Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Age of Reason


I re-read the Age of Reason by Thomas Paine over the weekend. I'd forgotten how sensible it was, a cracking secular/deistic essay on life, the universe and everything and at only 200 odd pages an easy shoe-in for a lazy Sunday afternoon; certainly more enlightening that that other book supposed to be read on Sundays! I reckon that if Paine had lived longer to appreciate the discoveries of Darwin he'd have dropped the Deism thing completely. Admitting full-blown atheism at that time was dangerous, even so, his writings leave you senses the rational tension gravitating him towards it.

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