A Reason for Paine

     Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, was quite honestly a “paine” to read. Although it is a great representation of the language of the time, and his writing can be observed to be a type of beautiful, I had, at times, difficulty grasping the main concepts. The biggest ideas or themes that I found to be prevalent in The Age of Reason, were Paine’s bias against organized religion, the value and authenticity of the Bible including his problem with revelation, and his advocacy of deism. His bias against organized religion stemmed from the fact that any organization or group created by man cannot be equivalent to teachings of God. Most of Paine’s arguments do have adequate evidence and make sense, however, because he is so confident of his opinions, his arguments can come off as one-sided and arrogant.  He preaches that organized religion has its root in money and making its members feel guilty. His deep-rooted and obvious disdain for the Bible is perfectly shown towards the end of the text where he cites, “the stupid Bible of the church that teaches nothing,” (111), “stupid tests of the Bible,” (112), and, “only stupid sermons can be preached,” (112). It was almost childish to me to see such a profound writer basically throw a fit about how “stupid” he believes the Bible to be in the conclusion of the text. It is almost like he is so frustrated with the fact that people do believe in the things he is so against, that he tries to make it seem like the absolute most ludicrous thing in existence. 

     However, possibly contradicting myself, as Paine does a tad bit throughout his work, I can somewhat agree with his theories on revelation. Although it seems completely impossible to me that God should have to reveal himself or his teachings to us to have it truly be called revelation, I can agree that many true revelations could have been very much skewed through word of mouth. This concept reminded me of the game of “whisper-down-the-lane” in which a person thinks of a sentence and whispers it to the person next to them, after the sentence has been whispered all the way down to the very last person, almost every time the group finds that the sentence has been completely changed through the mishearing of re-telling the original. I do believe it is hard to have faith in a Bible written by many authors through many different recapitulations of events that occurred thousands of years ago. Revelation is supposed to be directly from God to man so I can understand how it is hard to define the stories told by the person who it was revealed to, to those who it wasn’t revealed to, to still be termed revelation. 

     Paine makes a lot of statements concerning the true God or higher-power of Creation. I certainly agree that the wonders and true mechanics of Nature and the Creation can be evidence of a higher-power. This deism that Paine promotes is something he has structured his beliefs and life around through the many experiences and research he has made in these subjects. I think that conscience can be inherently in us when we are born but it is first formed and shaped by our primary teachers, our parents. Our conscious is affected by everything our parents show us and teach us and as we grow, experience life, and learn of the acceptable aspects of society, our conscious is again shaped by what we want and what we receive from our culture and society. If a person grows up learning nothing of religion, is still a good person, and then the culture he or she moves into is all about a specific religion or way of thinking, that person may completely change based on what he or she wants or what he or she agrees with. 

     This text applies to our life and to class by representing further ideas about religion in our Ways of Knowing (Faith) section. Religion has always been one of those very debatable topics that is on the same side as Politics, topics that people are very personal about because they may rule their lives by what they are confident in to be true. However, I will always be a strong advocate for knowledge. I believe that no one should truly be able to have strong opinions about one side before being able to understand and be fully aware of all sides. For Religion, and for culture as well, it adds to a well-rounded individual to be knowledgeable on every possible option or belief, to simply be able to have an open-mind and better understand people who may have completely different backgrounds than you. One last point that I have sincerely taken away from The Age of Reason, is reason. I agree with Thomas Paine in that everything one believes in should contain a certain amount of reason behind it. It is difficult to trust in anything without sufficient foundation on which the “why?” and “how?” are based upon. There are questions that should always be answered but there are also questions that may never be answered, it will forever depend upon how much a person wants, needs, or cares about that aspect of his or her life or society.