tacticalogic: I don’t recall ever reading any account of John Adams telling Thomas Paine “We don’t want or need your kind, here. Shut up and get out.”, so if it’s following a political tradition, it’s not ours.
Spirited: You’re wrong. Paine advocated a New Pantheist spirituality grounded in natural science in opposition to the Christian consensus held by the Founders. As a result they rejected Paine. He became an outcast.
Whether the Founders were individually Christian or not, there was among them a general Christian consensus that finds some of its greatest expression in the scholarly works of Samuel Rutherford in his “Lex Rex” (1644) and in the writings of the 18th century jurist William Blackstone.
Blackstone greatly influenced early American understanding of God, the Bible and nature. He taught that since the transcendent living, personal God is the omnipotent Creator who works and governs the affairs of men then all law should be consistent with His Revelation in the Bible. No law should be passed that is contrary to the higher law of God.
Rutherford reasoned that despite being God’s spiritual image bearers, all men are sinners, therefore no man-—whether king, prime minister or president is superior to any other man. This meant that no man is above the law; all are subject to the law without exception, thus all men must recognize that they are under the transcendent Law of God.
Furthermore, as all men are created equal in the eyes of God, then worth, dignity and the right to life are conferred upon each human being at creation. Thus all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable spiritual property. In other words, the ground of our Constitutional rights is spiritual property. Spirit precedes temporal. In this light the Constitution is a great spiritual document.
In James Madison’s essay “Property,” published in The National Gazette on March 29, 1792, he clearly defines the meaning of a person’s God-given spiritual property, some of its’ temporal manifestations and the meaning and intent of just government as opposed to unjust government:
“He has a property....in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.” (Samuel Rutherford, Lex Rex; lexrex.com)
“He has a property...in his opinions and the free communication of them.”
“He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.”
“He has property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.”
Property is “a man’s land, or merchandize, or money...”
“...as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”
“Government is instituted to protect property of every sort....This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”
“As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties or his possessions.” (ibid)
Vishal Mangalwadi, India’s foremost Christian scholar observes that the unique concept of man as God’s spiritual image-bearer gave birth to the “belief in the unique dignity of human beings,” and this is,
“...the force that created Western civilization, where citizens do not exist for the state but the state exists for the individuals. Even kings, presidents, prime ministers, and army generals cannot be allowed to trample upon an individual and his or her rights.” (Truth and Transformation: A Manifesto for Ailing Nations, pp. 12-13)
Over and against America’s Christian foundations Paine proposed pantheism, or collectivism-—statism
Paine saw natural science as an enlightened pathway to a ‘new’ spirituality, one that would replace the outdated and unscientific Revealed Word perspective. For Paine, the Deists veneration of natural science and man’s Omniscient Reason was the only true religion.
Paine provided Americans in the 1790s with what Deists of the 1730s provided England: a reason for rejecting the Revealed Word in favor of natural science and Reason (the mind of man).
Undermining the Revealed Word through corrosive criticism, ruthless ridicule, scoffing and mocking was the first goal of Deists. The second was to advance an alternative religion based on natural science, one that prefigured and paved the way for the occult New Age evolutionary pantheism overtaking America today and advocated by neo-pantheist Christians such as Teilhard de Chardin, Michael Dowd, and John Polkinghorne with his sophisticated two-aspect monism conception.
“All the corruptions that have taken place in theology and in religion,” said Paine, “have been produced by admitting what man calls revealed religion.” Rational religion, on the other hand, derives from an “examination of nature, especially the careful study of celestial bodies.” (The Making of the New Spirituality, James A. Herrick, p 101)
In a section of “The Age of Reason” entitled “Comparing Christianism with Pantheism,” Paine recommends a scientific alternative to Christianity. Though he labels this new scientific faith Deism, it is a brand of pantheism that redistributes the Divine Substance of God within nature, thereby endowing men with divine sparks-—men can be as God in other words.
Paine compared natural science as the study of the “structure of the heavens” with various non-Christian “systems of religion.” In this light, natural science is “the progression of knowledge” and the one true source of natural religion.
In another section entitled “Advantages of Life in a Plurality of Worlds,” Paine explains that the pantheist conception of an infinite space filled with divine life led him, as it had Giordano Bruno, to speculate that other intelligent species exist in the cosmos, which through contemplation, can provide a sense of wonder lending itself to worship. (ibid)
For Paine and other Deists, natural science was the basis for a new pantheist spirituality and self-divination.
ONCE property was allowed to be taxed.. the government owned everything..
You paid rent to the givernment.. first on a few items then on more and more items..
Any that miss this... are delusional...
FRiend, you've been hammering & hammering at Thomas Paine this whole thread -- as if Paine were a snake in the Garden, or a Judas amongst apostles.
Paine was not those, indeed is not even listed as a major Founding Father.
But Paine provided valuable service during the entire Revolution period, and when it was over George Washington recommended, and Congress approved $3,000 in compensation -- an amount equivalent to $3,000,000 today.
The states of New York and Pennsylvania also rewarded Paine handsomely.
So Paine was far from "outcast".
Yes, Paine did tangle with some other Founders, notably Pennsylvania's Robert Morris -- who Paine accused of financial shenanigans.
So in 1779 Paine was expelled from his Congressional Foreign Affairs committee post, but continued to serve the Revolution in Europe, by arranging for foreign grants & loans.
In 1792, while in Great Britain, Paine was accused of libel & sedition, to which he responded:
Paine had gone to France in support of the French Revolution, but soon got into trouble with various authorities there, coming within a hairs-breadth of losing his own head during the terror of 1794.
During his imprisonment US officials in France were, ahem, slow to come to his rescue, and Paine blamed Washington for that, publically attacking Washington in 1796.
Paine supported France and Napoleon against Britain, until he figured out that Napoleon was not what he hoped.
In 1802 Paine's friend, President Thomas Jefferson invited him to return to the United States, where Paine lived in New York until his death, at age 72, in 1809.
Paine's religious beliefs were a little extreme for his time, but not completely so.
Where most of our Founders can be called Christian-Deists, or deistic-Christians, Paine was a Deist first, holding only the Quakers in very high regard.
He put no stock in creeds & doctrines.
Paine certainly did run afoul of leaders in the Second Great Awakening after 1800, and his views on Indian cultures seem at odds with his other beliefs:
Those do not equate to socialism or statism.
Among Paine's most notable admirers was a young Abraham Lincoln, a fact which makes me wonder if those who attack Paine so vigorously are also subtly attacking Lincoln himself?