Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (53 page)

In Part II of
The Age of Reason
, Paine turns a hot light on that
other
Bible — the Judeo-Christian one — which he calls pure mythology. Book by book, he decimates the Bible for factual errors and internal contradictions. Although biblical critics today point out those (massive) contradictions all the time, Paine was among the first to apply this secular technique to the sacred book — and that book didn’t come out smelling like a rose, but like something entirely else.

Even more important to Paine was the grotesque immorality he saw in nearly every book of the Bible — especially (though by no means entirely) the Old Testament. For many readers in his time, seeing his list of rape, murder, enslavement, and genocide, all directly sanctioned by God in the Bible, was a genuinely shock, the first they’d heard of these terrible things being in the Good Book. Then as now, the pulpit filtered most Biblical knowledge before it reached the congregants. And though plenty of hellfire found its way into the sermons of the late 18th century, the devil was in the details, and the truly nasty details were news to most of Paine’s readers.

The Age of Reason
sparked new interest in Deism as a way of doing religion. And though not an atheist himself, Paine’s forceful arguments against dogmas and superstitions make
The Age of Reason
a natural and important part of the written legacy of freethought.

Despite his clear statements of belief, his relentless dismantling of the Christian religion led to the false charge that he
was
an atheist. He spent the last years of his life back in the United States, shunned and isolated for his views. Only six people attended the funeral of one of the founders of his country.

“He had lived long, did some good and much harm,” said one obituary.

Clearing the Way

Europe needed a few hundred years to wake from its medieval nap. The rediscovery of the classics spurred the Scientific Revolution and a new, secular way of seeing the world and being in it.

By the 18th century, a cultural and intellectual movement called the Age of Enlightenment caught fire. The thinkers at the heart of the movement wanted to spur progress and improve society by embracing and increasing knowledge. Just as I’ve argued for earlier periods, the first task was to get unhelpful ways of thinking out of the way. And just like earlier thinkers, those in the Enlightenment saw superstitious and supernatural ideas as the most unhelpful of all, and therefore the ideas most in need of a swift kick out the door.

Before a new, secular worldview could be built, they say, it was necessary to “break the spell” of the old ways of thinking. That process continued far beyond the Enlightenment, through the 19th and 20th centuries and well into the 21st. These sections present three important works of exactly this kind, ideas intended to clear people’s minds and cultures of supernatural beliefs.

Hiding disbelief with an atheist priest

Few double lives are more compelling to imagine than that of an atheist priest, but that was exactly the situation for Jean Meslier.

The year was 1689 and France had recently finished nearly a century of bitter religious warfare when Jean Meslier became a parish priest — “to please my parents,” he said. For 40 years he performed his job, doing his best to ease and improve the lives of his parishioners. But upon his death in 1729, those same parishioners made an astonishing find — four handwritten copies of a memoir in which Meslier revealed that he was an atheist and pretty much always had been.

The subtitle — “Clear and Evident Demonstrations of the Vanity and Falsity of All the Religions of the World” — says all you need to know about his point of view. Imagining the whole scene is quite dramatic. Every day for the last ten years of his life, Meslier finished his priestly duties, and then returned home, picked up a quill, and bent to attack the very religion and God he had spent the day serving. The result wasn’t the first book-length work written from an atheist perspective — just the first one with a name on it.

That’s right — the first openly atheist author was also a Catholic priest.

He really can’t be blamed for keeping it secret while he was alive. Blasphemy was still a capital crime in France at the time. Meslier addressed the book to his parishioners and framed as a heartfelt apology for his part in deceiving them. Telling his parishioners would have been too dangerous while he was alive, he said, so he decided to do so after his death.

Meslier thought everything through to the last detail. To ensure that his parishioners saw the book he wrote for them, he registered it with the town clerks, telling them to deliver the four copies to his congregation when he died.

In the course of 93 chapters, Meslier said that

Priests are “pious morons” eager to deceive others with “illusions, errors, lies, and fictions” so they can control them.

He felt “pain and extreme loathing” for speaking against his true beliefs and for keeping people in the “stupid errors, the vain superstitions, and the idolatries that I hated, condemned, and detested to the core.”

Christianity is no less false, vain, or idolatrous than any other religion.

All religions are human creations and God doesn’t exist.

He had come very close to “bursting out with indignation” hundreds of times, but was afraid of the consequences.

The Gospels are filled with contradictions, which he pointed out in detail.

Religion is the cause of war and division among people.

In addition to the good, the Bible is filled with deeply immoral teachings.

People don’t need the priests — it’s the other way around.