Reflection blog #11

Benjamin Franklin was a very Deism based individual, as he was well versed in their beliefs. Deism is merely the belief in God, but these people believe that they are able to prove the existence of god, as I have been told by my incredibly accurate source. Anyways, Franklin was born and raised Presbyterian, and eventually grew to question the church's style of preaching the word of God. He "found them more or less mixed with other articles, which , without any tendency to inspire, promote, or conform morality, served principally to divide us, and make us unfriendly to one another" (Franklin 145). He didn't seem to like the churches much as he found their message to be quite unprogressive. He found the dogmas of their persuasion unintelligible (Franklin 144). He believed that the "Most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man and that all crimes will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter" (Franklin 145). His perception of the churches completely butchered this belief of his, and forced him to truly think about his religious beliefs. He perceived the church's sermons were "all to me very dry, uninteresting, and unedifying; since not a singly moral principle was inculcated or enforced; their aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good citizens" (Franklin 146) What the sermons included were not what he would have expected as he would have preferred a verse from the fourth chapter of the Philippians, while the sermon actually based itself off of five points of the apostle (Franklin 146). He claims that "these might be all good things; but, as they were not the kind of good things that I expected from the text" (Franklin 146) Franklin clearly doubted the church's ability to teach morality, and that they were teaching the wrong things all together. He would have wanted them to teach the citizens how to be good citizens as opposed to how to worship God. He believed that if the church taught virtue then everyone would be rewarded for expressing their virtues and what not. Franklin has never truly doubted the existence of god, for he "never doubted, for instance, the existence of a deity that he made the world and governed it by his providence" (Franklin 144-145) He likes God, but hates how people interoperate God and twist his messages for personal gain, at least thats my opinion. You can see how much God has influenced his life in his many achievements, and to be very specific I will critique his thirteen virtues. For one his temperance virtue, which pretty much say that you should avoid gluttony. Gluttony is a sin according to the bible. Transitive property. Next look at humility, which says to imitate Jesus and Socrates, and if I actually have to elaborate on how that is influenced by religion then it will be a sad day. So Franklin had the right idea about his religious skepticism, which pretty much comes down to people are bad, and God is good.

"Deism: Its History, Beliefs and Practices." Web. 25 Oct. 2011. .

Franklin, Benjamin, and Leonard Woods Labaree. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New Haven: Yale UP, 1964. Print.