Thomas Paine saved my life I was 17 when Thomas Paine saved my life. As suburban children in 1950s’ Surrey my brothers and I attended an Anglican Sunday School in the ‘tin tab’ next to the parish church. My brothers only remember endless reiterations of the story of Jacob and Esau but it was different for me. I took it seriously. The parish was Low Church evangelical. We were taught that fallen humanity was all destined for hell fire unless they believed the right sort of things about Jesus.
Unless they were ‘saved’. It didn’t not matter how you lived, how good, kind or generous you were. Nothing you could do would save you from hell. This view was not and is not extreme. It is straightforward main stream Alpha course Christianity to this day.
This idea had a profound effect on me even as a young child. I tried not to read books about nonChristians because I might start to care about these characters, who were destined for an eternity of torment. The major impact of this idea didn’t reveal itself until I was in my late teens studying religious knowledge for A-Level when it became an obsession that took over my life. It sounds melodramatic now but I know that I sat on the trolley bus on the way to school, hearing the screams, smelling the smoke, scanning the faces of my fellow passengers wondering if I should warn them of their danger. It may be a coincidence but it was then that I developed ulcerative colitis, a chronic illness I still have. My school work began to suffer.
Then my agnostic father gave me his copy of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. Thomas Paine wrote the first part of The Age of Reason in 1794 when he was in prison in Paris under sentence of death and had ‘neither Bible nor Testament to refer to’. The fall of Robespierre saved his life. Paine was not an atheist. He wrote this book ‘lest, in the general wreck of superstition…we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.’ He objected to the Bible and Christianity because he believed that they insulted God, the creator of the Universe.
The ideas he expressed were commonplace among scholars and gentlemen at the time but Paine intended to make them accessible to anyone who could read and had sixpence to spare. His friend and patron, Benjamin Franklin, was among those who tried to dissuade him.
I don’t know what those who object to Richard Dawkins writing about theological issues would make of Paine’s presumption – a stay (corset) maker and excise man who was only able to pursue a career as a journalist in America. Paine knew nothing of archaeology or modern biblical scholarship. He wrote: ‘The evidence that I shall produce in this case is from the books themselves; and I will confine myself to this evidence alone. … I will therefore meet (the advocates of the Bible) on their own ground and oppose them with their own weapon, the Bible.’ I think this was why Paine was so effective in releasing me from the prison to which my religious indoctrination had consigned me.
He set me free to go out into the world and explore any part of it I chose. Three years later I joined the newly formed British Humanist Association that has been my home ever since.
I have remained wary of Christians and Christianity. Do these people believe in and worship a God who will condemn the vast majority of humankind to a cosmic concentration camp? If they do, how can they be trusted? I know that not all Christians believe this but many still do.
I have always been interested in religion and religious ideas of all kinds. When a flyer about the SOF magazine fell out of the Guardian I took out a subscription and joined the Network a year later. It is, as Don Cupitt described, it ‘the freest religious organisation in the world – a place where any and every idea can be safely explored’. Thomas Paine would have been quite at home with us.
There is much more I would like to write about Thomas Paine and perhaps the editor will let me do so sometime in the future. Meanwhile if you would like to know more, you can contact the Thomas Paine Society at 43 Eugene Gardens, Nottingham NG2 3LF.
Barbara Burford is a SOF Trustee and Minutes Secretary.
SOF Sift A column in which Network members think out loud about SOF and their own quest.