"Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), whose theology was Unitarian, edited an abridged version of the New Testament that stripped the gospels of their supernatural elements and Jesus of his divinity. Jefferson had no use for the traditional church acceptance of the miraculous, which he thought was designed to confuse the flock and herd it toward an unquestioning faith. While Jefferson didn't quite do to his God what he'd done to his king,"
"The guy who told Americans they had a God-given right to pursue happiness thought that while humans' natural endowment had made us free, it also made us responsible for creating happiness out of the resources we saw before us. If we're going to find bliss in this lifetime, we'll have to work for it. So central was the general concern about happiness around the time, that contemporary Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) made it the touchstone of their ethics."
Thomas Jefferson edited an abridged New Testament that removed supernatural elements and portrayed Jesus without divinity. Jefferson rejected traditional church acceptance of miracles as manipulative and favored a circumscribed providence. He held that natural endowment grants freedom but also obliges individuals to create happiness from available resources, making the pursuit of bliss a matter of effort. Jeremy Bentham grounded ethics in maximising aggregate happiness and proposed a felicific calculus, but this approach neglects individual rights and fails to distinguish kinds of pleasure. John Stuart Mill countered that some forms of pleasure are more worthy than others.
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