Tom Paine was a worker and commoner. He spoke and wrote from a particular experience, that of an English artisan at the onset of industrialization. He was, too, a planetary revolutionary—indeed, he helped give meaning to the term—and as such his writing is hugely significant for the twenty-first century. If we were to compare him to any contemporary figure, it would be Che Guevara. He asserted aspiration, possibility, the unheard of. He breathed the warmth of human agency to frigid hierarchies of power. The phrase “world revolutionary” might have several meanings—a sailor of the seven seas, a scientist of the universal mind, a philosophe in the republic of letters, a journeyman on the move.
... his uncompromising condemnation of all the world’s religions. In “The Age of Reason,” published in 1794 and 1795, Paine wrote, “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.” Theodore Roosevelt once called Paine a “filthy little atheist,” but Paine did believe in God; he just didn’t believe in the Bible or the Koran or the Torah; these he considered hearsay, lies, fables, and frauds that served to wreak havoc with humanity while hiding the beauty of God’s creation, the evidence for which was everywhere obvious in “the universe we behold.”
In “The Age of Reason,” Paine offered his own creed:
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.
But . . . 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.
“Paine’s religious opinions were those of three-fourths of the men of letters of the last age,” Joel Barlow observed, probably overstating the case only slightly. Paine’s views were hardly original; what was new was his audience. While other Enlightenment writers wrote for one another, Paine wrote, as always, for everyone. His contemporaries believed that radical philosophical speculation—especially critiques of religion—was to be shared only with men of education (and, it was assumed, judgment). The poor could not be trusted with such notions; freed of church-based morality, they would run amok. Paine disagreed, profoundly. To say that he was vilified for doing this is to miss the point. He was destroyed.
Mark Twain once said, “It took a brave man before the Civil War to confess he had read ‘The Age of Reason.’ ” But that didn’t mean it wasn’t read. In 1797 alone, a single Philadelphia printer sold a hundred thousand copies. In Britain, sales of “The Age of Reason” outpaced even those of “Rights of Man,” though, since it was banned as blasphemous, it’s impossible to know how many copies were sold. The London printer Richard Carlile, who called his bookstore the Temple of Reason, was fined a thousand pounds for publishing it, and sentenced to two years in jail. (During an earlier trial on similar charges, Carlile had read aloud from “Rights of Man,” a ploy that allowed him to publish it again, as a courtroom transcript.)
After Carlile’s wife fell into the trap of selling “The Age of Reason” to a government agent posing as a bookstore browser, she—and her newborn baby—followed her husband to prison. Eventually, in order to avoid exposing anyone inside the bookstore to further prosecution, there appeared in the Temple of Reason an “invisible shopman,” a machine into which customers could drop coins and take out a book, about which Collins writes, “It is sobering to think that the freedom of the press once depended upon a mechanism now used to vend Mars bars.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016crbo_books#ixzz1qAbMGaVv
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