"My own mind is my own church." Saint Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
This famous quote from The Age of Reason (1793) placed Paine in the category of revolutionary twice over. He was the pamphlet writer whose "Common Sense" kindled the American Revolution in 1776. With The Age of Reason he was to kindle the next great controversial conflict: the Freethought Revolution.
Paine was no saint. This is simply my way of tipping my hat (that in good Walt Whitman style I will not remove for him or anyone) to the immense, though neglected, contribution of the man who fired up the colonists to declare their independence. Without Paine who knows how long it would have taken for Jefferson to scribble down the Declaration and for he and his aristocratic noblemen to actually put it into play?
It is the time, the era, the moment to renew Thomas Paine's call for a new world where the truth is loud and evident, where justice and liberty prevail, where reason and common sense remind us that no army (political or religious) can defeat an idea!
(Paine, Franklin, Muir, Jesus, Emerson and more)
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