The Age of Reason

Contents

1. I.I The Author’s Profession of Faith 4 min 9

   Paine explains why he publishes his thoughts on religion now: the abolition of the French clergy in 1793 threatens to sweep away true theology with false. He makes his profession of faith: one God and no more, hope of a future life, the equality of man, and religion as justice, mercy and making others happy. He rejects every church’s creed (“My own mind is my own church”), calls national churches inventions to monopolize power and profit, condemns professing what one does not believe, and predicts that the revolution in government begun with Common Sense will bring a revolution in religion.

2. I.II Of Missions and Revelations 6 min 3

   Every national religion claims a special mission from God through a founder: Moses, Jesus, Mahomet. Paine defines revelation as a direct communication from God and argues that it is revelation only to its first recipient; to everyone else it is hearsay, which no one is obliged to believe. He applies this to the tables of the law, the Koran and the virgin birth, then explains belief in Jesus’s divine birth by the heathen mythology of the time, from which, he claims, Christian theology grew: the Trinity, the cult of Mary and the saints.

3. I.III Concerning the Character of Jesus Christ, and His History 5 min 3

   Paine praises Jesus as a virtuous, amiable man whose morality has never been surpassed, but notes that he wrote nothing about himself. The resurrection and ascension, unlike the virgin birth, could have been shown publicly; instead a handful of witnesses speak for the world, and Paine, like Thomas, will not believe without evidence. The Jews, descendants of those present, deny the story. Jesus existed and was crucified, probably for preaching against the priests and perhaps for hoping to free the Jews from Rome: “this virtuous reformer and revolutionist lost his life.”

4. I.IV Of the Bases of Christianity 4 min 2

   Paine retells the Christian story as mythology. The Greek giant imprisoned under Etna suggested Satan’s war in heaven and confinement in a pit; Satan is then released into Eden as a talking serpent, persuades Eve to eat an apple, and damns mankind. The church, unable to do without him, leaves the devil at large and promises him most of the world. Finally the two ends of the fable are joined: Jesus is made God and man, begotten in order to be sacrificed because Eve ate an apple.

5. I.V Examination in Detail of the Preceding Bases 3 min 1

   Examined in its parts, Paine argues, the story dishonours God: it gives Satan almost divine power, makes him defeat the Almighty by stratagem, and forces God to redeem creation by dying on a cross. Many good people have nonetheless believed it, because they were educated to, or were too moved by the idea of God’s sacrificial love to examine it.

6. I.VI Of the True Theology 2 min

   A short transition. Instead of tragedy and sacrifice, Paine asks, why not admire the creation: a world furnished to us at no cost, and the machinery of the universe that runs on whether we sleep or wake? Doubt about Christianity is spreading everywhere, and free investigation will console the doubtful. He turns to the Old and New Testaments.

7. I.VII Examination of the Old Testament 13 min 13

   Nobody can say who made the Bible the word of God except the church, which collected writings and voted on them. Paine turns to internal evidence. Revelation cannot apply to events people witnessed, so the Bible’s history and anecdote are not revelation. Genesis’s creation account reads as an anonymous tradition, not by Moses. Much of the Old Testament is cruelty and obscenity, “the word of a demon”; Job, Psalms and Proverbs are better. “Prophet” originally meant poet and musician, as the story of Saul shows. Since language changes and translations err, no written book can be the unchangeable word of God.

8. I.VIII Of the New Testament 14 min 6

   The New Testament offers only anecdotes of Jesus, written after his death by others. Jesus founded no new religion, but called people to moral virtue and one God. Paine mocks the doctrine that Christ died for sin: the sentence on Adam was death, not crucifixion, and Paul’s two Adams are a quibble. The Epistles may be forged. Redemption rests on pecuniary justice, a debt another can pay, not moral justice, and was probably invented to support purgatory, pardons and indulgences. Taught to see himself as a worm, the believer despises reason and prays dictatorially.

9. I.IX In What the True Revelation Consists 4 min 3

   There is a word of God: the creation we behold. Human language is local and changeable, and the idea that Jesus, speaking one language before printing, could bring a message to all nations reflects ignorance of the world’s size. God’s means always equal his ends, so his universal word must be something that cannot be forged, lost or altered. The creation speaks a universal language, and in it we see God’s power, wisdom, munificence and mercy.

10. I.X Concerning God, and the Lights Cast on His Existence and Attributes by the Bible 7 min 4

    God can only be understood as a first cause; believing in one is easier than disbelieving, since nothing we know made itself. Reason alone discovers God. The only parts of the Bible that convey an idea of God are some chapters of Job and Psalm 19, which Paine quotes in Addison’s verse paraphrase from memory. Job’s questions show that reason can find God’s existence but cannot fully know his attributes. The apostles’ writings say nothing of what God is.

11. I.XI Of the Theology of the Christians; and the True Theology 12 min 7

    Christianity, worshipping a man, is “a species of atheism” that eclipses reason. The true theology is natural philosophy, chiefly astronomy, the study of God’s works, from which all the sciences and arts derive. Man cannot invent principles, only discover them: the laws of eclipses, trigonometry, the lever and the wheel all exist independently of human figures and machines, and so have a divine origin. The visible heavens were given as a school of science and a lesson in kindness.

12. I.XII The Effects of Christianism on Education; Proposed Reforms 12 min 10

    Christianity also revolutionized learning, reducing it from the knowledge of things to the study of dead languages, which Paine wants abolished in favour of science. He argues that the church did this deliberately, since scientific knowledge of the universe would refute its system, and that it persecuted science, citing Galileo and Virgilius. The age of ignorance began with Christianity, not with the Goths and Vandals. The Reformation revived the sciences, but in religion only multiplied national popes.

13. I.XIII Comparison of Christianism with the Religious Ideas Inspired by Nature 13 min 11

    Paine describes his Quaker upbringing, his lack of Latin, his early love of science (globes, the lectures of Martin and Ferguson, the astronomer Bevis) and his entry into politics with Common Sense. At seven or eight, hearing a sermon on redemption, he revolted at a God who killed his son. Deism, contemplating God in his works, is simpler; the Quakers come nearest, though their creation would be drab. The size of the universe and the likelihood of many worlds make the Christian scheme, centred on one small planet, impossible to believe.

14. I.XIV System of the Universe 6 min 6

    A popular account of the solar system: six planets revolving round the Sun at distances given in millions of miles, the tilt of the Earth causing the seasons, and the fixed stars, which Paine thinks are probably suns with systems of their own. Space, he concludes, is filled with systems of worlds.

15. I.XV Advantages of the Existence of Many Worlds in Each Solar System 3 min 2

    All our science comes from watching the planets’ revolutions; had their matter formed one globe, there would be no such motions to teach us. So the Creator arranged the universe for man’s benefit, and for the inhabitants of every world, all of whom share the same school of science in a “society of worlds”.

16. I.XVI Application of the Preceding to the System of the Christians 4 min 1

    How could a God of millions of worlds leave them all to die on this one because a man and a woman ate an apple, or does every world have its own Eve, serpent and redeemer? Systems of religion that contradict the evidence of creation must be false. Christianity may have begun as a pious fraud, then hardened into belief kept up by those who lived by preaching it, which explains the church’s persecution of science.

17. I.XVII Of the Means Employed in All Time, and Almost Universally, to Deceive the Peoples 18 min 4

    The three means of imposing on mankind are mystery, miracle and prophecy. Everything in nature is a mystery in one sense, but moral truth is never mysterious, and religion must be intelligible to all. Since we do not know nature’s limits, and balloons, electricity and stage illusions look miraculous, miracles prove nothing; it is always more probable that a reporter lies than that nature leaves its course. Prophecy, originally poetry, is so obscure that it fits anything. All three belong to fabulous religion and make religion a trade.

18. Recapitulation 3 min 4

    Paine sums up Part I: a word of God in print or speech is impossible, given the mutability of language and the possibility of fraud; the creation is the real word of God; and moral duty consists in imitating God’s goodness to all creatures, so persecution and cruelty to animals are wrong. He expects to exist after death. All religions agree on God; a universal religion would mean shedding their additions. Adam was a deist, but everyone has a right to their own worship.

19. Preface to Part II 8 min 9

    Paine explains why he wrote Part I in haste at the end of 1793, as the Terror turned against foreigners in the Convention, and describes his arrest, his imprisonment in the Luxembourg, the fever that he believed saved him from Robespierre’s list, and his return to the Convention. He dismisses the clerical replies to Part I and announces that, now supplied with a Bible, he will meet them on the ground they confused: not what the Bible teaches, but whether its books are authentic at all.

20. II.I The Old Testament 2 h 21 min 39

    Paine examines the Old Testament book by book, using its own chronology and internal evidence. Phrases such as “unto this day”, the place-name Dan and the list of Edomite kings show, he argues, that Genesis to Samuel were written long after the men they are named for. He condemns the massacres the books ascribe to God’s command, tallies the errors in Ezra’s census, treats Job, Jonah and parts of Proverbs as gentile works, dates part of Isaiah after the Exile, reads Isaiah 7:14 as a sign to Ahaz, and dismisses the prophets as poets, partisans and fortune-tellers.

21. II.II The New Testament 1 h 6 min 26

    Turning to the New Testament, Paine accepts that Jesus probably lived but attacks the gospel story. The conflicting genealogies, the massacre of the innocents found only in Matthew, and the irreconcilable accounts of the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension show, he argues, that the writers were neither eyewitnesses nor conspirators but compilers of legend. He explains the appearances as a ghost story, attributes the canon to a church seeking power and revenue, rejects Paul’s bodily resurrection for an immortality of consciousness, and restates his deist creed.

22. II.III Conclusion 26 min 11

    Paine concludes that revelation, even if possible, binds only its recipient, and that revealed religion has caused the persecutions and religious wars of history. He rejects the Gospel’s commands to love enemies and turn the other cheek as impossible morality, praises the Quakers as the one non-persecuting sect, and calls Christianity an engine of despotism and priestly avarice. True religion is deism: God known through the creation and the principles of science, with every church to become a school of science and every opinion left free.