860 Paine, Thomas
should utilize their individual abilities for reason in
order to understand and contend with the accepted
expectations society had undoubtedly forced on
them from birth.
LuElla Putnam
JuStIce in The Age of Reason
According to Thomas Paine, the Christian view
of the Bible is unjust toward both the Creator
and humankind. Once, as Christians see it, wrote
Thomas Paine, God revealed certain historical
events only to certain persons, who then set down
as his word the events they had seen, and also the
ways those revelations had appeared to them; these
people’s writings should be accepted as the only
word of God. As Christians see things, according to
Paine, it does not matter that many essential parts
of these tales are borrowed from the non-Christian
world; the different times and circumstances in
which they were written do not matter, either, and
it does not matter how the tales were collected into
a book. What gets lost and added while translating
them into contemporary languages does not matter;
neither does the highly imaginative way the stories
themselves are put, nor one’s own personal view of
them. According to Paine, Christian churches dic-
tate that the Bible should only be read as a historical
record dictated directly to individual persons by God
himself, and whoever reads the Bible that way and
does not then accept what its words claim is either
an infidel or a heretic and, depending on the time
and place, maybe a criminal too.
In Paine’s opinion, the Christian churches use
their most important text, the Bible, to interpret the
relationship between God and a single person, in the
same spirit in which modern political states use their
most important text, a constitution, to interpret the
relationship between one person and another per-
son. To him, that spirit is called Unreason.
Paine saw things like this: The state is going to
assume that its citizens will act unreasonably toward
each other, and more often than they do already, if
the state does not threaten them with punishments,
which they did not personally agree to in advance,
under laws they might not even know about; and
in the meantime, those citizens have handed over
their political liberty in trust to that state, as a
guarantee of their rights against any violation of
them by their fellow citizens. Paine believed that
the state assumes its citizens quite naturally desire
to harm each other, and he accepted such pessi-
mism, because it can be influenced in this direction
or that by political or, at least, worldly means. But
as Paine had it, the Christian church assumes in the
same way that God sees members of humankind as
treating each other with the very same selfishness
and ill will, even when the state’s dictates subside
for a moment and we are left to ourselves in silence;
and so God has breathed his word into them, that
they may have orders to follow even then. Accord-
ing to either the modern state or the Christian
church, Paine felt, humankind falls into error
when not directed and threatened from above; and
the result to him was that any person who is not
watching another with the modern state’s eyes is
watching with the Christian God’s.
Belief in the Christian God is unjust because
it puts evil on a par with the Creator, outside and
opposite, rather than as part of the Creator, wrote
Paine; and it is unjust because it takes the senses
and imagination and heart out of the Creator’s
relationship with humans—takes all of the Creation
out. Paine argued that it is reasonable and just to
believe instead in that Creator whose word reveals
itself to all humankind equally via the five senses
and the heart and the imagination and the intellect,
constantly, rather than only in a few people’s inter-
pretation of a single book. In its day, this belief was
called deism.
The known means and ends of justice, law,
statecraft, and religion were all outlawed during the
Reign of Terror in France, and all the French roy-
als, aristocrats, and clergymen were arrested, given
show trials, and guillotined publicly. Paine wrote as
an Englishman living under suspicion there at that
time, and many of his friends were dying this way.
In his pamphlet, he claims to show the mistakes
the church and state have made in the past, and he
wants to prevent the same ones from being made
again there, where he is living, if nowhere else.
Finally, he remarks that he had finished writing
the first half of The Age of Reason just before being
arrested himself, for being a foreigner.
George Noonan