The Age of Reason

In my humble opinion, The Age of Reason is a magnificient literary work that has shaped the idealogy of modern society as we know it. Paine does an outstanding job of higlighting the concepts of God, Christianity, Nature, and Deism. As Common Sense is an argument against the British's rule over the early colonists, The Age of Reason is an argument against the validity of organized religion. While reading the text, although being puzzled at times due to the old style of writing, I could not help but concur with Paine on many issues. With that said, The Age of Reason is certainly not devoid of shortcomings as there were examples of bias, lack of knowledge, and inconsistencies. All in all I feel that Paine wrote a superlative piece of revolutionary work that challenged an established creed during his time while simultaneously introducing a radical intellectual theory which is Deism.

Throughout Paine's text, I agreed the most with perhaps his views of revalation  as well as nature/science. A revalation in a religious sense is when an idividual is informed of something directly from God. Therefore one should not have an inclination to subscribe to a certain creed simply because he is told of God's word from another individual or church. This person would not have the same luxury of receiving a revelation from God as an individual such as Moses did. Based on this rationale the Bible therefore cannot be a medium for conveying God's because it  too is not a revalation. Because parts of it had been elected from church members, it is not a message directly from God to man. This line of thought from Paine only seemed logical to me; I should not have to believe in something solely because another told me that it was true. However as I previoulsy mentioned, it was apparant that throughout the text that Paine harbored a bias towards the Bible and Christianity as a whole. Throughout the text, Paine refers to the Bible as "stupid". He even goes as far to say that the Bible must be "the word of a demon, rather than the word of God" on pg. 56. He also states that he does not own a copy of the Bible which causes the reader to question the credibility of his accusations. The occurence of these shortcomings throughout the text are unfortunate as they blemish an otherwise exemplary critical analysis on Christianity.

Thomas Paine was a very intelligent man. He was also talented at getting his intellectual point across to others. Paine spoke of a theology in his text and how an understanding of God's true word helps man better understand his surrounding environment. Paine reasons that Earth cannot be the focal point of the universe as there must be other planets occupied by sentient life. Paine reasons that if every niche on the Earth, is occupied by life then because of the sheer vastness of the universe, life of  some form must be present throughout it. Paine says that the church does not want the public to be educated on such views because they challenge the creed which they preach which he believes are fabricated by the church and bear no accuracy. He goes on to say that because of this, education is centered around the learning of dead languages rather then science. Although I believe in Paine's ideas of science I could not help but notice a glaring contradiction he made. Paine states on pg. 75 that "scientific learning that now exists, came to us from the Greeks, or the people who spoke the Greek language." However on the next page, he states that he thinks that the study of the dead languages should be abolished. If the basis of our scientific knowledge was translated from the Greeks, wouldn't it seem prudent to foster an eductaion of the dead languages to perhaps uncover important pieces of information? Although this slightly confused me, this does not take away on what he says of true theology or the Church's motive of concealing the study of science.

I feel that Paine made some very radical claims for his time period. Although they are not flawless, I feel that they are logically sound and stimulated a new age of rational belief.