With an open mind may you too explore this author believing in a NATURAL ORDER for the world. Simplicity of creation and negation for religions, believed to be created by man.
from wikipedia: In December 1792, Paine's Rights of Man, part II was declared seditious in Britain and Thomas Paine was forced to flee to France in order to avoid arrest. Dismayed by the French revolution's turn toward secularism and atheism, he composed Part I of The Age of Reason in 1792 and 1793:
It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion. . . . The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity and of the theology that is true.[6]
Although Paine wrote The Age of Reason for the French, he dedicated it to his "Fellow Citizens of the United States of America", alluding to his bond with the American revolutionaries.[7]
At the beginning of Part I of the Age of Reason, Paine lays out his personal belief:
- 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, lest it should be supposed that I believe 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 Jwish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
- I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.[16]
As we take a look back at the life of Marie Antoinette, may we remember that which she too believed in. Apart from the church and more over the more probable reason for the revolution, was the belief in a natural order as portrayed in Mozart's rendition of "Figaro" which condemned the power of church and government. Maria Antoinette publicly supported Mozart on this work. Her support of this very project was said to have begun the plans for the French Revolution.
"If we assume man has been corrupted by an artificial civilization, what's the natural state?
The state of nature from which he was removed?
Imagine wandering up and down the forest without industry,
without speech and without home"
-Marie Antoinette
More on the ideas of Thomas Paine: