Quick, listen to this realaudio talk by Mark Steel on Thomas Paine while it’s still available on the BBC site. It’s both hysterically funny and informative. One revelation for me was that America’s early fervently godless rabble-rouser began his career by signing on to a ship called the Terrible, under Captain Death, and also sailed as a privateer. I tell you, there’s a mystic connection between atheists and pirates!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
That’s a strange coincidence – I’d just downloaded it last night and am listening to it now! Tis very good. Also look for ‘The Mark Steel Solution’ on Religion – its very funny indeed.
Ah, Paine was Deist, not godless.
Ah, but if you read what his contemporaries wrote about him, he was a strident atheist.
That’s right PZ – it’s all about the…dare I say it? “framing”
I wonder I we might one far off day look back through time and see your position as quaint and moderate? We can only hope.
Yeah he was a deist. Not an athiest. Paine even states it himself in his writings. No matter what his contemporaries wrote about him, which usually was to disparage him more so than to exalt him. He was a rather hated man on both sides of the Atlantic.
Anyway, check out “Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern NAtions” by Craig Nelson. A rather good biogrpahy on teh man. If you want o devle deeper I suggest the excellent book by Eric Foner “THomas Paine and Revolutionary America.”
I’ve got a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, and the second half of the book reads like a DI brochure. He spends the first half ripping into organized religion, and I guess I can’t really blame him for being born before Darwin published, but I have a hard time believing that someone who devotes half a book to proving the existence of God is an atheist.
Excellent talk! Do continue to make a fuss, PZ!
Sorry, guys, I was making a sneaky point. Paine wasn’t a real atheist, and he wrote a few weird things about it, but he was also kind of the Dawkins of his day, making criticisms of convention that made his critics furious.
Deists were not religious. They had no holy places, holy books, holy people, holy relics, holy rituals, holy buildings, or holy anything. They did not congregate. They were the equivalent of agnostics or atheists.
Their ‘deity’ we know as Mother Nature. This was the price they paid for not believing. To openly defy the godly was to invite murder, arson, and mayhem.
PZ Myers swaggered and drunkenly boasted:
While I suspect that Johnny Depp and Captain Jack Sparrow are atheists, some of the most deadly pirates were fundamentalist Christians. I advise you to read up on Black Bart Roberts: The Greatest Pirate of Them All:
Aye, Matey, yee think yar free ’cause dar ‘taint no gods telling ya what ta do, but ‘taint nothing like the freedom of delusion with which they can escape reality itself. ‘Taint no god telling them anything, they create god in their own image and tell fools what to do.
Hey now, don’t disparage good privateersman serving their country in their own mercenary way under a Letter of Marque. There’s a world of difference between them and pirates.
Except that sometime a little extra theivery might occur. . . and occasionally a friendly or neutral ship might be taken….and then a privateer might slip over into true piracy.
Okay the difference was not so big! ;)
I love the idea of atheists going knocking door to door in religious areas asking ‘have you heard the bad news?’
The only thing I do know is that Real Player is the work of the devil himself. Talk about pirates and hijacking! Those pirates have taken over my computer more than once. Really, I advice you guys not to use nor promote the use of such bloated piece of garbage software.
All is fair in love and war, eh?
Christian Burnahm:
I prefer the idea of going around on Sunday afternoons and saying, “You know what I did this morning? Slept in.”
Gork:
Strange, the only 2 fellows ever persecuted were Paine, & Blount (who was ‘symbolically’ executed – his books burned as a symbol).
Outside of that, The Deists went a little apeshit during the French revolution.
While being Deist was perhaps a lower rung in the latter en route to atheism, there was/is still the clinging to an abstract fatherhead, proving further that soft chains are hardest to break.
Perhaps your group’s name should be expanded to Campus Atheists, Skeptics, Humanists and Pirates?
It should be great for recruiting, especially if you make your Sunday morning door to door rounds with eye patch, peg leg and parrot.
Ar, matey! Abandon your magic sky daddy’s ship and join us on board the CASHP galleon! There’s grog and dancing and merriment and midnight readings of The Origin of ‘pieces of Eight!
In war, love, and business, as Scrooge McDuck says.
In war, love, and business, as Scrooge McDuck says.
Mark Steel is smart and funny, which makes it difficult to understand how he got mixed up with Respect and George Galloway et al.
I suspect Mark Steel has got mixed up with Respect and that twit Galloway because of Labour’s policies on Iraq and other areas has made many of its supporters exremely angry.