Thomas Paine on Religion - Essay Example

15 November 2007 Thomas Paine on Religion Thomas Paine is one of the prominent political leaders and revolutionists of the 18th century America. During the American Revolution, Thomas Paine was known to every man in the Colonies, and it was looked upon with respect and reverence. He was concerned with the condition of the underdog in the political and economic scheme, and so outspoken about it that he was looked upon as a dangerous disturber who did not have enough sense to keep still, but kept up his braying in season and out of season (Kaye 8). His ideas about religion and its impact on social institutions and citizens, Thomas Paine expressed in the book The Age of Reason. The core of his teaching is deism and personal religion: "My own mind is my own church" (Paine 13). Thomas was born in Thetford on January 29, 1737. His parents lived in the small house on White Hart Street. A photograph of this cottage exists, but the building was torn down in the 1880's. In its place there stands a pretty garden and a fountain. The house had four or five rooms, one of which on the street level was used by Joseph as a shop. His father, Joseph Paine was a commonplace person (Kaye 72). He is described as placid and pious, industrious and poor (Kaye 74). In religious belief and practice he was a Quaker. He lived ten years in France, from 1792 to 1802, took part in the French Revolution and met thousands of Frenchmen, yet he never learned enough French to make a speech in that language, or to say anything at all except the few sentences that were needed in ordering food and commenting on the weather (Great Theosophists: Thomas Paine n.d.). In 1750, he was taken from school to be taught the trade of staymaking. It was a handicraft that required a fairly long apprenticeship. One had to learn the qualities of various fabrics, such as silk, linen and calico. Cutting the cloth was an operation that called for skill, for each pair of stays was an individual product. Tape measurements of the customer were made in the first place, and a pattern was laid out (Kaye 23). After nearly five years in his father's shop Tom Paine ran away. In 1756, he went away again and joined the privateer King of Prussia, commanded by a Captain Mendez. Paine would never say anything about it, but his attitude in respect to this particular exploit is not at all remarkable. He was as reticent about it as about everything that concerned his personal life. On March 26, 1771, he married Elizabeth Ollive. He was then thirty-four and she was ten years younger (Kaye 24). During 1770s, Paine played an active role in the political life of England: he joined officers in Parliament and published his first political article The Case of the Officers of Excise. In 1774, Paine came to America and devoted himself to the revolutionary cause. The most important fact is that Paine was the first author who wrote for the whole American public. During the first six months after its publication about one hundred thousand copies of Common Sense were sold (Larkin 29). His religious ideas and vision of an ideal society Paine expressed in the Agee of Reason. This work consists of three parts appeared in 1794, 1795 and 1807. The first part of the book was written when he was in good health, and without the aid of a Bible; it was meant to shock men into thinking, but compared to the second part it is a model of restraint. It was dedicated to "my Fellow Citizens of the United States," though he was evidently dubious of their enthusiasm for it" (Paine 45). Paine never overlooks an opportunity to humble aristocratic arrogance. He called men to practice the moral virtues, and the belief of one God Larkin 29). Excepting the violent Fundamentalists, no religious person would today be inflamed by reading it. It is ludicrous to suppose that a man of Paine's intense temperament would indulge in flippancy on the brink of eternity (Great Theosophists: Thomas Paine n.d.). The ink had barely dried on his work when the long-expected happened; the guards came to arrest him at three o'clock in the morning, as the authorities wished to make as little stir about it as might be (Larkin 31). Paine did not look upon the Bible as the Word of God, nor did he believe that it had been inspired by God, but that it had been conceived and written by the prophets and apostles as a pious fiction. Paine writes about Jesus Christ: "Nothing that is here said can apply, even with the most distant disrespect, to the real character of Jesus Christ. He was a virtuous and an amiable man" (Paine 23). Paine ridiculed the fictions of the Bible: he believed nevertheless in God, in a future life, and in the eternal kindness and all-embracing love of the Creator (Larkin 41). He believed that the true Word of God is shown only in Nature--in the forests and the fields, in sunshine and rain, in the living creatures of the earth, and he calls the choicest gift of God to man the Gift of Reason. Paine states: In like manner of reasoning, everything we behold carries in itself the internal evidence that it did not make itself. Every man is an evidence to himself that he did not make himself; neither could his father make himself, nor his grandfather, nor any of his race; neither could any tree, plant, or animal make itself; and it is the conviction arising from this evidence that carries us on (Paine 34). Paine warms up on the subject of the prophets; he will not allow them to be coupled with the name of Jesus. Coming to the New Testament, he calms down; the Founder of Christianity, moral, benevolent, and a wholehearted rebel, he has no quarrel with, and he suspects the Roman government of working hand in glove with the Hebrew hierarchy. The miraculous birth was a different story: if an angel revealed it to Joseph and Mary, it was a revelation to them, and they were at liberty to believe it (Larkin 54). Others who had it only on the hearsay of hearsay could take it or leave it. Paine explains: The most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation by that strange means are all fabulous inventions dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty" (Paine 87). The next period of his life deals with Paine's imprisonment. Suffice it to say that after eleven months he came out, a man broken on the wheel. Human misery is an abstraction; a paralyzed body, a suppurating abscess, and a florescence of carbuncles make it tangible and visible. The characters of the Bible heroines he finds unattractive (Larkin 44). Paine states that for the book of Job he can honestly say a good word, though he credits it to the heathen, and not to the Chosen People (Larkin 45). On economic, on moral, and on religious grounds he attacked slavery. It was a disease which would destroy the soul and body of the nation: "Under gospel light all distinctions of nations, and privileges of one above another are ceased. Christians are taught to account all men their neighbors, and love their neighbors as themselves; and do to all men as they would be done by; to do good to all men; and man-stealing is ranked with enormous crimes" (Paine 127). The society which enslaved them must inevitably suffer, for nations no less than individuals can reap only what they have sown (Larkin 46). Paine criticizes revelation: he supposes that those who believed in private verbal messages from the Almighty to mankind had shown a dangerous disposition to deliver them at the point of the bayonet, or through the medium of the civil law (Tichi 202-203). His mind now relieved from the thrall of a desire long suppressed, his very serious physical condition began to show signs of improvement (Paine Thomas, 35833). With the prospect of a good time coming when the church, like the state, should pick up the gauntlet he had thrown down, he was loath to quit the human scene. Paine was domiciled in a Quaker colony where mildness was inculcated as a principle o religion. The government construed that mildness as cowardice, and a happy method of accommodation was not even attempted. On the homeopathic principle that like cures like, it was supposed that colonial grievance would be cured by more grievance. Although the Quakers had definitely withdrawn from the politics of their own colony as a society, they exerted a tremendous influence (Tichi 203). The German settlers were not politically minded and were content to follow the Quaker lead. When the Port of Boston was closed by royal edict, in the hope of starving the Massachusetts rebels into submission, the neighbor colonies came generously to her aid. Virginia sent up grain; sheep were herded up from Connecticut; Pennsylvania contributed nine thousand barrels of flour, besides other necessities (Larkin 87). The Quakers were willing to frustrate the ministerial scheme of starvation and gave bountifully of their substance to relieve the colony where once they had been brutally persecuted, but there they parted company with the others. Their principles would not permit them to requite evil with evil, nor to inflict suffering on the people of England in retaliation for the sins of their government (Ziff 46). Paine frequently professed his profound respect for the Quakers as the only sect which practiced the teachings of Jesus without equivocation, a people so just and moderate that they had tamed the wild men. The insolence of the king in refusing to negotiate enraged him, while the spectacle of the Quakers in continual and humble supplication before the throne of a royal nincompoop excited him to fury against their humility. Paine shares the opinion of Samuel Adams that, "let the consequences be what they may, it is [the king's] unalterable determination to compel the colonies to absolute obedience" (cited Kaye 88). This opinion Paine in time shared, and when the ministry backed up the king's unalterable determination with men and arms, declaring that the differences could only be settled with the sword, his indignation boiled over. It is important to note that the first thirty-seven years of his life had been lived under political and ecclesiastical oppression, which fostered a spirit of rebellion; extreme conservatism is the parent of extreme radicalism. Paine came to America with a sense of injustice in the background of his consciousness; America was peopled by the disaffected of Europe (Kaye 93). Paine attacks religious institutions and the church. He states: The adulterous connection of Church and State, wherever it has taken place . . . has so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow" (Paine 51). He declared that he respected the Quakers above all others, inasmuch as they were the only Christians who had never tortured their fellows in the name of religion. It was only when the methods of the British government for effecting colonial submission became so raw that even Quakers took the warpath that Paine was converted to belief in physical force (Webb 513). The government refused to discuss differences, burned whole towns, and shot men down on their own land. Even then, however, he recognized the right of Quakers to follow the dictates of conscience (Kaye 93; Great Theosophists: Thomas Paine, n.d.). During his lifetime, Paine was often criticized for radial ideas and neglect to the church and religion in general. Following Larkin (2005) the law was stretched out to protect the Bible and destroy its critics; the church served the government, the government stood by the church. Lord Erskine, who defended Paine in The Rights of Man trial, had become, to his great profit, orthodox and conservative. He had lost government patronage by that defense, and never more was guilty of a weakness of the kind. Erskine saw a great light and followed it so faithfully that he had now become Lord Erskine, and to insure his loyalty, prosecuting attorney for the state. The defense threw the prosecution ranks into consternation by serving notice that they would produce the sacred Scriptures in court, and read passages from them. This the prosecution declared was an insult to the dignity and authority of the Court; the King had taken an oath to maintain the Christian religion. His critics laid much stress on the fact that pious and learned men had labored to clear up scriptural obscurities. In his enthusiasm for the new social order Paine was bored by the political agitation. The English people were in perpetual conflict with their government, and sooner or later the differences were "accommodated." Here was a land fresh from the hand of the Creator, a land of new human values, of magnificent possibilities (Larkin 98). In 1797 Paine helped to establish a church in Paris which would make the love of mankind its basic belief and field of action. In association with a number of his friends, he founded in January of that year the church of Theophilanthropy, a name which is compounded of three Greek words meaning God, Love and Man. They called it a church, but it really was an ethical society, and it happens to have been the first one of its kind. Following Kaye (2005): "He has been called a hater of Christ, but the assertion is not sustained by the facts" (121). I agree with Paine's vision and opinion about religion, Jesus Christ and the Bible itself. The opposing points of view have not been effectively stated in certain authoritative pronouncements of the Catholic Church, though it has also considerable support in other religious bodies. In return for its teaching of obedience to civil rulers, the church as the ultimate authority in matters of faith and morals was not entitled to the support of the state in enforcing its decisions. Since church and state claimed, in any particular country, the allegiance of the same people, there was not naturally much interlocking. The administrative service of the Crown was not largely entrusted to ecclesiastics. Many functions now assumed by the state were then dealt with by the church, which was, in a very real sense, a government with numerous civil service of its own. Thus the idea of cooperation between church and state survived and was accepted alike by Catholic and Protestant governments. Thus, it weakens and (weakened) the position of the state and its power. The personal religion plays a crucial role in the state and life of its citizens determining morals and values of people. I agree with Paine's ideas that Christ was a "virtuous and amiable" man, and that his teachings are excellent. Similar to Paine I share the opinion that Christ had been born of a virgin mother or that he was more closely related to God than are people in general. Even today, these facts are not proved remaining a fiction. In general, the ideas shared by Paine took their roots in revolutionary nature of his age and denial of the old values and social traditions. Even today, secular and religious considerations are so entangled in the policies of states that it is not always easy to say how far one or the other is the more influential in proceedings against dissenters. At least in the outward manifestations of religion, is generally regarded as essential to national unity. An individual should have a personal religion but he/she should not be a slave of false traditions and religious teachings. Works Cited 1. Great Theosophists: Thomas Paine. N.d. 2007. 2. Kaye, Harvey J., Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. Hill and Wang, 2005. 3. Larkin, Edward, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005. 4. Paine Thomas. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2004, p. 35833. 5. Paine, Th. The Age of Reason. Citadel; New Ed edition, 1988. 6. Webb, J. Echoes of Paine: Tracing the Age of Reason through the Writings of Emerson. The American Transcendental Quarterly 20 (2006): 513-517. 7. Ziff, L. Revolutionary Rhetoric and Puritanism. Early American Literature 13 (1978): 45-50. 8. Tichi, C. The American Revolution and the New Earth. Early American Literature 11 (1976): 202-210. Read More