We honor and revere Thomas Paine for his 1776 publication of Common Sense, a pamphlet that helped unite the colonials by challenging the authority of the British government and the royal monarchy. The plain language that Paine used spoke to the average man, and they were convinced when he made the case for a war of independence. American school children are taught about Paine’s Common Sense, but unfortunately, his equally significant work, The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology is completely ignored. That is a shame because Paine speaks truths that should be put squarely on the table today to shut up and shut down those who are thumping the Bible, acting as if the Constitution made America a Christian nation, and who seek to pass laws that are intended to make Americans obey their warped interpretations of what they claim God demands of and for Americans, and our government at all levels.
Paine was a Deist, and as described by Wikipedia, “The Age of Reason presents common deistic arguments;for example, it highlights what Paine saw as corruption of the Christian Church and criticizes its efforts to acquire political power. Paine advocates reason in the place of revelation, leading him to reject miracles and to view the Bible as an ordinary piece of literature rather than as a divinely inspired text. It promotes natural religion and argues for the existence of a creator-God."
The First Section of the Age of Reason (to which I will confine myself in this diary) begins with this letter to the reader:
TO MY FELLOW-CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
I put the following work under your protection. It contains my opinions upon Religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
Would it not be a breath of fresh air to hear a Republican in 2012 utter these words?
Paine was far from an atheist. In Common Sense he proclaims:
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
But then Paine previews for the reader the essence of his argument:
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise...
Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.
Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.
Paine seems to be speaking directly to men like Franklin Graham and Rick Santorum when he exposes the flaws in their prayers to change things, and their selfishness
Yet, with [his] strange appearance of humility and this contempt for human reason, he ventures into the boldest presumptions; he finds fault with everything; his selfishness is never satisfied; his ingratitude is never at an end. He takes on himself to direct the Almighty what to do, even in the government of the universe; he prays dictatorially; when it is sunshine, he prays for rain, and when it is rain, he prays for sunshine; he follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say: Thou knowest not so well as Iâ¦
As to the theology that is now studied [instead of the power and wisdom of God in his works], it is the study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning God. It is not the study of God himself in the works that he has made, but in the works or writings that man has made; and it is not among the least of the mischiefs that the Christian system has done to the world, that it has abandoned the original and beautiful system of theology, like a beautiful innocent, to distress and reproach, to make room for the hag of superstition.
Santorum's "snob" remarks about President Obama's urging people to become more educated are exposed at their root by Paine:
[T]he advocates of the Christian system of faith could not but foresee that the continually progressive knowledge that man would gain, by the aid of scienceâ¦would militate against, and call into question, the truth of their system of faith; and therefore it became necessary to their purpose to cut learning down to a size less dangerous to their project, and this they effected by restricting the idea of learning to the dead study of dead languages.
They not only rejected the study of science out of the Christian schools, but they persecuted it, and it is only within about the last two centuries that the study has been revived. So late as 1610, Galileo, a Florentine, discovered and introduced the use of telescopes, and by applying them to observe the motions and appearances of the heavenly bodies, afforded additional means for ascertaining the true structure of the universe. Instead of being esteemed for those discoveries, he was sentenced to renounce them, or the opinions resulting from them, as a damnable heresy. And, prior to that time, Vigilius was condemned to be burned for asserting the antipodes, or in other words that the earth was a globe, and habitable in every part where there was land; yet the truth of this is now too well known even to be toldâ¦.
[T]he supporters or partisans of the Christian system, as if dreading the result, incessantly opposed, and not only rejected the sciences, but persecuted the professors. Had Newton or Descartes lived three or four hundred years ago, and pursued their studies as they did, it is most probable they would not have lived to finish them; and had Franklin drawn lightning from the clouds at the same time, it would have been at the hazard of expiring for it in the flames.
Paine notes further that the Dark Ages were the product of the Church's war on knowledge. But while Paine had no quarrel with accepting that Christ preached morality, he goes on to unmask the pious frauds:
The persons who first preached the Christian system of faith, and in some measure combined it with the morality preached by Jesus Christ, might persuade themselves that it was better than the heathen mythology that then prevailed. From the first preachers the fraud went on to the second, and to the third, till the idea of its being a pious fraud became lost in the belief of its being true; and that belief became again encouraged by the interests of those who made a livelihood by preaching it.
But though such a belief might by such means be rendered almost general among the laity, it is next to impossible to account for the continual persecution carried on by the Church, for several hundred years, against the sciences and against the professors of science, if the Church had not some record or tradition that it was originally no other than a pious fraud, or did not foresee that it could not be maintained against the evidence that the structure of the universe afforded.
Paine argues cogently that even if God revealed truths to one man, for the rest of humanity, all they have is hearsay noting that even the Ten Commandments do not in themselves prove they were dictated to Moses by God since they contain general moral principles that all descent humans would logically discover without recourse to the supernatural. As for the story on which Christianity is based, Paine points the similarities of the birth of Christ to heathen stories, and says:
When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this â for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so â it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidenceâ¦
The Christian Mythologists, calling themselves the Christian Church, have erected their fable, which, for absurdity and extravagance, is not exceeded by anything that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients.
Paine challenges the morality and logic of those,like today's Born Again Christians, who claim that regardless of their immoral deeds and shattering of the Golden Rule, their belief that Christ died for their sins will absolve and save them:
If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me; but if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed; moral Justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty, even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose Justice to do this, is to destroy the principle of its existence, which is the thing itself; it is then no longer Justice, it is indiscriminate revenge.
As noted, Paine was far from an atheist, and his prescription for those who believe in God was simple, and happily, in accord with the liberal political philosophy:
That the moral duty of man consists in imitating the moral goodness and beneficence of God, manifested in the creation toward all his creatures. That seeing, as we daily do, the goodness of God to all men, it is an example calling upon all men to practice the same toward each other; and, consequently, that everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals, is a violation of moral duty.
In the First Section of the Age of Reason refutes the religious fundamentalists, and Paine offers arguments that have contemporary meaning that should be raised in opposition to the Theocratic propaganda used to support the Republican Party; and which Republicans use in conspiracy with the clergy to garner votes. Furthermore, while the right wingers, since the election of President Obama keep complaining that they want their country back,in borrowing arguments from the Deists to refute their bleating and policies on issues such as who will be saved, gays, abortion, contraception, America as a Christian nation, their interpretation of the First Amendment that allows Bible reading by teachers in school and no real separation of church and state, as well as all of the other offensive things they say and try to legislate based on their religion, we would be in the good company of many of our Founders (and their sources of inspiration) since includeed among the famous deists are:
* George Washington * Benjamin Franklin * Thomas Jefferson * James Madison * Ethan Allen * John Locke * Adam Smith * Moses Mendelssohn * and * Maximilien Robespierre *