A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1736 (Old Style), English-born American political activist and rev

A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1736 (Old Style), English-born American political activist and revolutionary Thomas Paine was born in Norfolk. He is best remembered for his pamphlet Common Sense, which vocalized rebellious demands for independence from Great Britain.“These questions about the politics of knowledge will arise repeatedly in subsequent chapters. For the moment, let us consider just one other example – the philosopher and firebrand Thomas Paine. An unsuccessful corset-maker, sacked tax-collector, and occasional political writer, Paine left his native England to start a new life in America in 1774. On his arrival in Philadelphia, he found work as the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. A couple of years later, his polemical pamphlet Common Sense (1776) was a key factor in persuading the American colonists to go to war against the British government, and established Paine as the bestselling author of the age. An associate of Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and others of the founding fathers of the United States of America, Paine’s democratic and anti-monarchical political philosophy shaped the Declaration of Independence. After politics, Paine’s other great passions were science and engineering. He had attended popular lectures on Newton and astronomy back in England, and he spent many years of his life working on a design for a single-span iron bridge, inspired by the delicacy and strength of one of the great works of nature – the spider’s web. His whole philosophy was a scientific one. He saw revolutions in governments paralleling the revolutions of celestial bodies in the heavens. Each was an inevitable, natural, and law-governed process. Later in his life, having had a hand in both the American and French revolutions, he turned his sights from monarchy to Christianity. The institutions of Christianity were as offensive to his enlightened and Newtonian sensibilities as were those of monarchical government. In his Age of Reason (1794), Paine complained of ‘the continual persecution carried on by the Church, for several hundred years, against the sciences and against the professors of science.’” — From ‘Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction’ by Thomas Dixon[Pg. 10-1 — From ‘Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction’ by Thomas Dixon.]Image via Wikimedia Commons -- source link

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