The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine (read aloud books TXT) 📗

After this we have the childish stories of three or four other dreams; about Joseph going into Egypt; about his coming back again; about this, and about that: and this story of dreams has thrown Europe into a dream for more than a thousand years. All the efforts that nature, reason, and conscience, have made to awaken man from it, have been ascribed by priestcraft and superstition to the workings of the devil; and had it not been for the American revolution, which by establishing the universal right of conscience, first opened the way to free discussion, and for the French revolution which followed, this religion of dreams had continued to be preached, and that after it had ceased to be believed. Those who preached it and did not believe it, still believed the delusion necessary. They were not bold enough to be honest, nor honest enough to be bold.

Every new religion, like a new play, requires a new apparatus of dress and machinery, to fit the new characters it creates. The story of Christ in the New Testament brings a new being upon the stage, which it calls the Holy Ghost; and the story of Abraham the father of the Jews, in the Old Testament, gives existence to a new order of beings it called angels. There was no Holy Ghost before the time of Christ, nor angels before the time of Abraham. We hear nothing of these winged gentlemen, till more than two thousand years, according to the Bible chronology, from the time they say the heavens, the earth, and all therein were made. After this, they hop about as thick as birds in a grove. The first we hear of pays his addresses to Hagar in the wilderness; then three of them visit Sarah; another wrestles a fall with Jacob: and these birds of passage, having found their way to earth and back, are continually coming and going. They eat and drink, and up again to heaven. What they do with the food they carry away in their bellies the Bible does not tell us.

One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as Scripture religion is, could never have obtained credit; yet we have seen what priestcraft and fanaticism could do, and credulity believe.

From angels in the Old Testament we get to prophets, to witches, to seers of visions, and dreamers of dreams, and sometimes we are told, as in 1 Samuel, 9:15, that God whispers in the ear. At other times we are not told how the impulse was given, or whether sleeping or waking. In 2 Samuel 24:1, it is said, “And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, to say, Go number Israel and Judah.” And in 1 Chronicles, 21:1, when the same story is again related, it is said, “And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.”

Whether this was done sleeping or waking we are not told, but it seems that David, whom they call “a man after God’s own heart,” did not know by what spirit he was moved; and as to the men called inspired penmen, they agree so well about the matter, that in one book they say that it was God, and in the other that it was the devil.

Yet this is the trash the church imposes upon the world as the word of God! this is the collection of lies and contradictions called the Holy Bible! this is the rubbish called revealed religion!

The idea that the writers of the Old Testament had of a God was boisterous, contemptible, and vulgar. They make him the Mars of the Jews, the fighting God of Israel, the conjuring God of their priests and prophets. They still tell us many fables of him as the Greeks told of Hercules.

They put him against Pharaoh, as it were to box with him; and as Moses carries the challenge, they make their God to say, insultingly, “I will get me honor upon Pharaoh, and upon his host, upon his chariots, and upon his horsemen.” And that he may keep his word, they make him set a trap in the Red Sea, in the dead of the night, for Pharaoh, his host, and his horses, and drown them as a rat-catcher would do so many rats. Great honor indeed! The story of Jack the Giant-killer is better told.

They match him against the Egyptian magician to conjure with him; and after bad conjuring on both sides (for where there is no great contest, there is no great honor), they bring him off victorious. The three first essays are a dead match; each party turns his rod into a serpent, the rivers into blood, and creates frogs; but upon the fourth, the God of the Israelites obtains the laurel⁠—he covers them all over with lice! The Egyptian magicians cannot do the same, and this lousy triumph proclaims the victory.

They make their God to rain fire and brimstone upon Sodom and Gomorrah, and belch fire and smoke upon mount Sinai, as if he were the Pluto of the lower regions. They made him salt up Lot’s wife like pickled pork; they make him pass, like Shakespeare’s Queen Mab, into the brains of their priests, prophets, and prophetesses, and tickle them into dreams, and after making him play all kind of tricks, they confound him with Satan, and leave us at a loss to know what God they meant.

This is the descriptive God of the Old Testament; and as to the New, though the authors of it have varied the scene, they continued the vulgarity.

Is man ever to be the dupe of priestcraft, the slave of superstition? Is he never to have just ideas of his Creator? It is better not to believe that there is a God, than to believe of him falsely. When we behold the mighty