Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Age of Reason - A Quick Analysis

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Nov. 29, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

11:07

The Age of Reason - A Quick Analysis

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	So I've just finished listening to the audiobook of Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, and it was just on my list.
	I've got a bunch of things just on my list I'm just getting through at this point, and that was one of them because it's a very, very good and detailed series of arguments against Christianity, which is something I personally have never felt the need to look into in any great depth because I've always been an atheist and most of the people around me are atheists, so it's never been something I really give a damn about.
	But I thought it would be a good read anyway, and it is.
	It's a very very, very thorough book and I think now I understand why feminists consider me to be a misogynist.
	Because he must have really hated Christianity to go to these lengths to try and undermine it.
	The same way, I really don't like feminism and go to extreme lengths to undermine it.
	He's, he's obviously not someone who just hates Christianity or religious people.
	He's just really not happy with the lack of consistency and logic that supports it, which is, in fact, exactly the same thing that I have with feminism.
	He uses the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament alone to refute the idea that these books are a credible source of information on anything, let alone the divine, which is really entertaining.
	But again, it's.
	You know, it's old hat now, but it's, it's just the way he does it and you can the the.
	The way he puts it across is very clear, very concise.
	He doesn't waste your time he he, he speaks in plain language where possible.
	He points out the numerous contradictions and possibilities and fallacies within the Bible.
	He observes the diabolical nature of Jehovah, the useless nature of prayer on an omniscient being that's already got the, the entire universe planned out.
	And if it's the will of God, why are you praying?
	You know it's his will.
	He establishes all priests and prophets as liars and charlatans and degrade.
	He goes into great depth about degrading prophets into poets or bards in ancient Judea, as in what they were apparently, and I don't know the veracity of this, but apparently the language has morphed.
	And so the term prophets actually meant basically an entertainer or a singer, someone who would recite and perform.
	And he effectively turns the prophecy into just a theatre act, like a talent.
	like a play, and I don't, I mean it's plausible.
	So I don't I, but I don't know the truth of it, but it's.
	He makes a good argument and he, you know he, he says that this is the etymological development of it, which I can't prove it isn't, and then he often proves his point by just pointing out that the alternate translation that is regularly used now doesn't actually make all that much sense in the context of the text itself.
	But if you use the what he calls the original translation, suddenly the text makes a lot more sense and it's referring to events that are going on at the time.
	And it's interesting that he's not an atheist either, because he obviously establishes that man didn't create himself, and so at some point the universe must have traced back to a single source, and so in his mind, there probably is a God.
	It's just that we know absolutely nothing about it.
	And it's important to remember that, like, many of the arguments he's making are contextual in the Bible itself, but many of them are also universal.
	So it just disproves any kind of prophets claiming to have been spoken to by a God.
	And so he completely invalidates Judaism and Islam as well.
	He's just far more expert on the Bible itself.
	But yeah, essentially he argues that we know nothing about God.
	There must be some prime mover, but we don't know anything about God.
	And what's really interesting is how he talks about the ancient Israelites and how essentially they were just unbelievably brutal.
	They never gave quarter to their enemy.
	They had to wipe them out.
	They're totally genocidal.
	Nothing like the rest of the people around them, incidentally.
	And it seems that like in the book of Job, like in Satan himself, it seems to be a foreign import from the Gentiles.
	I've heard this before, actually.
	I've read, I remember decades ago now, reading something about Manichae, which was definitely prevalent at the time, or definitely in existence at the time, and was quite widely spread across the Middle East, which is a dualist religion, dualism, and everything that comes with that.
	And that's where the character of Satan has popped up, in his opinion.
	And it's compelling because in the Old Testament, Satan's just another pleb with the rest of the angels.
	He's not anyone who can revolt against God.
	It's interesting the way he points out that in the character of Satan, we have a godlike figure, as in he is everywhere at all times and he has the power to do anything.
	And he has to.
	Otherwise, and he's using the contemporary talk of the priests of the time where they're like, oh, Satan makes you do bad things.
	Oh, well, shit, Satan's everywhere all the time, and he's affecting all people.
	That's a terrifying amount of power that they give to Satan and completely undermines the concept of God in itself.
	Unless Satan is, of course, just a manifestation of God, which it must be.
	So it doesn't make God look good.
	And the various moral failings of God, he definitely goes into depth about those as well, pointing out that he's basically Aries of the Israelites.
	And he is.
	He's just a war god.
	He likes to kill things.
	That's what he does.
	I mean, obviously, none of this actually happened.
	This is the thing.
	Archaeology doesn't bear any of these stories out.
	But the mythology they told themselves was crazy heroic, if you think about it, for them as a people.
	But anyway, yeah, he's not arguing for atheism.
	he promotes deism multiple times obviously he wants to divest religion from the state and finds i mean thomas paine is one of the most fierce opponents of monarchy and And this attitude absolutely translates to the priestly influence in society.
	He doesn't see any legitimacy in it at all, as you would imagine.
	He was staunchly Republican, and I've recently read Common Sense as well, and that was really interesting.
	Again, just I love the way he lays out his arguments.
	They're just completely straightforward and completely internally consistent, which puts him in kind of a devastating collision course with the Bible, which is not in any way internally consistent.
	And just by just a stock interpretation of the text itself, a standard interpretation of the thing.
	I mean, to suggest that, like, you know, the book of Moses, oh, this was written by Moses.
	How can it possibly recant the events of after Moses' death?
	And things like this.
	There are numerous examples of this.
	And he just goes through them all with an alarming amount of patience and sort of clear-headedness and honestly, and a definitive direction of purpose.
	Systematically delegitimizing every single aspect of this book to the point where literally there is nothing you can read from it that's genuine.
	I can't remember who did it, but I don't think it was Thomas Paine who went through the Bible and just removed all of the supernatural element from it to make it a record of history.
	He would have, you could quite easily see him having done the same.
	Presumably, he must have read the thing because it was just completely, completely systematic and thorough.
	The funny thing is as well is that he's not being particularly respectful to Christianity because of all this.
	And he's got this rather amusing tone.
	It's in many ways like a YouTube video.
	I honestly, I approached feminism in exactly the same way.
	And I bet this pissed off the clergy at the time something fucking fierce.
	Because he was just completely unapologetic.
	And I mean, he would have had a Pepe in this.
	You know, that expression, the looking at you like, I don't give a fuck about your standards.
	Well, he's just completely undermined all of their standards.
	Pointing out that, I mean, he points out the book of Job shows a moral standard that just isn't present anywhere else in the Bible.
	And because, you know, it features a new character, Satan.
	It must have been adopted from the Gentiles.
	And I'm inclined to agree.
	I don't think that it is internally consistent with the other books of the Old Testament.
	And the same with Psalms as well.
	But yeah, so he's just got no respect for anything based off of this.
	Because he's just so completely and thoroughly demolished it.
	And so his tone is definitely a lot more light-hearted than you might think.
	I mean, it was very much like reading Locke's first treatise, where he is just stripping apart.
	I can't remember the name of the Lord whose book he was essentially reply videoing to.
	But at points, Locke was just openly mocking the guy.
	These are the ideas of an idiot.
	And only an idiot would believe them.
	And Thomas Paine has definitely got that sort of approach towards the Bible.
	He's just ferocious.
	And he just, he's not very nice about the people who he's talking about either.
	I mean, he calls them out like charlatans, frauds.
	So it's pretty great.
	I'm not going to lie.
	I enjoyed it.
	Because, you know, the thing is, I think this is written at the same sort of time as John Stuart Mill was writing on Liberty.
	And one of the things, you take from this is that, yeah, it's, yeah, On Liberty was published, I think, about 10 years after Age of Reason.
	And one of the things you get from On Liberty is the very pervasive societal problem of the church.
	As in, they're using their temporal power to oppress people and freedom of speech and freedom of thought.
	And they're doing this often, well, where possible through political intervention, through government.
	But the problem is a wave of secularism because of the Enlightenment.
	So they do it through societal pressure.
	But people like John Stuart Mill and Thomas Paine were writing directly against that to try and stop this kind of societal persecution from religion.
	But yeah, it's really, really worth your time to read.

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