Summary by James R. Martin, Ph.D., CMA
Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida
Churches, God and
Religion Main | Political Issues Main
Editor's Introduction:
The first part of The Age of Reason was written in 1793, but it was suppressed and no copy with that date can be found in France or elsewhere. Shortly after he finished Part One, Paine was arrested and placed in prison. Part Two was written in 1795 and published with Part One in 1796.
Part One:
Chapter 1: The Author's Profession of Faith
Paine makes it clear right away that he believes in God, but not in the religious dogma of the various organized religions. He states his beliefs as follows: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy." ..."I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." Paine expressed concern for what he referred to as the adulterous connection of church and state and appeared to be hopeful that "Human inventions and priest-craft would be detected; and that man would return to the pure, unmixed, and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more."
Chapter II: Of Missions and Revelations
Every religion has established itself by pretending some special mission of God communicated to certain individuals (e.g., Moses, Jesus, Mahomet). This is presented as a way to connect to God not already available to everyone alive. Each of these churches or religions shows certain books they refer to as revelations, or the word of God. Paine says he does not believe any of them. Paine argues that, "It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us second hand, either verbally or in writing." However, it was not difficult to see why Jesus was accepted by many as a celestially begotten son of God since the intercourse of gods with women was well established in heathen mythology. For example, Jupiter had supposedly cohabited with hundreds of women, and most of the extraordinary men in the heathen mythology were reputed to be sons of some god. The trinity of gods was a reduction of about twenty of thirty thousand. Paine ends this chapter with the following: "The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud."
Chapter III: Concerning The Character of Jesus Christ
Paine writes that although Jesus Christ was a virtuous and amiable man who preached a system of morality, he did not write about himself. His historians created him in a supernatural manner and were obliged to take him out in the same manner. Paine argues that a thing that everybody is required to believe requires proof and evidence of it that is available to all. That evidence was never given. Instead a few people (8 or 9) were introduced as proxies for the whole world, to say they saw the resurrection of a dead person from the grave, and all the rest of the world are called upon to believe it. Paine goes on to say, "The story, so far as relates to the supernatural part, has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it."
Chapter IV: Of the Bases of Christianity
The Christian mythologists created a fable that Satan made war against the Almighty, who defeated him and confined him in a pit. It is based on the fable of Jupiter and the race of Giants that was told many hundred years before where Jupiter confined the Giant under the volcano Mount Etna. But the Christian mythologists let Satan out and he showed up in the garden of Eden in the form of a snake and had a familiar conversation with Eve who was apparently not surprised to hear a snake talk. Satan convinced Eve to eat an apple and dams all mankind. The Christian mythologists bring the two ends of their fable together where Jesus the celestially begotten God and man was purposely sacrificed because Eve had dammed all mankind by eating an apple.
Chapter V: Examination in Detail of the Preceding Bases
According to the Christian fable, Satan has a power equally as great, if not greater, than the Almighty. After his fall he becomes omnipresent. "The more unnatural anything is, the more is it capable of becoming the object of blind and dismal admiration."
Chapter VI: Of The True Theology
Paine argues that Christianity has become popular in many countries and needs to be investigated
Chapter VII: Examination of The Old Testament
There is no evidence of authority for believing the books of the Old Testament are The Word of God. More than half of The Old Testament includes obscene stories, voluptuous debaucheries, cruel and torturous executions, and unrelenting vindictiveness. It is more consistent with the word of a demon than the Word of God, and it has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. Since there is no universal language, translation is necessary with mistakes of copyists, printers, and willful alterations. "... human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. - The Word of God exists in something else."
Chapter VIII: Of The New Testament
If the purpose of Jesus Christ was to establish a new religion, he would have undoubtedly written it himself. The first four books (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) do not give a history of the life of Jesus and they were all written after his death. There is no account of Jesus for about sixteen years. It does not appear that he was educated and he probably could not write. The New Testament indicates that the church has developed a system of religion that is very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears. Christianity is a religion of pomp and revenue pretending to imitate a person whose life was humility and poverty. Paine continues in this chapter to question the doctrine of redemption.
Chapter IX: In What The True Revelation Consists
According to Paine The Word of God is the creation we behold. The idea that God sent Jesus to bring the glad tidings to all nations is consistent with what was believed at that time, i.e., that the earth was flat and that a man could walk to the end of it. But Jesus Christ could speak only one language (Hebrew) and the world includes several hundred languages. Human language is not a universal language and is incapable of being used as a way to spread The Word of God.
Chapter X: Concerning God, And The Lights Cast On His Existence and Attributes by The Bible
Paine writes that the only idea that relates to the name of God is a first cause, the cause of all things. Man calls the first cause God. Things do not cause themselves, so there must be a God. (Note: The problem with this argument is that it leads to the question or regress as to what caused God? See the Dawkins (Chapter 3), and Miller (Chapter 12) summaries below for more on this point. The counter argument is that God is an uncaused supernatural being and therefore not subject to the regress. Miller appears to agree with the counter argument, but Dawkins says the argument that God is immune to the regress is unwarranted.)
Chapter XI: Of The Theology of The Christians; And The True Theology
According to Paine, Christianity appears to be a species of atheism because it believes in a man, or man-ism rather than God. It is the study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning God. "It is not the study of God himself in the works that he has made, but in the works or writings that man has made; and not among the least of the mischiefs that the Christian system has done to the world, that it has abandoned the original and beautiful system of theology, like a beautiful innocent, to distress and reproach, to make room for the hag of superstition." All of our knowledge of science is derived from the study of the true theology that God has displayed in the structure of the universe.
Chapter XII: The Effects of Christianism On Education; Proposed Reforms
The Christian system of faith created a revolution in the state of learning, and education became the study of dead languages. This system including the account of the creation, the idea of a man-god, the idea of the death of a god, the idea of a family of gods, and the idea that three gods are one are all irreconcilable to the divine gift of reason and to the knowledge that man gains from the sciences by studying the structure of the universe that God made. It resulted in the rejection of science in the Christian schools and caused discoveries of the universe (e.g., by Virgilius and Galileo) to be viewed as irreligious practices and heresy. The age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system of revealed religion.
Chapter XIII: Comparison Of Christianism With The Religious Ideas Inspired By Nature
Paine writes that he questioned the truth of the Christian system as a boy and could not understand why God would kill his son, or the mythology of five deities; God the father, God the son, God the Holy Ghost, the God Providence, and the Goddess of Nature. Telling a child that the Father put his son to death, or employed people to do it to make mankind happier and better makes the story worse. How different this is he says from the concept of Deism professed by the Quakers. The implication of the Christian system is that the earth is the whole of the habitable creation. Knowing that there is a plurality of worlds at least as numerous as the stars renders the Christian system of faith small and ridiculous.
Chapter XIV: System Of The Universe
Paine explains our solar system in this chapter and speculates that each of the stars represents a Sun and another system of worlds or planets too remote for us to discover.
Chapter XV: Advantages Of The Existence Of Many Worlds In Each Solar System
The idea in this chapter appears to be that the universe provides the opportunity to gain a great deal more scientific knowledge than a solitary world or solar system would provide by itself, and that the universe was created for the benefit of man.
Chapter XVI: Applications Of The Preceding To The System Of The Christians
The Christian system of faith is developed around the idea of one world. Why would the Almighty with millions of worlds come to die in our world because one man and one woman had eaten an apple? Those who first preached the Christian system might defend the practice by saying it was better than the heathen mythology that prevailed at the time. But it continued and was encouraged by the interest of those who made a livelihood by preaching it. This led to the church's continued persecution against the sciences for hundreds of years even though the system could not be maintained against the evidence that the structure of the universe affords.
Chapter XVII: Of the Means Employed In All Time, And Almost Universally, To Deceive The Peoples
This chapter includes a discussion of what Paine describes as the three principal means that have been used to impose upon mankind: Mystery, Miracle, and Prophecy. Setting up a system of religion incompatible with the word of God required a word to bar all questions and speculations. The word Mystery served that purpose to bewilder the mind. The idea of a Miracle extends that to puzzle the senses.
A Miracle is something that is contrary to the operation of natural laws. However, nothing could be more inconsistent than to believe that God would use miracles to support his intended doctrine when those who relate them would be suspected of lying. It degrades the Almighty into a character of a show-man playing tricks to amuse and make people wonder. The question arises whether it is more probable that nature would suspend her own laws, or that the person who related the miracle would lie? Truth does not need the crutch.
Prophecy we are to believe involves a man the Almighty chooses to communicate some event that would occur in the future. However, all of the things called prophecies in the Old Testament are so equivocal as to fit almost any circumstance that might happen afterwards. Nobody could know whether the prophecy was known before hand, or a guess, or accidental. "A prophet, therefore, is a character that is useless and unnecessary. Mystery, Miracle, and Prophecy have been used to turn religion into a trade.
Recapitulation
The idea that the word of God exist in print is inconsistent because there is no universal language, languages are mutable, translations are subject to errors, the word could be suppressed, altered, or totally fabricated and imposed upon the world. The creation is the real Word of God, and the moral duty of man consist of imitating the moral goodness and benevolence of God manifested in the creation towards all creatures. Persecution and revenge between men and every cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty.
Part Two:
Preface
Paine explains why he wrote the first part of the book and says that he has found the Bible (Old Testament) and Testament (New Testament) to be much worse books than he had conceived. His only errors in the first part were probably speaking better about them than they deserved.
Chapter 1: The Old Testament
This is the longest chapter in the book and questions whether there is sufficient authority for believing that the Old Testament is the word of God. The things done in this part of the Bible by the express command of God are shocking to humanity and to the idea we have of moral justice (e.g., the assassination of infants). Believing that these accounts are true requires that we unbelieve all our beliefs in the moral justice of God. In addition to the moral evidence against the Old Testament, Paine argues that there is other evidence. For example the books of the Old Testament are books of testimony of things naturally incredible, rather than other ancient books that do not rely on testimony, but instead on evidence independent of the author. He mentions Euclid's Elements of Geometry as an example. We believe in such works because they are self-evident. Paine continues by criticizing the various books of the Old Testament beginning with the five books of Moses. I will not try to summarize all of that but he says that there is no evidence that Moses wrote them and that they were probably written by pretenders several hundred years after Moses died.
Chapter II: The New Testament
The fable of Jesus Christ begins with a young woman engaged to be married who is debauched by a ghost. The story is very similar to that of Jupiter and Leda, or any of the amorous adventures of Jupiter as mentioned earlier in Part one. The history of Jesus Christ is contained in four books and they contain some glaring contradictions that show that the story of Jesus Christ is false. Matthew provides a genealogy by name from David through Christ including twenty-eight generations. Luke provides another genealogy by name from David to Christ including forty-three generations in which there are only two names that are alike in the two lists. The presumption is that these books were not written by Matthew and Luke and that they were written by unconnected individuals who were not living together and many years after the things they pretend to relate.
The story of the angel announcing the immaculate conception in Mark and John is also different from that described in Matthew and Luke. Two books indicate the angel appeared to Joseph, the other two say it appeared to Mary. The time when Jesus was crucified is also different in Mark and John. The accounts of the circumstances of the crucifixion are different in the four books. Some mention an earthquake, graves opening, dead men walking out and others are silent on those points. The various accounts of the resurrection also include disagreements or contradictions about what took place including where the angels were and what they said, the sealing of the grave, the guard, the watch, when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came etc.
The accounts of what happened after the resurrection are also different. According to Matthew, the eleven marched to Galilee to meet Jesus in a mountain, but according to John they were assembled in another place for fear of the Jews. Luke says that the meeting was in Jerusalem the same day that Christ rose and that the eleven were there. Paine goes on in several more pages to add more evidence. For example, very little is said about the ascension into heaven (Luke and Mark mention it but there is nothing about it in Matthew and John). Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are full of glaring absurdities, contradictions, and falsehoods.
Chapter III: Conclusion
The use of the term revelation in the Old and New Testaments is an absurd misapplication of the word since referring to anything that man has been the actor or witness to is not a revelation. Paine writes, "When it is revealed to me, I will believe it to be revelation; but it is not and cannot be incumbent upon me to believe it to be revelation before; neither is it proper that I should take the word of man as the word of God, and put man in the place of God." Paine says he totally disbelieves that the Almighty ever communicated anything to man, by any mode of speech, in any language, or by any kind of vision, or appearance, or by any means other than the universal display of himself in the works of the creation. Religious wars arose from this thing called revealed religion and the monstrous belief that God has spoken to man. Deism teaches us all that is necessary or proper to be known. "The creation is the Bible of the deist."
"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of power it serves the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests; but so far as respects the good of man in general, it leads to nothing here or hereafter.
"The only religion that has not been invented, and that has in it every evidence of divine originality, is pure and simple deism."
"The study of theology as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and admits of no conclusion. Not any thing can be studied as a science without our being in possession of principles upon which it is founded; and as this is not the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing."
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Related summaries:
Dawkins, R. 2008. The God Delusion. A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company. (Summary).
Hornsey, M. J. and K. S. Fielding. 2017. Attitude roots and Jiu Jitsu persuasion: Understanding and overcoming the motivated rejection of science. American Psychologist 72(5): 459-473. (Summary).
Kenrick, D. T., A. B. Cohen, S. L. Neuberg and R. B. Cialdini. 2018. The science of antiscience thinking. Scientific American (July): 36-41. (Summary).
Martin, J. R. Not dated. Religious Affiliations Surveys 1972-2018 (Summary).
Miller, E. L. 1992. Questions That Matter: An Invitation To Philosophy, Third Edition. McGraw-Hill, Inc. (Summary).
Prothero, S. 2007. Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - And Doesn't. Harper San Francisco. (Summary).