Enlightened Chains, pg. 18
religions - tracing back to ancient Zoroastrianism to show that all faith is, at its core, faith. It is when things move beyond faith and into religion that Paine has a problem.
Paine writes in “On the Word ‘Religion’”, that “religion” literally means “to be tied again”. He goes to some length to explain that Deism is not a religion but a faith in God, whereas Christianity is a religion without true theology (since it puts Jesus, not God, at its head) and without real meaning. This is likely a point on which many Enlightenment figures in Europe would have agreed.
So where does all of this hair-splitting get us? There are basically three sides of the argument. One side sees religion as a violation of science and therefore discounts religion as having any use. One side sees science as an attack on religion and therefore seeks to discredit science whenever possible. The third side lives somewhere in between, some of them content there, some of them unsettled and unsure.
To be sure, some in the third group - and likely in all groups - are guilty of leading what Socrates called “the unexamined life”. They see truth in science but do not have a deep understanding of it. They also believe their religion to contain truth and do not have a deep understanding of it, either. Because learning about either would cast doubts on the other, they remain balanced in internal ignorance - unable to believe either side but unable to disbelieve either side.
There is also, however, a respectful area that can be carved out in this middle ground. Science is helpful for understanding the world around us. It is a tool of Enlightenment in the truest sense of the word. If anything has brought mankind out of savagery it is the use of his collective intellect to solve successively more difficult problems with reality based solutions - the only type that matters when you are sick,
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Paine writes in “On the Word ‘Religion’”, that “religion” literally means “to be tied again”. He goes to some length to explain that Deism is not a religion but a faith in God, whereas Christianity is a religion without true theology (since it puts Jesus, not God, at its head) and without real meaning. This is likely a point on which many Enlightenment figures in Europe would have agreed.
So where does all of this hair-splitting get us? There are basically three sides of the argument. One side sees religion as a violation of science and therefore discounts religion as having any use. One side sees science as an attack on religion and therefore seeks to discredit science whenever possible. The third side lives somewhere in between, some of them content there, some of them unsettled and unsure.
To be sure, some in the third group - and likely in all groups - are guilty of leading what Socrates called “the unexamined life”. They see truth in science but do not have a deep understanding of it. They also believe their religion to contain truth and do not have a deep understanding of it, either. Because learning about either would cast doubts on the other, they remain balanced in internal ignorance - unable to believe either side but unable to disbelieve either side.
There is also, however, a respectful area that can be carved out in this middle ground. Science is helpful for understanding the world around us. It is a tool of Enlightenment in the truest sense of the word. If anything has brought mankind out of savagery it is the use of his collective intellect to solve successively more difficult problems with reality based solutions - the only type that matters when you are sick,
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