound it up and walked away. Thomas Jefferson’s idea of God, although nominal, led him to a moral belief that all men were endowed with certain unalienable rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Believing God created all people equal, Mr. Jefferson also saw slavery in the United States as something to be abolished.

French Atheist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) believed man to be autonomous. He said, “we remind man that there is no legislator but himself…” and, “there must be an absolute truth……it consist[s] in one's immediate sense of one’s self.” Sartre believed the absolute freedom of all men led to all human activities as being of equal value. The man who helps a little old lady across the street has no additional moral standing than the one who runs her over.

Both Jefferson and Sartre are trying to give reasons for man’s morality, otherwise known as ethics. Jefferson praises the moral or ethical teachings of Jesus but leaves him in the grave. If Jesus did not do the miracles acclaimed to him, why should we follow his example any more than Socrates or Plato? Sartre erases God all together and calls man his own "legislator" for all moral decisions. Mr. Sartre's position of no God leaves man's morality dangling with "each" man able to self-govern his own behavior without a judge.

Socrates (427-347 B.C.E.) fought this battle of ethics against another Greek Philosopher Protagoras, who's famous slogan was, "Man is the Measure of all things." Socrates believed man’s morals to have a transcendent base verses being individualistic.

It is a logical necessity for there to be Personal Moral Giver because if not, each individual becomes his own ruler. If each man is “absolutely” free from a transcendent moral base, there is no standard moral rule except what “each person” decides for themselves. If man is the measure of all things, then the dictator cannot be held accountable for “injustices” in which he has legislated as the rule.

The Bible exposes man’s dilemma of morality from the beginning. The Bible states a Personal Moral Giver as the authority behind why "thou shall not.” It proclaims man guilty, as the one who walked away from a Personal Moral Giver, and explains man’s yearning for morality by revealing him to be made in the image of a moral God.

There has to be some authority outside of “man’s morality” to say thou salt not kill, steal or cheat on one’s spouse. If we are going to accept the morals of the Bible we have to accept them in context with the supernatural. To tell someone “you ought to” without a sufficient base gives them the right to ask, “Who made you God?”