Paine criticizes the tyrannical actions of the Church as he had those of governments in the Rights of Man and Common Sense, stating that " the Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue.

Since Hume had already made many of the same " moral attacks upon Christianity " that Paine popularized in The Age of Reason, scholars have concluded that Paine probably read Hume's works on religion or had at least heard about them through the Joseph Johnson circle.

" Although many early English deists had relied on ridicule to attack the Bible and Christianity, theirs was a refined wit rather than the broad humor Paine employed.

Paine wrote that " the people of France were running headlong into atheism and I had the work translated into their own language, to stop them in that career, and fix them to the first article.

Before Paine it had been possible to be both a Christian and a deist ; now such a religious outlook became virtually untenable.

Despite all of these attacks, Paine never wavered in his beliefs ; when he was dying, a woman came to visit him, claiming that God had instructed her to save his soul.

Paine dismissed her in the same tones that he had used in The Age of Reason: " pooh, pooh, it is not true.

Paine, who had only recently arrived in the colonies from England, argued in favor of colonial independence, advocating republicanism as an alternative to monarchy and hereditary rule.

In 1759, Thomas Paine had his home and shop in a house at 20 New Street, Sandwich.

Prior to this trip NASA administrator Thomas O. Paine had approached Collins and said that Secretary of State William P. Rogers was interested in appointing Collins to the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.

Paine also had Flat Rock Camp, his summer retreat on the shores of Lake Champlain, constructed for his family.

Such foreign banking companies had acquired several medium sized securities firms ( such as UBS acquiring Paine Webber and Credit Suisse acquiring Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette ).

They had an ally in American Founding Father Thomas Paine.

* In Tom Paine Maru ( 1984 ), entrepreneurs of the Confederacy travel from world to world, exploring the various kinds of messes made by the Federalists who had been shifted back in time and scattered at random over the universe at the conclusion of The Venus Belt.

Bad weather delayed Longmore from assessing his new pupil, and before the weather improved, the School's Commandant, Captain Godfrey Paine RN had co-opted Trenchard to the permanent staff.

In response to the changing conditions, corporations that had sponsored in-house venture investment arms, including General Electric and Paine Webber either sold off or closed these venture capital units.

The new bridge was designed by James Paine who had previously been responsible for Richmond Bridge.

Three years later he would, against the advice of his friends, take on the defence of Thomas Paine who had been charged with seditious libel after the publication of the second part of his Rights of Man.

Erskine's decision to defend Paine cost him his position as attorney-general ( legal advisor ) to the Prince of Wales, to which he had been appointed in 1786.

Laurens and Paine accused Morris of war profiteering in 1779, and Willing had voted against the Declaration of Independence.

Since leaving NASA fifteen years earlier, Dr. Paine had been a vocal spokesman for an expansive view of what should be done in space.

He lodged with Thomas Paine and listened to the debates in the Convention.

Without such a declaration, Paine concluded, “ he custom of all courts is against us, and will be so, until, by an independence, we take rank with other nations .”

However, according to his biographer, Albert Paine, Twain seemed to take issue more with what he saw as Mary Baker Eddy's cult of personality than with the actual ideas of Christian Science saying:

In 1993, Bob Johnson established the first Deist organization since the days of Thomas Paine and Elihu Palmer with the World Union of Deists.

The stamp, designed by Howard Paine, displays the book with its original dust jacket, a white Magnolia blossom, and a hilt placed against a background of green velvet.

Deism was a religious philosophy in common currency in colonial times, and some Founding Fathers ( most notably Thomas Paine, who was an explicit proponent of it, and Benjamin Franklin, who spoke of it in his Autobiography ) are identified more or less with this system.

Paine would also more than likely have been familiar with Voltaire's mocking wit and the works of other deistic French philosophes.

Foner also maintains that with The Age of Reason Paine " gave deism a new, aggressive, explicitly anti-Christian tone ".

In the eighteenth century " vulgarity " was associated with the middling and lower classes and not with obscenity ; thus, when Paine celebrates his " vulgar " style and his critics attack it, the dispute is over class accessibility, not profanity.

The irreverent tone that Paine combined with this vulgar style set his work apart from its predecessors.

As the historian E. P. Thompson has put it, Paine " ridiculed the authority of the Bible with arguments which the collier or country girl could understand ".

Paine takes advantage of several religious rhetorics beyond those associated with Quakerism in The Age of Reason, most importantly a millennial language that appealed to his lower-class readers.

" The periodical The Freethinker ( founded in 1881 by George Foote ) argued, like Paine, that the " absurdities of faith " could be " slain with laughter ".

While still in France, Paine formed the Church of Theophilanthropy with five other families ; this civil religion held as its central dogma that man should worship God's wisdom and benevolence and imitate those divine attributes as much as possible.

Thomas Paine, one of the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution, wrote “ All the tales of miracles, with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for impostors to preach and fools to believe ”.

He introduces himself with the line, " My name is Michael Paine, and I am a nosy neighbour " and in a spoof of the stakeout at the beginning of The Ipcress File, recounts to the camera the ' suspiciously ' mundane behaviour of his neighbours, before saying, " Not a lot of people know that I know that ".

Overcome with guilt, Paine leaves the Senate chamber and attempts to commit suicide by shooting himself.

Along with Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine, he is regarded as one of the most influential champions of Republicanism and an invested promoter of the American Revolution and its fight for independence.

Many Americans agreed with Paine, and came to believe that the United States ' virtue was a result of its special experiment in freedom and democracy.

Trained as a violinist, he also studied theory and composition in Boston with Josef Claus and John Knowles Paine.

In 1992, the government of Mukilteo opposed plans to expand Paine Field ; Mayor Brian Sullivan said that the city disagrees " with the idea of a Sea-Tac north " and supports upholding a 1978 agreement between residents around Paine Field and Snohomish County.

Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason that " whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God.