no. 128

"The story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up."

— Thomas Paine - English-born American author and revolutionary leader. Theodore Roosevelt called him a “filthy little atheist.” Actually a deist; wrote the definitive text of deism, The Age of Reason, which used reason to establish a belief in Nature’s Designer, but attacked Christianity as a system of superstition that “produces fanatics” and “serves the purposes of despotism.” In England, sellers of the book were jailed for blasphemy. In dating his letters, instead of “A.D.,” wrote “since the fable of Christ.”

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