The Word of God

Thomas Paine was a revered American Hero of the Revolution.  His Common Sense and American Crisis series inspired the people and soldiers during that period to understand what they were working and fighting for, and to persevere through the enormous hardships they faced.  If he had stopped there with his political publications, he would certainly be remembered today as one of the major founders of the United States of America—the name he coined for it.

But in 1794, facing the guillotine in Paris, he wrote Part 1 of The Age of Reason, which was to relegate him to the status of a footnote in our history.  His open advocacy of deism, a belief in a non-interfering God held by many of his fellow founding patriots, albeit with greater discretion, earned him the vilification of his ecumenical foes who hounded him even to his deathbed, where they demanded that he recant his deism and accept Christianity.  His philosophical contributions are only now coming out of the dark ages of American History where even the likes of Theodore Roosevelt called him “a dirty little atheist”.  Wider recognition of his contributions in this area is long overdue, and as will be shown, they reveal a framework for an even more detailed vision of reasoned reality and spirituality.

The Truth contained in Paine’s thoughts on philosophy and religion recorded in The Age of Reason continues in spite of a long period of its being relegated to the shadows, and slowly gathers momentum through the vastly increased capacity for freedom of discussion and exchange of ideas provided by the modern information age. While his are certainly not the last words on reasoned philosophy, nor is such a claim made here, his courageous social leap ahead of his time speaks to us in the modern world as few have, before or since.

Rarely is the expression of one’s concept of religion more timelessly profound or majestic than this quote from The Age of Reason:

“It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a Word of God can unite. The Creation speaketh an universal language.... It is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this Word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.”

                                                         —Thomas Paine

This is not only the best definition ever for the Word of God, it is at the same time a preamble to a Grand Unified Theory of Truth. Anything we believe about God/Truth must be consistent with this one simple paragraph. What are its implications? That there are no supernatural events, there is no revelation other than the natural universe itself, no prophesy; and prayer can only be a simple appreciation for the free will His universe bestows on us in the hope that we will find the strength to pursue the light of Truth (God) with an honest soul.

The purpose here is to take Paine’s conception of the Word of God, and presume to extend the concept one step further—That Truth is God, wherever that Truth leads and whatever it turns out to be.

Truth is God and God is Truth in both the figurative and literal sense. If there is a sentient, all powerful master of the universe, pursuing Truth will lead us in "His" direction along that fascinating road of infinite length. If "He" does not exist, the motivation to follow the road still does, since the pursuit of Truth (knowledge, justice, love, beauty) remains as the only path to genuine fulfillment. We worship this God, Truth, by its pursuit and are rewarded by that fulfillment—here and after(?)life.

Truth as God is the religion/philosophy that you know is correct because you've made Truth itself the pinnacle, the steeple of your religion.  God is a word for the ultimate, unequivocal reality—a definition indistinguishable from Truth. Wherever Truth leads, there too must be God, be that a spiritual, omnipotent being or not.