Thomas Paine and UU

[Matthew78]

If Thomas Paine were alive today, does anyone think he would be a UU given his deism?

 

[AmyLeona]

There are a lot of deistic UUs today.

Before the joining of the Unitarian and Universalist churches, several famous deists also identified as Unitarian or Universalist. (Including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.)

 

[applewuud]

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren,
and to do good is my religion."
— Thomas Paine

Yup, he certainly would check it out.

"Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man."
— Thomas Paine

This makes him a fellow-traveller of the Universalists who believed that God was too good to send people to everlasting punishment.

"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid or produces only atheists or fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism, and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests, but so far as respects the good of man in general it leads to nothing here or hereafter."
— Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

Now it would depend on which UU church he checked out. If he walked into one that was dominantly Humanist, he'd be asked to lead a religious education group. (A lot of UUs are "come-outers" fleeing one religion or another, and share Paine's belief.) If he walked into one that is more liberal-Christian, they might take exception to his dismissal of an entire culture and say they think those power-hungry clerics abused the true message of Jesus, and what he's protesting isn't Christianity, really.

"I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it."
— Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)

Since UUs are always changing our minds about things, this would put him in the mainstream of UU thought.

But, in the end, we can't know what Paine would think of us. I do know what a lot of us think of him: that he's a modern prophet whose ideas were crucial into making America a free society that allows us to believe what our reason tells us to, not what some authority or "sacred text" orders us to.

 

[Reptillian]

There are a lot of deistic UUs today.

Before the joining of the Unitarian and Universalist churches, several famous deists also identified as Unitarian or Universalist. (Including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.)

I think most of the deists from his time period would be athiests or agnostics today. I've been reading some of Ben Franklin's writings and he seems to find the order and beauty of the biological world to be the most compelling evidence for the existence of God. As a reasonable man of science, if he knew what we know today about evolution and genetics, I doubt he would have been as convinced. Although, perhaps some modern version of the "god of the gaps" would have been sufficient.