Thomas Paine who was a dynamic philosophical presence in the American Revolution of 1776 wrote his last book in 1795 on an investigation and commentary of organized religion with a focus on Christianity. Paine said that his "religious duties" included doing justice, loving benevolence, and attempting to make others happy. He called himself a deist which is a person who believes in the existence of a God based on the evidence of reason and nature but not on supernatural revelation. In this book he outlines deism as a rational religious belief and offers an analysis of the Bible based on textual content. He makes comparisons of the internal arguments of the Old and New Testaments by explaining, for example, inconsistencies of the biographic accounts in the four gospels.…
"Simply put, this book excoriates the idea that any religious book was written by God. They were all written by man, and while many of them have excellent principles, they are principles that any man can discern through his own reason. You don’t have to have all these supernatural events. He specifically mentions the Hebrew Bible , the Christian Bible and the Koran – the big three. These sacred books were written by man, and they can only be understood in terms of the period of history in which they were written. That’s all The Age of Reason is about, but it lost Paine all his positive fame. He was one of the most famous people in America because of his writing, which galvanized the colonists during the Revolutionary War . He lost all of that as a result of writing The Age of Reason , and he does die alone. No church cemetery will allow him to be buried there. The only religion he ever really admired were the Quakers and even the Quaker cemetery in New Rochelle New York wouldn’t let him be buried there. The Age of Reason ought to be uncontroversial today, but it’s not in America, simply because there are these 25% of Americans who believe that the Bible is literally true and that it was written by God. That’s the strange thing. The Age of Reason was on the Catholic Church’s index forever when there was an index, but I don’t think anybody would think much of it today in Europe. The idea that the Bible wasn’t something written by God is something that’s accepted by the vast majority of Christians. One of the things that’s useful about The Age of Reason – if you’re interested in the history of atheism – is that it really lays out the ground on which this battle was fought in the age of the Enlightenment. That’s really where the battle was joined. It lays out the grounds with its exploration of the Bible and who actually wrote it, and how it contradicts itself. He wasn’t the only one who did it, but he was the first to lay it out in large measure."
