A masterpiece of freethinking. The first part of Paine's essay provides some general comments on religion - he author believed devoutly in God, but rejected the claims of the established churches to some special knowledge of the nature of God. The core of his arguament is that any religion based on a supposed revelation of the Word of God to individuals is both spurious and blasphemous. The Jews claim that their Word of God was given to Moses, the Christians have Jesus and Saint Paul and the Moslems have Muhammed. However, when one of these individuals tells us that the Word of God has been revealed to them, we have only their word for it - to the rest of us it is not the Word of God, but the word of a man, and what could be more blasphemous that placing the word of a man on a par with that of God? Paine invites us instead to rationally consider the nature and character of God through His creation. One does not have to agree with his conclusions to appreciate his application of reason to the subject, and if you do not agree with his view of God, come to your own, based not on faith but on reason.
The second part of the book is a more specific attack on the belief in the truth of the Bible, and it is this that has earned him most bile from Christians. Paine analyses the text for factual and chronological inconsistencies, and shows that most of the books of the Old Testament could not have been written until centuries after the events they claim to describe, and are therefore no more reliable as history than Homer's Illiad. Moreover, the Old Testament claims that the Jews came upon whole races of people who had done them no harm, that they smote them with the edge of the sword, that they spared neither age nor infancy, and that these acts were comitted under the express command of God. If God does exist, what could be more blasphemous than to charge Him with such acts of wickedness? Would we rather believe that God would approve of the massacre of unoffending infants, or would we believe that these claims are lies? And if they are lies, what credit does the rest of the Bible have? Either all of it is the Word of God, or none of it is - we cannot pick and choose the sections we like and discard those we do not like.
Paine's analysis of the New Testament also rings sharply true. While Christians may, rightly, claim that some of the inconsistencies he points out are nit-picking, and can be explained by the passage of time between the life of Christ and the writig of the Gospels, many of the authors points are far from trivial. For example, read the Geneologies of Christ given in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew. Not only do the two books not agree on the name of a single ancestor between Joseph and David, but they do not even agree on the number of generations between the two. Clearly at least one of these geneologies is a fabrication (not a mistake, for nobody could be so incompetent as to fail to get a single name correct), designed to make the Gospel stories fit with ancient prophecies claiming the Messiah would come from the House of David. And if a Gospel begins with a lie, what credit does the rest of it have?
The book will be particularly disturbing for those fundamentalists who claim that every word of the Bible is literally true, for it shows that even a cursory reading of the Bible demonstrates that it cannot be literally true.
