“God is a Spirit,” Jesus supposedly said, but what is that? The word “spirit” has never been defined, except in terms that tell us what it is not: immaterial, intangible, noncorporeal, supernatural. No one has ever described what a spirit is. “To talk of immaterial existences,” Jefferson wrote, “is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God, are immaterial, is to say, they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise.” (To John Adams, August 1820.) This does not mean Jefferson was an atheist. He conceived of God as a material being, or
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