Age of Reason I. Chapter XVI - Application of the Preceding to the System of the Christians.
by Thomas Paine
But, in the midst of those reflections, what are we to think of the
christian system of faith that forms itself upon the idea of only one
world, and that of no greater extent, as is before shown, than
twenty-five thousand miles. An extent which a man, walking at the
rate of three miles an hour for twelve hours in the day, could he
keep on in a circular direction, would walk entirely round in less
than two years. Alas! what is this to the mighty ocean of space, and
the almighty power of the Creator!
From whence then could arise the solitary and strange conceit that
the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his
protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in
our world, because, they say, one man and one woman had eaten an
apple! And, on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in
the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a
redeemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently called the Son
of God, and sometimes God himself, would have nothing else to do than
to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of death,
with scarcely a momentary interval of life.
It has been by rejecting the evidence, that the word, or works of God
in the creation, affords to our senses, and the action of our reason
upon that evidence, that so many wild and whimsical systems of faith,
and of religion, have been fabricated and set up. There may be many
systems of religion that so far from being morally bad are in many
respects morally good: but there can be but one that is true; and
that one necessarily must, as it ever will, be in all things
consistent with the ever existing word of God that we behold in his
works. But such is the strange construction of the christian system
of faith, that every evidence the heavens affords to man, either
directly contradicts it or renders it absurd.
It is possible to believe, and I always feel pleasure in encouraging
myself to believe it, that there have been men in the world who
persuaded themselves that what is called a pious fraud, might, at
least under particular circumstances, be productive of some good. But
the fraud being once established, could not afterwards be explained;
for it is with a pious fraud as with a bad action, it begets a
calamitous necessity of going on.
The persons who first preached the christian system of faith, and in
some measure combined with it the morality preached by Jesus Christ,
might persuade themselves that it was better than the heathen
mythology that then prevailed. From the first preachers the fraud
went on to the second, and to the third, till the idea of its being a
pious fraud became lost in the belief of its being true; and that
belief became again encouraged by the interest of those who made a
livelihood by preaching it.
But though such a belief might, by such means, be rendered almost
general among the laity, it is next to impossible to account for the
continual persecution carried on by the church, for several hundred
years, against the sciences, and against the professors of science,
if the church had not some record or tradition that it was originally
no other than a pious fraud, or did not foresee that it could not be
maintained against the evidence that the structure of the universe
afforded.