Name: The Age of Reason
ISBN: 9781595472373

The Age of Reason

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. Paine suggests that since they were written separate of each other their basis is no better than hearsay. Because the United States convicted Paine of seditious libel in 1792, he escaped to France where he was selected to be a member of its National Convention. But there he conflicted with Robespierre, and while awaiting his arrest he wrote the first part of "The Age of Reason." Afterwards he was confined in Luxembourg and wrote the second half of the book. The work was published in 1795 and serves as a criticism of established religion from the point of view of the 18th century deists.

What Hacker News says

freedombenApr 2025

Fully agree. My kids consider(ed) history to be very boring, other than when I teach them about it. I thought I disliked history after coming out of high school because the classes were always so excruciatingly boring and felt so irrelevant to anything "modern day." As I went through my early career I found myself constantly wondering "why is X that way?" Personal research including reading books written by historians who actually tell the story and also describe the many various links between events, and especially the "other side" of many of the issues (that's particularly fascinating regarding the USA "founding fathers" as they were far from a cohesive single-minded unit as presented in most history classes) many things started to click. When I've taught my kids about history using the same approach, especially zeroing in on the real fascinating aspects of it, they still don't love history but they have a strong appreciation for it.

By way of example, "the founding fathers were Christians" is a classic oft-repeated phrase I continually hear, to which I love talking about Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, all of whom were clearly agnostic (at the time, they were "Deist" which was essentially equivalent to "agnostic" nowadays). Thomas Paine's phenomenal book "The Age of Reason" was utterly mind-blowing and extremely radical at the time, receiving widespread banning and igniting firestorms in the culture. It's still a great read today! Especially fascinating when you consider this was many decades before Darwin would provide one of the most important scientific explanations that massively shrunk the area for God of the Gaps.

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fernlySep 2019

Some of the speeches of Robert G. Ingersoll. Great oratory from an age when oratory was prized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_G._Ingersoll

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2662

Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. Not intended as oratory, but like Ingersoll's lectures, great fun to read aloud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine

http://thomaspaine.org/major-works/the-age-of-reason-part-1....

> But some, perhaps, will say: Are we to have no word of God—no revelation? I answer, Yes; there is a word of God; there is a revelation. THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man... The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they may be. It is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed....

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lucas_membraneSep 2019

On the Sensations of Tone by Hermann von Helmholtz

The Road by Jack London

all of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum

The Scottish Students' Song Book

Heart Songs

The Age of Reason

The Art of Money Getting by Barnum

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typesevenAug 2016

The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.

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wsc981Aug 2014

The book "The Age of Reason" by Thomas Paine really convinced me that something like a personal God doesn't exist. I've been raised a Christian, so changing the Christian mindset was not easy for me, it took a course of several years to stop believing in a personal God.

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DobbsJun 2008

So far: Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone

The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine

The first ignited my love for reading the the second changed how I look at life.

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