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Essay On Thomas Paine Hero

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Thomas Paine Hero or Zero
Thomas Paine was decidedly important to America from his very humble beginnings. In order to understand what helped him become so important, how he grew up and what led him to the United States must be examined. Paine was trying to explain to the Americans that without God nothing was possible. Paine also explained to them that the way the British government was being run is not the way to run America. By the end of Paine’s life, it become abundantly clear that Paine was no longer America’s hero. Paine’s many writings included “The Crisis”, “Common Sense”, and “The Age of Reason” all of which were extremely influential to the American people. However, throughout the duration of his writings, it was apparent that Thomas Paine went from being a person that almost every …show more content…

“The Age of Reason” was when Paine’s great reputation as being a prime mover was ruined. “It is one of the ironies of the literary and theological world that “The Age of Reason”, which, although written to express the author’s doubts regarding traditional religion, was intended primarily to save the world from atheism, brought against Paine the charge of atheism” (The Age of Reason 1). Paine let his beliefs get him into a lot of trouble. Paine’s Christian beliefs brought out his bitter criticism of atheism. “The Christian “system of faith,” he says, seems to be a “species of atheism,” a kind of “denial of God,” for it believes in a man rather than in the true God and interposes “between man and his maker an opaque body, which calls a Redeemer” (The Age of Reason 3). When Americans who once worshipped Paine started reading his thoughts on religion, they began to change how they felt about him. Upon his return to the United States in the 1800’s, he found that his writing “The Age of Reason” left him essentially

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