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The Age of Reason = The Age of Infidelity5 min read

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Atheists and secularists are fond of quoting the articulate Thomas Paine, author of the free-thinkers creed Age of Reason.  Few know, however, that a founding father wrote a rebuttal in 1801, which American Vision has reprinted. Elias Boudinot’s book The Age of Revelation was seen as a powerful rebuttal.  And now you can read it too.  Below is the blurb about the book from American Vision.

How many times have you heard some skeptic claim that this or that non-Christian was a Founding Father of America? Thomas Jefferson is one of their patron saints, and yet he wasn’t even present during the drafting of the Constitution. Of course, Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence which states emphatically that God is the Creator and the Judge of the world. The ACLU plays down these words. Benjamin Franklin is another one skeptics love to trot out as an anti-religious Founding Father. But it was Franklin who stood up at the Constitutional Convention and quoted Psalm 127:1 as a warning to the delegates:

Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.’

Not much is said about these remarks by Franklin.

So liberals bring out what they believe is their biggest gun – Thomas Paine. Paine wrote Common Sense in 1776 and used the Bible (Judges 8; 1 Sam. 8; Matt. 22:21) to make the case that Americans had a biblical right to oppose tyrannical governments. These facts are ignored by today’s ‘scholars’ and skeptics. Instead, they reference Paine’s The Age of Reason as the work they claim proves America was founded on Enlightenment principles. Hogwash! The first part wasn’t published until 1794. Even Paine’s friends denounced him for his views. John Adams called Paine a ‘blackguard’ who wrote out of the depths of ‘a malignant heart.’ George Washington, previously one of Paine’s fiercest advocates, attacked Paine’s principles in his Farewell Address (without referring to his name) as unpatriotic and subversive. But you would never know any of these facts if you sat through a history lecture on the period in a modern-day college classroom.

But here’s something else you will probably have never heard: Paine’s Age of Reason was thoroughly refuted by Elias Boudinot in his masterful book The Age of RevelationNever heard of Boudinot? I’m not surprised. It’s because Boudinot was a real Founding Father who served as a delegate to the Continental Congress, signed the Treaty of Paris, helped design the Great Seal of the United States, served as Director of the United States Mint, founded the American Bible Society, and proposed a resolution (that passed) just after the ratification of the First Amendment that called on the President to issue a Thanksgiving Day Proclamation. Boudinot said he 

‘could not think of letting the session pass over without offering an opportunity to all the citizens of the United States of joining with one voice, in returning to Almighty God their sincere thanks for the many blessings he had poured down upon them.’

You wont find any of these inconvenient truths in today’s textbooks.

Boudinot believed it was Paine’s popularity with his 1776 Common Sense that attracted people to The Age of Reason. It’s in this book that Paine declares that the Bible is more ‘the word of a demon than the word of God’ being ‘a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.’ When Boudinot heard that ‘thousands of copies of the Age of Reason had been sold at public,’ he decided to write a refutation of the incendiary work. Boudinot was a man ahead of his time. He understood that young people would be the most susceptible to Paine’s arguments. Little has changed in 200 years.

American Vision has rescued Elias Boudinot’s The Age of Revelation
from the dust bin of history, put there and covered over by academics
who fear that their students will find out that they’ve been lied to
about America’s founding. Boudinot understood that ‘Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow.’ The Age of Revelation has been newly typeset and published as a smyth-sewn (not glued) hardback with a beautifully designed dust jacket. Boudinot was not an academic, and yet The Age of Revelation surpasses most of what is passed off today as ‘Christian scholarship.’ This limited edition is the finest version of this valuable work that you will find. Original copies are impossible to find. Gary DeMar has written the Foreword. Hardback, 285 Pages.