Jefferson’s Razor

Jefferson’s Razor is a non-fiction book that I am authoring. The title Jefferson’s Razor refers to former President Thomas Jefferson and how he constructed his version of the New Testament. First of all Jefferson was a deist and not a theist as most Christians are. He was a follower of the Enlightenment that came to America from Europe. As such, he did not believe in the supernatural events depicted in the New Testament (which he described as nonsense that was added later by editors and scribes [as we know now he wasn’t very far off the mark]) and did not believe Jesus to be God, but he did believe that the teachings of Jesus were inspired.

In creating what has become to be known as Jefferson’s Bible, Jefferson literally took a razor to his bible and extracted the essence of Jesus’ teachings of compassion and pasted them in a notebook along with their Latin and Greek translations. I believe that this is something that all religions need to do, take Jefferson’s razor and cut out and keep the essence of compassion and love, while discarding the other “nonsense.” Unfortunately, it is the “nonsense” that fundamentalist believers choose to focus on instead of the essence of their religion, which is the compassion.

Jefferson’s Razor is also an exploration into why people believe the “nonsense” and refuse to let go of it even when it contradicts what we know, such as the age of the earth and the solar system. I was once a Christian believer and served as a  missionary. So the book has a perspective that other books critical of religion such those by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens do not have.