Reason vs. Religion July 27, 2025 Dr. Roger Ray
I have lately been re-reading the works of Thomas Paine, one of America’s founding fathers even though he was not invited to sign either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Paine was a marginally educated laborer who had tried his hand at business but had failed a couple of times. But he was something of a political agitator and as such he came to the attention of Benjamin Franklin who sponsored him to come to the American colonies to work for his newspaper. He published his revolutionary views as a kind of magazine that was so broadly read that he has been called The Father of the Revolution, but he was never a part of the inner circle of the Revolution because he was a man of rather humble station in life.
I wouldn’t call him a philosopher, as some people do, because, well, that is a bit of a lofty title for someone who was, in no way, a disciplined scholar. If he were around in our time, we might call him an influencer, but in his day, he was a revolutionary thinker who was not afraid to speak his mind. What has attracted me to him again was his very rational dismissal of traditional Christianity which he regarded to be mostly based on silly ancient stories that were obviously not true.
Now, I consider myself to be a fairly clever person but I will confess to you that I went to grad school in 1979 pretty much believing in most of those silly stories. I might have been cynical about Eve’s conversation with a talking snake, or Balam’s conversation with his donkey, and I was pretty sure that the bits about Jesus turning water into wine and walking on the water were, at best, editorial flourishes but, the hard stuff about souls, heaven and hell, the empty tomb and the bodily resurrection of Jesus . . . I took that stuff to grad school with me and only let it go after a great deal of reading and study . . . and even still, I didn’t want to let it go.
Somehow Thomas Paine managed to not only question the economic system that kept him and most of his ilk in poverty, along with the whole business about monarchy, but also the power and influence of the church, which was somehow integrated into an oppressive government, and a cruel economic system. His agitation against the monarchy and the church nearly got him arrested in Great Britain. He fled to France where, since he didn’t speak French, he was less likely to get into trouble, but he spoke English a little too well and too publicly and so he was arrested in jailed for his criticisms of Christianity.
Thankfully, his political connections in the colonies were good enough to secure his release. While he was in France, both before and during his incarceration, he was working on his essay, “The Age of Reason,” which, though full of mistakes about a number of things, is a nearly miraculous piece of thinking produced by someone who did not have the advantages of some of the aristocracy that he was bold enough to criticize. By the time Paine died, only six people attended his funeral because he had been so critical of both the church and such revolutionary heroes as George Washington.
I say that he made a number of glaring mistakes in his work because he worked almost entirely from memory. He didn’t have access to the internet, for sure, but in France, he didn’t even have access to a Bible or any English science books so, I believe, he can be forgiven for the more sloppy bits of his writing.
What draws me to him now is a certain frustration with our own age in which people seem to be so very willing to believe so many things that are clearly not true. The MAGA world is especially frustrating, a huge portion of our country that was willing to elect a felon and a known pedophile to the presidency because they thought that eggs were too expensive, but then they passively accept that the man who promised to lower prices immediately started a trade war with tariffs which are nothing but a sales tax levied on consumers, resulting in the single largest tax increase on the middle class in American history.
For purely partisan reasons, MAGA folks ignore Trump’s total incompetence, his rape of the environment and alienation of allies and his love for cruel dictators, when simple and basic logic should make them repudiate him as much or more than we liberals do. It is all mysterious to me. MAGA doesn’t bat an eye when the guy who promised to deport violent criminals, rapists, and drug dealers actually goes after the guys picking our produce and loading construction trucks at Home Depot. They believed that he cared about poor Americans and would help them but instead he kicked millions off of Medicaid to give billionaires tax cuts that they didn’t need and, in most cases, didn’t even ask for and they cheer this on mindlessly . . . .
but they get upset about the fact that his administration is not releasing the plane manifests and other details of Jeffery Epstein’s pedophile island. Did they think that he was going to release information that would incriminate Trump himself? He won’t even release his income tax returns and MAGA podcasters are upset that he won’t release evidence of his own pedophilia? Trump would fake his own suicide before he would do that!
But my interest in Thomas Paine goes far beyond MAGA hypocrisy. I’m more interested in how traditional religions, rife with superstition and magical thinking, have managed to make a resurgence in mainstream America. Paine makes the simple observation that the only evidence for heaven and hell, souls, and a supernatural theistic god are things written down in the holy books of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, all of which are purported to be believable because the writing was said to have been the product of people who were especially inspired by God. No evidence. No proof that these authors were anything more than either delusional or frauds. Paine sums it up saying, “for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”
What was obvious to a virtually uneducated guy who made barrel staves for a living 250 years ago, continues to elude many very educated people in our age who simply never think about the silly things they claim to believe most dearly. How can that be? Paine continues, “All … churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave (human)kind, and monopolize power and profit.
And the best part, especially for we Unitarians, Paine says, “I believe that religious duties consist in ding justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.”
That is not as eloquent as Voltaire nor as disarming as Bertrand Russell but, plain enough to make a thinking person from a Mormon family to stop wearing magic underwear and make Muslim’s accept that not only did Muhammed not ride a winged horse to heaven but that winged horses don’t exist, and Christians should embrace their gay family members and take some tips from them about fashion, home decoration, and hair styles.
Kierkegaard mused, “There are two ways to be fooled: One is to believe what isn’t true, the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” Trump wants to believe that if he puts a 100% tariff on good from China that somehow China will have to pay that tariff. But, obviously, no nation can levy a tax on another nation. The tariff is just a tax paid by the consumer, so that a $50 pair of sneakers now costs $100. China may not sell as many sneakers at that price but the ones they do sell, that extra $50 is paid by the American consumer who buys the sneakers. That’s how tariffs work, whether you want to believe it or not. Facts are stubborn things . . . they don’t change because you do not like the facts or you want what some gaslighting politicians might tell you is an “alternative fact.” An alternative fact is sort of like clean coal, neither exist and both are lies told to be who are gullible enough to believe it.
In a recent interview, Ted Cruz was talking about the prospect of an immanent bombing raid on Iranian nuclear facilities. He said that he favored the action because he had learned in Sunday School that those who bless Israel will be blessed by God. Even his right wing interviewer took him to task on this one. Obviously, the Harvard and Princton educated Cruz doesn’t believe that God will bless America for dropping the world’s biggest bombs on Iran; he just assumes that a lot of his Texas voters are dumb enough to believe that he believes it.
That the Jews wrote a book 2500 years ago that says that doing favors for Israel will bring you good luck is not a big surprise, but who in the 21st century should really fall for that obvious ploy?
It is too easy, though, to wave off either MAGA voters or Catholics as being simply gullible or stupid. Countless millions of people are capable of being physicians, scientists, CPAs, and architects during their working hours and then spend their evenings and weekends diving deeply into totally absurd political and religious beliefs that cannot stand a moment of critical analysis.
I offer Sir Issac Newton as a prime example. During the Great Plague of London in 1665, Cambridge closed. So, Newton went home and lived in isolation for a year. During that year he invented calculus, he came up with the unified laws of gravitation, and he did amazing experiments in optics and light. We have Newtonian physics because Newton had to drop out of college for a year and think for himself.
But what is rarely discussed is that Newton also devoted a huge amount of time to studying Biblical numerology, assigning numeric values to the letters of the Hebrew and Greek alphabet in order to decipher what he believed to be hidden secret messages in the book of Daniel and the Revelation to St. John. Through his tedious studies he came to the conclusion that the Catholic pope was the anti-Christ and that the world would come to an end in 2060.
I cannot imagine how his mind could have been captured by such drivel, but I suppose we’ll have to wait another 35 years to find out which one of us right. I don’t know about you, but I strongly suspect that my world will come to an end before 2060! But if I should make it to the age of 104, I will plan to spend a few minutes feeling embarrassed for Sir Issac Newton’s less productive period of academic inquiry.
I suppose that it is safe enough to predict that the world will end some 400 years later since no one in your immediate audience will be able to fact check you, but what might Newton have given to the world if he had used his time more wisely?
Rene Descartes gave us the famous saying, “Cogito Ergo Sum,” “I think, therefore, I am.” One of my favorite internet memes shows a bug-eyed Descartes with the caption: When Descartes discovered that people who do not think also exist!
I shudder to even try to consider what percentage of the world’s population are blinded by either religious or political deceptions or, in many cases, both but it is the job of the woke to keep trying to poke the world trapped in deception to wake up and see the light of reason.
Thomas Paine certainly wasn’t the smartest man ever to set pen to paper but just imagine what our world would be like if we could just accept his simple formula that the purpose of either politics or religion is to do justice, love mercy, and strive to make others more happy.
