The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine (icecream ebook reader TXT) 📕
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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 Bible’s 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 “his mind is his own church” and that man must embrace reason.
While these arguments weren’t 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 Paine’s 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 wasn’t 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 Jefferson—himself a Deist—advising Paine not to publish. Paine listened to Jefferson’s 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 edition’s 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 Reason’s harsh reception—or perhaps, because of it, and the controversy and discussion it caused—it achieved a popularity in England, France, and America that gave it incredible influence in those nation’s perspectives on organized religion.
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- Author: Thomas Paine
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I know not what is the Hebrew word that corresponds to the word “seer” in English;94 but I observe it is translated into French by Le Voyant, from the verb voir “to see,” and which means the person who sees, or the seer. ↩
I have read in an ancient Persian poem (Saadi, I believe, but have mislaid the reference) this phrase: “And now the whale swallowed Jonah: the sun set.” —Conway ↩
The story of Abraham and the Fire-worshipper, ascribed to Franklin, is from Saadi. (See my Sacred Anthology, p. 61.) Paine has often been called a “mere scoffer,” but he seems to have been among the first to treat with dignity the book of Jonah, so especially liable to the ridicule of superficial readers, and discern in it the highest conception of Deity known to the Old Testament. —Conway ↩
Mary, the supposed virgin, mother of Jesus, had several other children, sons and daughters. See Matthew 13:55–56. ↩
From the birth of David to the birth of Christ is upwards of 1,080 years; and as the lifetime of Christ is not included, there are but twenty-seven full generations. To find therefore the average age of each person mentioned in the list, at the time his first son was born, it is only necessary to divide 1,080 by 27, which gives forty years for each person. As the lifetime of man was then but of the same extent it is now, it is an absurdity to suppose, that twenty-seven following generations should all be old bachelors, before they married; and the more so, when we are told that Solomon, the next in succession to David, had a house full of wives and mistresses before he was twenty-one years of age. So far from this genealogy being a solemn truth, it is not even a reasonable lie. The list of Luke gives about twenty-six years for the average age, and this is too much. ↩
According to John, (19:14) the sentence was not passed till about the sixth hour (noon), and consequently the execution could not be till the afternoon; but Mark (15:25) says expressly that he was crucified at the third hour, (nine in the morning). ↩
The Bishop of Llandaff, in his famous Apology, censured Paine severely for this insinuation against Mary Magdalene, but the censure really falls on our English version, which, by a chapter-heading (Luke 7), has unwarrantably identified her as the sinful woman who anointed Jesus, and irrevocably branded her. —Conway ↩
Mark says “a young man,” and Luke “two men.” —Conway ↩
This belongs to the late addition to Mark, which originally ended with 16:8. —Conway ↩
The last nine verses of Mark being ungenuine, the story of the ascension rests exclusively on the words in Luke 24:51, “was carried up into heaven,”—words omitted by several ancient authorities. —Conway ↩
The former part of The Age of Reason has not been published two years, and there is already an expression in it that is not mine. The expression is: “The book of Luke was carried by a majority of one voice only.” It may be true, but it is not I that have said it. Some person who might know of that circumstance, has added it in a note at the bottom of the page of some of the editions, printed either in England or in America; and the printers, after that, have erected it into the body of the work, and made me the author of it. If this has happened within such a short space of time, notwithstanding the aid of printing, which prevents the alteration of copies individually, what may not have happened in a much greater length of time, when there was no printing, and when any man who could write could make a written copy and call it an original by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John?95 ↩
I have taken these two extracts from Boulanger’s Life of Paul, written in French; Boulanger has quoted them from the writings of Augustine against Fauste,96 to which he refers. ↩
Boulanger in his Life of Paul, has collected from the ecclesiastical histories, and the writings of the fathers as they are called, several matters which show the opinions that prevailed among the different sects of Christians, at the time the Testament, as we now see it, was voted to be the word of God. The following extracts are from the second chapter of that work:
The Marcionists (a Christian sect) asserted that the evangelists were filled with falsities. The Manichaeans, who formed a very numerous sect at the commencement of Christianity, rejected as false all the New Testament, and showed other writings quite different that they gave for authentic. The Corinthians, like the Marcionists, admitted not the Acts of the Apostles. The Encratites and the Sevenians adopted neither the Acts, nor the Epistles of Paul. Chrysostom, in a homily which he made upon the Acts of the Apostles, says that in his time, about the year 400, many people knew nothing either of the author or of the book. St. Irene, who lived before that time, reports that the Valentinians, like several other sects of the Christians, accused the scriptures of being filled with imperfections, errors, and contradictions. The Ebionites,
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