Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (52 page)

The first time I read this amazing book, I had two immediate thoughts, complete with mental exclamation marks:

“It sounds like it was written last week!”

“I can’t believe he wasn’t killed for this!”

But it wasn’t, and he wasn’t.

Erasmus felt that the Catholic Church of his time — a church of which he was a part — had become broken, unethical, and deeply corrupted. But the world itself wasn’t much better. So he enlisted the goddess Folly to give a speech praising humanity for all it did to promote and celebrate her work by spreading and promoting foolishness.
The Praise of Folly
was the result.

Starting outside the church doors was a masterstroke. Folly first praises the foolishness of philosophers, then of her fellow gods — a nice touch. She takes extended jabs at parents, at women and men, at warriors and artists, at poets and politicians, at doctors and princes and commoners. She thanks several national characters, from the Germans to the Turks, for doing her work for her. She even spends a bit of time mocking science in its cradle.

Then gradually, ever so gradually, she begins praising the priests and scholars of the Holy Catholic Church, first for their back-bending theologies (written as if they knew the Mother of God personally and visited Hell every weekend, he says), then for their laziness — and finally for their greed, their ignorance, and their rank immorality and galling hypocrisy.

Ah, ha ha
ha!

It’s simply brilliant. For the first 80 pages or so, Erasmus softened his readers, got them laughing at everyone around them, even at themselves. So when the men of the Church stepped into the crosshairs, why, it only seemed fair, especially because Erasmus was one of them! But the point was clear enough to get tongues wagging and brains working all over Europe. Not a good combination for the Church.

Erasmus was a friend and mutual admirer of Martin Luther, and a lot of historians think
The Praise of Folly
prepared the ground for the Protestant Reformation that began a few years later. But Erasmus was also a close friend of Pope Julian II, and the book was after all just a lark.
Ha ha ha!

If he hadn’t made it funny, hadn’t included other targets, and didn’t have friends in high places, Erasmus really may have met his end at the stake. Other heretics did, and for an awful lot less.

As it was, Pope Paul IV put all of Erasmus’s books, including
The Praise of Folly,
on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1559. But by that time, Erasmus was safely dead, and at any rate it was way too late to get the genie back in the bottle. The ideas were out there. The Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the course of freethought — up to and including atheism — flew right out of that hilarious, ingenious bottle.

Reasoning with Paine

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) is a perfect example of a religious believer whose out-of-the-box thinking about religion made him an inspiration not just to other out-of-the-box believers, but also to atheists and agnostics who had entirely thrown away the box.

Born in England, Paine became a corset maker, and then became involved in local activism, irritating many people as change makers tend to do. He met Benjamin Franklin, moved to the Colonies, and became quickly embroiled in revolutionary activities.

In 1776 Paine wrote
Common Sense,
a pamphlet credited with bolstering support for the idea of independence among the colonists. (One British Loyalist warned him that without the monarchy, the Colonies would quickly “degenerate into democracy.” Now there’s a telling phrase.) Paine took a job working for Congress, got fired, and then moved to France, where he quickly became embroiled in revolutionary activities. When power changed hands in 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned.

There, in a French prison, Paine earned his place in freethought history by writing
The Age of Reason,
one of the most powerfully reasoned, clear, and compelling assaults on traditional religion ever written.

Not that Paine was an atheist. In fact, it was his concern that revolutionary France was throwing the baby out with the bathwater by abolishing all religion that led him to write
The Age of Reason
in the first place, “lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity and of the theology that is true.”

Paine was a Deist, and “the true Deist has but one Deity,” he said. “His religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in everything moral, scientifical, and mechanical.” (For more on Deism, check out
Chapter 2
.)

Like Erasmus before him, Paine knew how to prepare an audience to hear what he had to say. He started with a clear statement of his own position. He believed

In one God, and hoped for an afterlife

In the equality of man

That religious duties included doing justice, loving mercy, and making others happy

That all established churches were human inventions created to terrify and enslave people and make money

That all people nonetheless have the right to believe in the doctrines of those churches, or in any religious idea to which their conscience leads

Paine then moved to a theme familiar to the Islamic heretics I write about in Chapters
5
and
10
— that the testimony of self-proclaimed prophets is a pretty weak and suspicious reason for believing. Paine’s position on prophecy can be summed up as follows: If God speaks to you, fine, but don’t expect me to put any stock in your testimony. Instead, I look to the natural world, which is the bible of the Deist.