X-Message-Number: 20102
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 23:00:04 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Thomas Paine

Eytan Kollin, #20087:

>Mr. Paine was a brilliant writer.  When the French
>Revolution broke out he was an advocate.  He supported
>the French Revolution when it broke the power of the
>Catholic Church. He supported it when they killed the
>royal family, and he continued to excuse it when the
>guillotines started to murder French women and men in
>the tens of thousands. After all, some of them must
>have deserved it, and the goals of the revolution make
>it excusable and, wait a minute, Mr. Paine is sounding
>like a modern secularist also.

Paine did support the French revolution, at least initially, but also tried 
to stop the execution of Louis XVI


(http://www.4literature.net/Thomas_Paine/Paine_Opposes_the_Execution_of_Louis_X/).
Paine himself was imprisoned while in France, and afterward thought that 
only being under treatment for a fever saved him from the guillotine--see 
Preface to *The Age of Reason*, part II. (The book is online at 
http://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/.) A few sentences quoted from Part 1 
Section 1 show where Paine was coming from religiously:


>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 endeavoring to make our 
>fellow-creatures happy.
>
>But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in 
>addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the 
>things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.
>
>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.
>
>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.


Paine, then, was a religious man, with beliefs and ideals found in the 
major religions, despite the negativity toward religious establishments.


Mike Perry

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