Paine's Reasonable Revelation

Thomas Paine's lays down serious truth in "The Age of Reason." Honestly, I had a hard time not agreeing with almost every idea, phrase, and earth-shattering (at the time) idea he posits in this paper. On the whole, it makes sense. A whole lot of sense. But how much good does wielding his heavy hammer of reason, his "most formidable weapon against errors of any kind," (174) against the religious doctrines of the time accomplish for the general population of the world?

One quite contentious point Paine touches is that of revelation: "Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man" (176). Therefore revelation, from Paine's point of view, becomes (or can become) the basis for religious belief. It is a conversation, and because revelation is restricted to a personal conversation between God and man (or a devine monologue bestowed upon the mortal listener), "it is a revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other; and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it" (176). Now this is a novel idea - one that clearly goes against what almost any church would tell its followers. Paine emphasizes this point of 'revelation vs. hearsay' with biblical examples, one of which is Moses and the Israelites. When Moses descended Mount Sinai with the tablets containing the 10 Commandments, "[the Children of Israel] were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so […] The Commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them" (176-7). The Israelites had not heard the word of God, but through Moses. This alone is not cause to suspect Moses of lying, but Paine does show that there exists no logical reason to believe in divinity from the Israelite experience at Sinai. He continues that while the the 10 Commandments don't directly exude divinity, "they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having to recourse to supernatural intervention." Again, this is not evidence of Moses lying to the people of Israel, but a shrewd analysis of documents that most take for granted. He extrapoles from this and other information that all churches are institutions set up to enslave and make profit from mankind.

So why write this diatribe against all organized religion? Does Paine think that with a few strokes of his pen he can change the minds of the masses, that his few thousand words can unbrainwash the believers of the world? Instead, I think that Paine wishes simply to 1. provide his viewpoint on religion, God, and the basis of belief in the world, and 2. show that with a keen eye for logic and reason, anyone can free themselves from indoctrinated thought and think for themselves. He says "I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise. They have the same right to their belief as i have to mine" (175). With all of this hatred for organized religion, Paine still believes in God, but he calls his church his own mind, and he experiences God not in scripture than any man could have written, but "in the scripture called creation" (179). So take it or leave it (I'll take it), this is what he thinks.

The Invention of God

In his piece “The Age of Reason,” Thomas Paine tackles a concept that I have personally always wanted to pursue, but could never accurately articulate it. While the rest of the argument he makes in the piece is the most logical and responsible stance on religion I have heard or read in quite some time, the aspect that intrigued me the most was the way he rationalizes the existence of this spirit humans call God. Religion beyond its ritualistic nature was never stressed in my house, so instead of formulating a belief in God, I tended to be more interested in examining how God came to be. I always wondered if the world would be a different place today had someone many years ago not come up with the idea to identify the force that creates all things as God, a spirit that commands our attention and devotion. Paine explains the creation of God perfectly. He writes, “Every man is an evidence to himself that he did not make himself… and it is the conviction arising from this evidence that carries us on, as it were, by necessity, to the belief of a first cause eternally existing, of a nature totally different to any material existence we know of, and by the power of which all things exist; and this first cause, man calls God,” (180). Every man realizes that his existence depends on something greater than himself. This fact urges men to seek answers to the question of creation and why he is here. Long ago, near the birth of humankind, someone chose to call that which allowed human beings to exist God. Since then, people have clamored to appease God because of what we have turned the notion of God into. Rather than God being the name for the energy and matter and process through which we exist, human beings turned God into a mode by which other human beings can be controlled and urged to behave in a favorable manner. The invention of God, Paine argues, was perhaps the most innovative and successful business and method of indoctrination ever invented. To reference a divine, all-knowing power is to win every argument that could ever arise. God can be used to prove anything, which takes the responsibility to behave morally or ethically completely out of the hands of human beings themselves. It is interesting to imagine how easily the concept of God could have never materialized, and where we would be today had it not. I, for one, believe we would be far better off without it.