The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine (icecream ebook reader TXT) ๐
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The Age of Reason is an important work in the American Deist movement. Paine worked on it continually for more than a decade, publishing it in three parts from 1794 through 1807. It quickly became a best-seller in post-Revolution America, spurring a revival in Deism as an alternative to the prevailing Christian influence.
In clear, simple, and often funny language, Paine attempts to dissect the Bibleโs supposed inaccuracies and hypocrisies. He portrays the Bible as a human construct, full of illogic, errors, and internal inconsistencies, as opposed to it being a text born of divine inspiration. On those arguments he pivots to decrying not just Christianity, but organized religion as a whole, as a human invention created to terrorize and enslave. Instead of accepting organized religion, he states that โhis mind is his own churchโ and that man must embrace reason.
While these arguments werenโt new to the wealthy and educated class of the era, they were new to the poor masses. The book was at first distributed as cheap unbound pamphlets, making it easily accessible to the poor; and Paineโs simple language was written in way the poor could understand and sympathize with. This made the powerful very nervous, and, fearing that the book could cause a potential revolution, Paine and his publishers were suppressed.
Paine wrote The Age of Reason while living in Paris. In France, its thesis wasnโt revolutionary enough for the bloodthirsty Jacobins; he was imprisoned there for ten months and only escaped execution through a stroke of luck. Meanwhile in Britain, the government considered the pamphlets seditious. British booksellers and publishers involved in printing and distributing the pamphlets were repeatedly tried for seditious and blasphemous libel, with some even receiving sentences of hard labor.
Paine began writing Part III after escaping France for America, but even the American elite thought the book too scandalous, with Thomas Jeffersonโhimself a Deistโadvising Paine not to publish. Paine listened to Jeffersonโs advice and held off publishing Part III for five years before publishing extracts as separate pamphlets. For that reason, Part III is not a concrete publication, but rather an arrangement of several loosely-related pamphlets organized at the discretion of an editionโs editor.
Once it was in the hands of Americans, it sparked a revival in Deism in the United States before being viciously attacked from all sides. Paine earned a reputation as an agitator and blasphemer that stuck to him for the rest of his life.
Despite The Age of Reasonโs harsh receptionโor perhaps, because of it, and the controversy and discussion it causedโit achieved a popularity in England, France, and America that gave it incredible influence in those nationโs perspectives on organized religion.
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- Author: Thomas Paine
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After this we have the childish stories of three or four other dreams; about Joseph going into Egypt; about his coming back again; about this, and about that: and this story of dreams has thrown Europe into a dream for more than a thousand years. All the efforts that nature, reason, and conscience, have made to awaken man from it, have been ascribed by priestcraft and superstition to the workings of the devil; and had it not been for the American revolution, which by establishing the universal right of conscience, first opened the way to free discussion, and for the French revolution which followed, this religion of dreams had continued to be preached, and that after it had ceased to be believed. Those who preached it and did not believe it, still believed the delusion necessary. They were not bold enough to be honest, nor honest enough to be bold.
Every new religion, like a new play, requires a new apparatus of dress and machinery, to fit the new characters it creates. The story of Christ in the New Testament brings a new being upon the stage, which it calls the Holy Ghost; and the story of Abraham the father of the Jews, in the Old Testament, gives existence to a new order of beings it called angels. There was no Holy Ghost before the time of Christ, nor angels before the time of Abraham. We hear nothing of these winged gentlemen, till more than two thousand years, according to the Bible chronology, from the time they say the heavens, the earth, and all therein were made. After this, they hop about as thick as birds in a grove. The first we hear of pays his addresses to Hagar in the wilderness; then three of them visit Sarah; another wrestles a fall with Jacob: and these birds of passage, having found their way to earth and back, are continually coming and going. They eat and drink, and up again to heaven. What they do with the food they carry away in their bellies the Bible does not tell us.
One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as Scripture religion is, could never have obtained credit; yet we have seen what priestcraft and fanaticism could do, and credulity believe.
From angels in the Old Testament we get to prophets, to witches, to seers of visions, and dreamers of dreams, and sometimes we are told, as in 1 Samuel, 9:15, that God whispers in the ear. At other times we are not told how the impulse was given, or whether sleeping or waking. In 2 Samuel 24:1, it is said, โAnd again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, to say, Go number Israel and Judah.โ And in 1 Chronicles, 21:1, when the same story is again related, it is said, โAnd Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.โ
Whether this was done sleeping or waking we are not told, but it seems that David, whom they call โa man after Godโs own heart,โ did not know by what spirit he was moved; and as to the men called inspired penmen, they agree so well about the matter, that in one book they say that it was God, and in the other that it was the devil.
Yet this is the trash the church imposes upon the world as the word of God! this is the collection of lies and contradictions called the Holy Bible! this is the rubbish called revealed religion!
The idea that the writers of the Old Testament had of a God was boisterous, contemptible, and vulgar. They make him the Mars of the Jews, the fighting God of Israel, the conjuring God of their priests and prophets. They still tell us many fables of him as the Greeks told of Hercules.
They put him against Pharaoh, as it were to box with him; and as Moses carries the challenge, they make their God to say, insultingly, โI will get me honor upon Pharaoh, and upon his host, upon his chariots, and upon his horsemen.โ And that he may keep his word, they make him set a trap in the Red Sea, in the dead of the night, for Pharaoh, his host, and his horses, and drown them as a rat-catcher would do so many rats. Great honor indeed! The story of Jack the Giant-killer is better told.
They match him against the Egyptian magician to conjure with him; and after bad conjuring on both sides (for where there is no great contest, there is no great honor), they bring him off victorious. The three first essays are a dead match; each party turns his rod into a serpent, the rivers into blood, and creates frogs; but upon the fourth, the God of the Israelites obtains the laurelโ โhe covers them all over with lice! The Egyptian magicians cannot do the same, and this lousy triumph proclaims the victory.
They make their God to rain fire and brimstone upon Sodom and Gomorrah, and belch fire and smoke upon mount Sinai, as if he were the Pluto of the lower regions. They made him salt up Lotโs wife like pickled pork; they make him pass, like Shakespeareโs Queen Mab, into the brains of their priests, prophets, and prophetesses, and tickle them into dreams, and after making him play all kind of tricks, they confound him with Satan, and leave us at a loss to know what God they meant.
This is the descriptive God of the Old Testament; and as to the New, though the authors of it have varied the scene, they continued the vulgarity.
Is man ever to be the dupe of priestcraft, the slave of superstition? Is he never to have just ideas of his Creator? It is better not to believe that there is a God, than to believe of him falsely. When we behold the mighty
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