jul 31
a truly frontal assault on the collection of myth and dogma that go by the name of christianity.
first jefferson, then paine: i am beginning to have new respect for the american founding fathers, for they violently despised the blind faith of their contemporaries. i just did not know about this facet of their personalities.
i got the reference to paine from the nytimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/books/review/31ELLISL.html
quote from tom paine: "... the age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system." amen, i say.
some of these early leftists like paine were also, strangely, libertarians. such a far cry from today's fascist marxists of india who are completely statist and unreasoningly blind.
here is the entire ebook text of 'The Age of Reason'.
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/p147a/
2 comments:
thanks a lot for the link. read parts of all the chapters. very interesting read. in fact very,very. would love to read what his critics said about it. also funny at times. my respect/disgust for christianity/christians/christ has not reduced or increased. definitely worth showing it to some of my christian friends.
With all due respect to airrahul, the US was originally settled by people who were escaping religious persecution because of their "fundamentalist" beliefs - they were so uptight, the English kicked them out - not exactly "secular, enlightenment-era thinkers". It is this experience of persecution that drove them to separate the church and state. Tom Paine's Age of Reason was written after the US Constitution was drafted and he was virtually ostracized for his atheistic beliefs. Benjamin Franklin and others begged him not to publish the "Age of Reason". You can substitute any religion for "Christianity" and its "miracles" in his Age of Reason and all of his arguments would still hold true. I am curious as to how this blog's author rationalizes his "Hindu nationalist religious beliefs" with the "age of reason" and his oft repeated assertion that India would be better off as a "Hindu" nation.
Post a Comment