"The Age of Reason" by Thomas Paine

• All natural 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.
• It is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself.
• Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals.
• Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.
• It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.
• Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication.
• Jesus Christ wrote no account of himself, of his birth, parentage, or anything else. Not a line of what is called the New Testament is of his writing.
• These books, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelations, (which, by the bye, is a book of riddles that requires a revelation to explain it) are, we are told, the word of God. It is, therefore, proper for us to know who told us so, that we may know what credit to give to the report. The answer to this question is, that nobody can tell, except that we tell one another so.
• When the church mythologists established their system, they collected all the writings they could find, and managed them as they pleased. It is a matter altogether of uncertainty to us whether such of the writings as now appear under the name of the Old and the New Testament, are in the same state in which those collectors say they found them; or whether they added, altered, abridged, or dressed them up.
• We have no other external evidence or authority for believing these books to be the word of God, than what I have mentions, which is no evidence or authority at all.
• Whenever we read the obscene stories the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible [NOTE: It must be borne in mind that by the “Bible” Paine always means the Old Testament alone.] is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind: and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.
• The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of an universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of wilful alteration, are of themselves evidences the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. -- The Word of God exists in something else.
• Had it been the object or the intention of Jesus Christ to establish a new religion, he would undoubtedly have written the system himself, or procured it to be written in his lifetime. But there is no publication extant authenticated with his name. All the books called the New Testament were written after his death.
• It is somewhat curious that the three persons whose names are the most universally recorded were of very obscure parentage. Moses was a foundling; Jesus Christ was born in a stable; and Mahomet was a mule driver.
• The only idea men can affix to the name of God, is that of a first cause, the cause of all things.
• Almost the only parts in the book called the Bible, that convey to us any idea of God, are some chapters in Job, and the 19th Psalm; I recollect no other.
• Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed.
• It is in the knowledge of the things that science and philosophy teaches that learning consists.
• It would therefore be advantageous to the state of learning to abolish the study of dead languages, and to make learning consist, as it originally did, in scientific knowledge.
• I moreover believe, that any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system.
• Mankind have conceived to themselves certain laws, by which what they call nature is supposed to act; and that a miracle is something contrary to the operation and effect of those laws. But unless we know the whole extent of those laws, and of what are commonly called the powers of nature, we are not able to judge whether any thing that may appear to us wonderful or miraculous, be within, or by beyond, or be contrary to, her natural power of acting.
• Is it more probably that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?
• The most extraordinary of all the things called miracles, related in the New Testament, is that of the devil flying away with Jesus Christ, and carrying him to the top of a high mountain; and to the top of the highest pinnacle of the temple, and showing him and promising to him all the kingdoms of the world. How happened it that he did not discover America?
• It has often been said that anything may be proved from the Bible; but before anything can be admitted as proved by the Bible, the Bible itself must be proved to be true; for if the Bible be not true, or the truth of it be doubtful, it ceases to have authority, and cannot be admitted as proof of anything.
• It is not the antiquity of a tale that is an evidence of its truth; on the contrary, it is a symptom of its being fabulous; for the more ancient any history pretends to be, the more it has the resemblance of a fable. The origin of every nation is buried in fabulous tradition, and that of the Jews is as much to be suspected as any other.
• And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo everything that is tender, sympathizing, and benevolent in the heart of man.
• Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies.
• People in general know not what wickedness there is in this pretended word of God. Brought up in habits of superstition, they take it for granted that the Bible is true, and that it is good; they permit themselves not to doubt of it, and they carry the ideas they form of the benevolence of the Almighty to the book which they have been taught to believe was written by his authority.
• The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that is is difficult to class them separately.
• To be happy in old age it is necessary that we accustom ourselves to objects that can accompany the mind all the way through life, and that we take the rest as good in their day.
• This book, the Bible, is too ridiculous for criticism.
• When a priest quotes any of those passages, he unriddles it agreeably to his own views, and imposes that explanation upon his congregation as the meaning of the writer.
• The christian faith is built upon the heathen Mythology.
• The first chapter of Matthew begins with giving a genealogy of Jesus Christ; and in the third chapter of Luke there is also given a genealogy of Jesus Christ. Did these two agree, it would not prove the genealogy to be true, because it might nevertheless be a fabrication; but as they contradict each other in every particular, it proves falsehood absolutely.
• Were any girl that is now with child to say, and even to swear it, that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would she be believed? Certainly she would not. Why then are we to believe the same thing of another girl whom we never saw, told by nobody knows who, nor when, nor where?
• It is an easy thing to tell a lie, but it is difficult to support the lie after it is told.
• The tale of the resurrection follows that of the crucifixion; and in this as well as in that, the writers, whoever they were disagree so much as to make it evident that none of them were there.
• As to the account of Christ being seen by more than five hundred at once, it is Paul only who says it, and not the five hundred who say it for themselves. It is, therefore, the testimony of but one man, and that too of a man, who did not, according to the same account, believe a word of the matter himself at the time ti is said to have happened.
• I am not one of those who are fond of believing there is much of that which is called wilful lying, or lying originally, except in the case of men setting up to be prophets, as in the old Testament; for prophesying is lying professionally.
• The story of the appearance of Jesus Christ is told with that strange mixture of the natural and impossible, that distinguishes legendary tale from fact.
• There was no such book as the New Testament till more than three hundred years after the time that Christ is said to have lived.
• About three hundred and fifty years after the time that Christ is said to have lived, several writings of the kind I am speaking of were scattered in the hands of diverse individuals; and as the church had begun to form itself into an hierarchy, or church government, with temporal powers, it set itself about collecting them, called ‘The New Testament.’ They decided by vote, as I have before said in the former part of the Age of Reason, which of those writings, out of the collection they had made, should be the word of God, and which should not.
• As the object of the church, as is the case in all national establishments of churches, was power and revenue, and terror the means it used, it is consistent to suppose that the most miraculous and wonderful of the writing they had collected stood the best chance of being voted. And as to the authenticity of the books, the vote stands in the place of it; for it can be traced no higher.
• When we consider the lapse of more than three hundred years intervening between the time that Christ is said to have lived and the time the new Testament was formed into a book, we must see, even without the assistance of historical evidence, the exceeding uncertainty there is of its authenticity.
• Priests and conjurers are of the same trade.
• Nothing can present to use a more strange idea than that of decreeing the word of God by vote.
• We should never force belief upon ourselves in anything.
• The contradictory possibilities, contained in the Old Testament and the New, put them in the case of a man who swears for and against. Either evidence convicts him or perjury, and equally destroys his reputation.
• The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
• Christianity grounds itself originally upon the [Hebrew] Bible, and the Bible was established altogether by the sword, and that in the worst use of it -- not to terrify, but to extirpate.
• The Jews made no converts: they butchered all.
• The Bible is the sire of the [New] Testament, and both are called the word of God. The Christians read both books; the ministers preach from both books; and this thing called Christianity is made up of both. It is then false to say that Christianity was no established by the sword.
• What is it the Bible teaches us? -- repine, cruelty, and murder. What is it the Testament teaches us? -- to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.
• Of all systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice; it renders the heart torpid, or produces only atheists and fanatics. As an engine of power, it served the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests; but so far as respects the good of man in general, it leads to nothing here or hereafter.
• Not any thing can be studied as a science without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is not the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.
• The Bible-makers have undertaken to give us, in the first chapter of Genesis, an account of the creation and in doing this they have demonstrated nothing but their ignorance.