I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine[1]
Americans know Paine as the writer of Common Sense (1776), a rousing defense of American independence. That book and his other writings for human rights and individual freedoms made Paine a hero of the American Revolution.
But unlike his friends George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin, Paine kept demanding more revolutions even after the Americans won theirs. In 1787, he sailed for England and eventually began agitating for greater human rights there. When his 1791 book The Rights of Man attacked (among other things) the British monarchy, the English government charged Paine with treason. Paine fled to France, which was fighting its own revolution.
There may have been something heady for Paine about living in the country of d’Holbach and company. That’s where he wrote The Age of Reason. The book came out in two parts -- the first in 1794, the second in 1796 -- and was an all-out attack on organized religion:
“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish [by Turkish, Paine means Muslim], appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind.”[2]
Paine was especially hard on the main faith of Europe and America:
“Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity.”[3]
And he was no fan of the Good Book:
“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. . . . I sincerely detest it.”[4]
When Paine returned to America in 1802, he found that his countrymen no longer remembered him as a hero but instead shunned him for denouncing their faith. He died seven years later, alone and nearly penniless.
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