but they cannot answer his challenge.
They have fabricated horrific stories of his death, which are untrue. They have called him an "atheist", which was untrue. They tried to write him out of US history until his memory was revived largely due to the efforts of Robert Ingersoll in the late 1800s.
The current strategy of the fundies is to praise Paine for "Common Sense" and "The Rights of Man" and just pretend that he never wrote "The Age of Reason".
The arguments in "The Age of Reason" have not been answered. The argument in the Part One against revealed religion cannot be answered.
The specific instances of contradictions in the Bible in Part Two have been answered, but the answerers come off as very ad-hoc and contrived.
I think the US would be a better place if more copies of "The Age of Reason" were in circulation. If I had great wealth, I would print inexpensive quality paperbacks of "Reason" and Robert Ingersoll's works and advertise for them on TV, radio, billboards, in newspapers and in magazines like "People" and "US News and World Report". I would love to see a revival of the Freethought Movement.
***
Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason"http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/index.shtml Robert Ingersoll's "Why I Am Agnostic"http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/why_i_am_agnostic.htm*****
From "The Age of Reason" by Thomas Paine (1795)EVERY national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every man alike. Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all.
When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven, and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes to near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and therefore I have a right not to believe it. When also I am told that a woman, called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not: such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it: but we have not even this; for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves. It is only reported by others that they said so. It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not chose to rest my belief upon such evidence.
It is, however, not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the Son of God. He was born when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing at that time to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds; the story therefore had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, and no more, and who had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the story.
It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian Church, sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand. The statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus. The deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything. The church became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon had been with the other; and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.***
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