The Age of Reason

The Guardian yesterday had a picture of Ian Paisley laughing like a loon, with Martin McGuinness standing next to him smiling rather more stiffly and uneasily.

So Northern Ireland now has for First Minister a Biblical fundamentalist who forty years ago came to public attention as a loud-mouthed anti-Catholic bigot, and who once led a campaign to ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’.

My father, an English fundamentalist Protestant, sincerely admired Ian Paisley. If he were still alive, I know what he would have seen in this: the Hand of God working out the Divine Purpose.

When I was in the sixth form at school, my father gave me a copy of William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity (1794). He had decided that since he was saddled with an intellectual daughter, the only way to convince her of the errors of her atheistic ways was through the logic of an eighteenth-century Protestant philosopher. I am oddly touched by that. I still have his copy of Paley on my shelves. It stands next to Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, published in the same year.

Paine was a supporter of the American Revolution, and a major intellectual influence on the revolutionaries in France. So far as religion went, he was a pure deist. This is part of his profession of faith at the start of The Age of Reason:

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 endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

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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.

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One of the problems my father had in his attempts to ‘convert’ me was that I knew the Bible extremely well – my upbringing had seen to that – and by the time I reached my teens I was reading it critically. I did not know Paine’s writings then; I think that if my father had found them in the house he would probably have burnt them in the back garden. However, I know I would have found them liberating. This is Paine on the Old Testament:

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

( More on the Old Testament )

And on the divinity of Jesus:

It is, however, not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the Son of God. He was born when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing at that time to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds; the story therefore had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, and no more, and who had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the story.

Incidentally, Paine thought that the American Revolution had set up the necessary conditions for the people to repudiate religious revelations:

( Paine on religion in post-revolutionary America )

Thomas Paine (1737–1809)

from The Age of Reason (1794)


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