Talk:Noah Webster

Religious views

Is there some reason you largely gutted the section on his religious views?

Webster was a devout Christian. His speller was very moralistic, and his first lesson began "Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink ; nor for your body, what ye shall put on; for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things."

His 1828 American Dictionary contained the greatest number of Biblical definitions given in any reference volume. Webster considered "education useless without the Bible." Webster learned 20 different languages in finding definitions for which a particular word is used. [Preface to the 1828 edition of Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language]

"In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed...No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people."

Webster released his own edition of the Bible in 1833, called the Common Version. He used the King James Version as a base, and consulted the Hebrew and Greek along with various other versions and commentaries. Webster molded the KJV to correct grammar, replaced words that were no longer used, and did away with words and phrases that could be seen as offensive.

All editions of Webster's Dictionary published in 1913 and earlier, along with the Webster Bible, and Dissertation on the English Language are available in the public domain.

 —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 02:28, 4 July 2007 (CDT)

The biographers don't think it was very important (thus: there is one sentence in the DAB article, which I used). Wiki has these religious types that add all sorts of uncritical stuff that they think promote Christianity. For example, Webster was a deist or freethinker for most of his career (he got religion about 1808) and the Wiki editor deliberately hides that and mis-states his religion--and he removed a section (from Ellis) on how his spellers were secular.Richard Jensen 03:06, 4 July 2007 (CDT)

Are you saying the quote is fabricated and his thinking on the matter unimportant to understand him? That his proliferate use of Bible verses in his dictionary as he edited it while living is unimportant to understand him? That seems implausible at best. Sure the David Barton and Peter Marshall types would wish to make the "Founding Fathers" into Saints, but on the other extreme, other historians would wish to seriously downplay the role of religion in these people's thinking and contributions. But to understand a man, one must understand his core motivations--and there lies religion for a good deal of historically important people, from Gandhi to "W".  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 03:11, 4 July 2007 (CDT)