Summary

Part One

Part One of The Age of Reason sets forth Thomas Paine's beliefs about God and established religion: he believes in one God, a happy afterlife, and that all men are equal and their purpose on earth is in "doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy" (666). Paine, however, does not believe in organized religion or any national religious organization. National churches, rather than embracing the good principles of religion, are built on the attempt to gain power and exclude portions of society.

After this argument against established religion, Paine begins to write about the Christian Bible, with the goal of exposing its falsehoods and inconsistencies. He writes that, although the book claims to be based on revelations, this is impossible because by definition, a revelation must come directly from God to the people without an intermediary like the Bible. He adds that Jesus Christ wrote none of his own stories, which, Paine argues, throws the entire New Testament and the claim that Jesus is the son of God into question. Although Paine believes Jesus was an exemplary human being and should be looked back to as an example for all mankind, he doesn't believe that Jesus was the son of God or that he was sent to earth to die for the sins of the world.

He backs up this belief by arguing that it would diminish the power of God if he sent his son to earth to be the savior of mankind. This action ignores all other planets and galaxies, and suggests that God's power is not great or varied enough to be the God of all beings in the universe. Additionally, the message of God cannot be imparted through spoken word because of the wide variety of languages spoken on earth. Rather, writes Paine, "THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD: And it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man" (686).

Paine concludes the first part of Age of Reason by discussing mystery, miracle, and prophesy, which he calls the three means by which Christianity has been imposed. These three phenomena are fallacies imposed by the Christian church, and they expose its errors and inconsistencies. Thus Paine argues that organized religion is a fallacy and that man should rather worship individually in order to better appreciate and know God's grandeur.

Part Two
The second part of The Age of Reason continues much in the same way as the first. Paine continues to prove the falsity of the Bible in order to take down Christianity and other organized and state-sponsored religions. In the course of the second half of this writing, he goes through many of the books in the Bible, pointing out inconsistencies, errors, and impossibilities in portions of the text. He begins with the Old Testament and attempts to prove that Moses, who was alleged to have written a great part of it, could not possibly have been the author. Most of Paine's evidence for this lies in chronological impossibilities. For example, there are several instances where Moses refers to something -- a city, a kingdom, etc. -- that did not exist in his own time and that he therefore could not have known about. Paine continues in this line for many of the other Old Testament Books, finally concluding that a great portion of this work must be false because it is historically implausible. Before moving on to the New Testament, he writes, "I have now gone through the Bible as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees. Here they lie, and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow" (791).

Paine spends the majority of the section on the New Testament examining the Gospels and the story of Jesus Christ. Using the same type of analysis as for the Old Testament, he points out inconsistencies and impossibilities in the story of Jesus' birth, life, and crucifixion, and eventually comes to the conclusion that Christ, although a moral and exemplary man, could not have possibly been born to a virgin or crucified to save mankind. He uses the discrepancies between the stories told in each Gospel, supposed to have been written by four of Jesus' apostles to prove that neither Matthew, Mark, Luke, nor John could have been present for most (if not all) of the stories they tell, and that they are therefore to be read with a great deal of skepticism.

Throughout both parts of The Age of Reason, Paine bases his analysis of the Bible and Christianity on the plausibility, or the reason, of the writings of the Old and New Testament. His argument is rooted in the unshakable belief that everything must make sense and have a scientific explanation. Anything that does not make sense, and especially an accumulation of these instances, is good reason to dismiss Christianity and organized religion entirely. It is thus easy for him to believe that religion, like government, is based in power and that "It has been the scheme of the Christian church, and of all other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the creator, as it is of governments to hold him in ignorance of his rights" (826).