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review 2016-06-02 03:10
Eye-opening
Thomas Paine - Enlightenment, Revolution, & the Birth of Modern Nations (07) by Nelson, Craig [Paperback (2007)] - Thomas Nelson Publishers

I have only ever read The Rights of Man many years ago. I loved Paine's wit (there are many classic one-liners, including my favourite anti-monarchist barb of all time: "a hereditary monarch makes as much sense as a hereditary poet laureate") but found his philosophy superficial, probably because I had just left grad school.

This biography makes a compelling case for Paine being one of the greats of the enlightenment - man able to combine philosophical ideas with prose that was intelligible to the masses and who wrote about any number of topics (and even designed bridges!). In this version, Paine is an important figure worthy of serious study and as important (if not more so) as his contemporaries, with contributions to both philosophy and actual political life (including helping to draft multiple constitutions).

I have two nitpicks with the book.

The first is that Nelson loves Paine too much. He asks us to forgive Paine's faults, after all Paine is only a man. But Nelson does not extend the same courtesy to some the people who argued with Paine, particularly John Adams (who comes across as an absolutely awful person in this book) and Edmund Burke (whose position on the French Revolution is considered some kind of betrayal, both personal and political).

The second major issue is with Nelson's portrayal of Pitt the Younger's "terror." Nelson equates the suppression of free speech in England (something that was quite common at the time) with the Terror in France. I am nearly a free speech absolutist, but one cannot claim that jailing people for months for writing things is in any way the same as the mass murder of thousands of people. This is just absurd and downright preposterous. I really don't understand where Nelson is coming from here.

But those two things aside, this is a really interesting biography of one of the most important writers of his era.

Well worth your time.

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text 2016-02-08 15:43
Reading progress update: I've read 51 out of 288 pages.
The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine - Paul Collins

A journey through all the places that Thomas Paine's remains passed through. So far it's interesting and does a fairly decent job of using the story of what happened after his death to reveal what he was like in life, but a lot of it is focusing more on the people he was friends with. It's also extremely conversational, which sometimes works and sometimes not so much. Still, pretty enjoyable so far. 

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review 2016-01-17 00:00
The Age Of Reason
The Age Of Reason - Thomas Paine Before I read this book, I used to think there were just six general arguments that Christians (or other theistic religions) needed to debate: design (teleological), first cause, morality, ontological, purpose of life, and proof of the resurrection. Paine did something else entirely. He argued by showing the absurdity of Christianity as a whole, and the internal contradiction within and between chapters of the bible. Those are the debates apologist never participate in because they are the low hanging fruits and aren't defendable.

Adam (man) caused original sin by eating an apple in spite of a talking snake's admonition. God comes to earth in the form of his son to die a horrible death to atone for all men (and women). One can pay a debt of a pauper and keep him out of debtors prison, but the punishment for other crimes can't be atoned by somebody else vicariously (at least not for the world I live in). Paine makes a good point on how all revealed truth becomes hearsay for everyone else but the one who God talked to directly.

Paine shows at the most the books of the bible are history books and are not written by who the books claim they are written by and were written well after they claim they were. He gets quite detailed in demonstrating inauthentic claims of authorship, and shows anachronisms internal to the document. Also, he shows directly the cruelty of the people of the Old Testament.

Paine is a Diest, but he attaches no predicates to his God. I like to think of God as Arthur C Clark did in one of his books as Bob a supercomputer of some kind. It perfectly reasonable in the time before Darwin to have been a Deist after all as Kant wrongly said "there will never be a Newton for a blade of grass".
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review 2015-09-23 00:00
Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings (Oxford World's Classics)
Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings (Oxford World's Classics) - Thomas Paine,Mark Philp Acknowledgements
Introduction
Note on the Texts
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Thomas Paine


--Common Sense
--American Crisis I
--American Crisis XIII
--Letter to Jefferson
--Rights of Man
--Rights of Man Part the Second
--Letter Addressed to the Addressers, on the Late Proclamation
--Dissertation on the First Principles of Government
--Agrarian Justice

Abbreviations
Explanatory Notes
Index
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