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

or Nazarenes, who were the first Christians, rejected all the Epistles of Paul, and regarded him as an impostor. They report, among other things, that he was originally a Pagan; that he came to Jerusalem, where he lived some time; and that having a mind to marry the daughter of the high priest, he had himself been circumcised; but that not being able to obtain her, he quarrelled with the Jews and wrote against circumcision, and against the observation of the Sabbath, and against all the legal ordinances.97

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“It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” Genesis 3:15. ↩

Athanasius died, according to the Church chronology, in the year 371. ↩

A fair parallel of the then unknown aphorism of Kant: “Two things fill the soul with wonder and reverence, increasing evermore as I meditate more closely upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” (Kritik Derpraktischen Vernunfe, 1788). Kant’s religious utterances at the beginning of the French Revolution brought on him a royal mandate of silence, because he had worked out from “the moral law within” a principle of human equality precisely similar to that which Paine had derived from his Quaker doctrine of the “inner light” of every man. About the same time Paine’s writings were suppressed in England. Paine did not understand German, but Kant, though always independent in the formation of his opinions, was evidently well acquainted with the literature of the Revolution, in America, England, and France. —⁠Conway ↩

This is an interesting and correct testimony as to the beliefs of the earlier Quakers, one of whom was Paine’s father. —⁠Conway ↩

According to what is called Christ’s sermon on the mount, in the book of Matthew, where, among some other [and] good things, a great deal of this feigned morality is introduced, it is there expressly said, that the doctrine of forbearance, or of not retaliating injuries, was not any part of the doctrine of the Jews; but as this doctrine is found in Proverbs, it must, according to that statement, have been copied from the Gentiles, from whom Christ had learned it. Those men whom Jewish and Christian idolators have abusively called heathen, had much better and clearer ideas of justice and morality than are to be found in the Old Testament, so far as it is Jewish, or in the New. The answer of Solon on the question, “Which is the most perfect popular government,” has never been exceeded by any man since his time, as containing a maxim of political morality, “That,” says he, “where the least injury done to the meanest individual, is considered as an insult on the whole constitution.” Solon lived about 500 years before Christ. ↩

The book called the book of Matthew, says, (3:16,) that “the Holy Ghost descended in the shape of a dove.” It might as well have said a goose; the creatures are equally harmless, and the one is as much a nonsensical lie as the other. Acts 2:2⁠–⁠3, says, that it descended in a mighty “rushing wind,” in the shape of “cloven tongues”: perhaps it was cloven feet. Such absurd stuff is fit only for tales of witches and wizards. ↩

The Bible-makers have undertaken to give us, in the first chapter of Genesis, an account of the creation; and in doing this they have demonstrated nothing but their ignorance. They make there to have been three days and three nights, evenings and mornings, before there was any sun; when it is the presence or absence of the sun that is the cause of day and night⁠—and what is called his rising and setting that of morning and evening. Besides, it is a puerile and pitiful idea, to suppose the Almighty to say, “Let there be light.” It is the imperative manner of speaking that a conjuror uses when he says to his cups and balls, Presto, be gone⁠—and most probably has been taken from it, as Moses and his rod is a conjuror and his wand. Longinus calls this expression the sublime; and by the same rule the conjurer is sublime too; for the manner of speaking is expressively and grammatically the same. When authors and critics talk of the sublime, they see not how nearly it borders on the ridiculous. The sublime of the critics, like some parts of Edmund Burke’s sublime and beautiful, is like a windmill just visible in a fog, which imagination might distort into a flying mountain, or an archangel, or a flock of wild geese. ↩

The councils of Nice and Laodicea were held about 350 years after the time Christ is said to have lived; and the books that now compose the New Testament were then voted for by yeas and nays, as we now vote a law. A great many that were offered had a majority of nays, and were rejected. This is the way the New Testament came into being. ↩

2 Chronicles 28:1. Ahaz was twenty years old when ho began to reign, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem, but he did not that which was right in the sight of tho Lord.⁠—Verse 5. Wherefore the Lord his God delivered him into the hand of tho king of Syria, and they smote him, and carried away a great multitude of them captives, and brought them to Damascus: and he was also delivered into the hand of the king of Israel, who smote him with a great slaughter.⁠—Verse 6. And Pekah, king of Israel, slew in Judah an hundred and twenty thousand in one day.⁠—Verse 8. And the children of Israel carried away captive of their brethren, two hundred thousand women, sons, and daughters. ↩

The word “devil” is a personification of the word “evil.”