Response - Book Report/Review Example

He was motivated to write by the social malaise where the national order of priesthood was abolished and the humanity lost any sight of morality (Paine n.pag.). Paine was a staunch believer of God, of human equality, of religious duties, but he was not a believer of the theological doctrines of the Jewish, Roman, Greek, Turkish, Mythologists, and the Protestant church (Paine n.pag.). He is, in its existentialist fashion, a believer of his mind as his own church. For him, the structures established by these prominent religious denominations were aimed at monopolizing power and were actually promoting enslavement for profit (Paine n.pag.).

For him, these religious orders contravene the fundamental precept that for man to be happy, he should be mentally faithful to himself (Paine n.pag.). For Paine lies, a perjury of human mind, are destructive for human morality (Paine n.pag.). For him, there is an adulterous connection between the church and the state (Paine n.pag.). He supposed that revelations were only true to the person whom they were revealed, and the rest was hearsay (Paine n.pag.). Likewise he interposed that the concept of trinity was a reduction of pluralism, and the beliefs of statuses is not different from deification, canonization, or of idolatry (Paine n.pag.).

Like an ascetic who seemed to have withdrawn from the historic accounts of the life of Jesus, Paine’s theory contravened the ideation of miracles and labeled it as a supernatural fraud (Paine n.pag.). He criticized the writings by Mathew, Luke, John, and Mark as not genuinely historical accounts of the life of Jesus, but a mere anecdotal literature bereft of an account on his education, economic status, and thought. This made him thought of Jesus as an illiterate person (Paine n.pag.). For preaching about God and the importance of virtues, the philosopher considered Jesus a philanthropist (Paine n.pag.).

He also dubbed purgatory to be mere inventions of the church that wanted to rake money from its believers who were seeking forgiveness, dispensations, and indulgences (Paine n.pag.). Nevertheless, he still kept on being a believer of God. Paine wanted to see God’s presence in the immensity of His Creation and to appreciate God’s wisdom through the unchanging system of an incomprehensible whole (Paine n.pag.). Being highly and empirically critical, Paine criticized the Books of Kings and Chronicles which contained records of history of Jewish kings who were famous for their rascal behavior.

He believed that the Bible was a book lacking a sense of continuity and compiled by people who lacked authorities. He thought that the chronology of historical accounts in the Bible was falsely written and filled with metaphors or incoherent ideation of events (Paine n.pag.). After criticizing the content of the Bible and the people involved in the stories, he concluded that the Bible was a forgery and an actual instrument used for imposition (Paine n.pag.). Paine was tagged to be a Deist. In spite of the elaborate criticism he used towards the Bible and the mystical life of Jesus and the Holy Trinity, he wasn’t able to make a logical proposition about how human mind and the capacity to reason in itself could be perceived as the temple of his church knowing its inherent limitations, finiteness, and its potency to generate erroneous perceptions (Paine n.pag.).

Those who are convinced of Paine’s views practice Deism and advance an idea that only through