A Paine in the Ass

What is it the Testament teaches us? — to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.
Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Part II, Section 20

Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet, Common Sense that is taught to us as school children as having roused those citizens who read it to throw off the shackles of British oppression and establish these United States of America. Thomas Paine would not have been a friend of Bill Donohue, or Pat Robertson, or Jerry Falwell, or the Taliban, or an UltraOrthodox Rebbe.

And yet, Thomas Paine, had he lived now, would undoubtedly have been a blogger, a Rude Pundit perhaps, or anAmanda Marcotte, a Melissa McEwan, a BitchPhd, a Liza Sabater, a Caliberal. Thomas Paine saw a world, manipulated into obedience by religion(s) that told them that humans were nothing, only God's grace could redeem them. Furthermore, believers have been told repeatedly that their beliefs, their faith, was worth killing non-believers over. God willed it.

Paine saw a world in which women died in childbirth, children died of myriad diseases that carried them off before they were five, men died in ceaseless wars—many of them fought over whose interpretation of Scripture was correct. Words. Men fought over words, words they claimed had not been produced by human hands, and because those words had magical origins, they were sacrosanct and thus, worth dying for.

Paine called Bullshit.

If one of the Democratic candidates had hired, say, Thomas Paine to blog for them, undoubtedly Bill Donohue would have immediately trumpeted selected portions of Paine's writings—the nasty bits, the parts of his pamphlets where Paine, overcome with rage at the mass suffering he encountered—Donohue would have seen those offerings of pain, and rage, and righteous anger, as anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, anti-religion. He would have instituted a smear campaign against Paine, called for him to be fired, and whipped his believers into such a frenzy so that the mob would send Paine letters in which Christian individuals would promise to sodomize him, torture him, kill him. And Bill Donohue, good Christian that he is, would have sat back upon his sulferous throne and said, "Lo. Behold. For this is the Lord's work."

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