Jefferson on Natural Rights as Created by Nature's God

What did the founding fathers mean by the separation of church and state? Read it for yourself from Thomas Jefferson’s own lips. I have paraphrased in places and added the convenience of modern bullets. Of course I cannot help annotating and exclaiming.

The Virginia Act For Establishing Religious Freedom Thomas Jefferson, 1786

Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free; (and:)

• that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do;
• that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible (opinions), and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time;
• that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical;
• that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness,
  and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporal rewards, which proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labors for the instruction of mankind;
• that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, more than our opinions in physics or geometry;
  that, therefore, the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to the offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which in common with his fellow citizens he has a natural right; that it tends also to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honors and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it;
• that though indeed these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way;
• that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles, on the supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency, will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own;
• that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order;
  and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself (and, as history has often shown, truth prevails against the entire world),
• that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in nowise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.
And though we well know this Assembly, elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no powers equal to our own and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law, yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind (this refers to the freedom of religion discussed in all of this Act for Establishing Religious Freedom. For the sake of discussion compare this view of natural rights, to Darwin’s view *) and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right. (The simplicity of all of this is that the government not punish any person for praying or not praying or for attending church or not attending church. The modern doctrine has been to appear to expand Jeffersonian liberty by punishing, for instance, those who would choose to pray together in public schools.)

* The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is however impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand, a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal; and apparently follows from a considerable advance in man's reason, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder. I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for His existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man; for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent Deity. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.

Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc. of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals. They are also capable of some inherited improvement, as we have seen in the domestic dog compared with the wolf or jackal. If it could be proved that certain high mental powers, such as the formation of general concepts, self-consciousness, &c. were absolutely peculiar to man, which seems extremely doubtful, it is not improbable that these qualities are merely the incidental results of other highly-advanced intellectual faculties; and these again mainly the result of the continued use of a perfect language. At what age does the newborn infant possess the power of abstraction, or become self-conscious, and reflect on its own existence? We cannot answer; nor can we answer in regard to the ascending organic scale. The half-art, half-instinct of language still bears the stamp of its gradual evolution. The ennobling belief in God is not universal with man; and the belief in spiritual agencies naturally follows from other mental powers. The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals; but I need say nothing on this head, as I have so lately endeavoured to show that the social instincts,--the prime principle of man's moral constitution-- with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habits, naturally lead to the golden rule, “As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise,” and this lies at the foundation of morality (from ORIGIN OF SPECIES and DESCENT OF MAN).

Darwin does not declare that there is no God. He simply argues that the Bible is no more true than the arguments of those global warming experts of yesteryear who declared the earth flat and Copernicus a heretic. However, Darwin’s discussion is not about the free choice to believe at all. Belief or a lack of belief, Darwin speculates, has everything to mental development and culture. Darwin does not recognize that the choice of nations to believe in God has resulted in freedom, liberty and what he calls civilization. This notion of a predetermined evolution of man and culture was a theme of Darwin’s contemporary Karl Marx.