3

dude number 3 is Paine! he is a Deist, and I am being tested on his reasoning behind the rejection of the institution of Christianity.
he prefaces his missive by reminding everyone that he believes in God, the equality of man, and that religious duties consist of justice, loving mercy and endeavoring to make fellow creatures happy.

his whole paper is an attack on the Church as an institution! yeah, Paine! he points out that the church is a human invention that is too intimately tied to the state and is thus dreadfully susceptible to corruption.
he then points out that a "revelation" is divine knowledge passed on from God to a single person. it is not said from one man to another, that's hearsay and therefore one is not required to believe a lick of it. from this we can conclude that the commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity within them.
in addition, JC didn't write an account of himself! his story as we know it is ridiculous and carries every earmark of fraud and imposition. Paine points out that everything in the scriptural system is the reverse of what it pretends to be, and if Christians are looking for objects of gratitude and admiration, why not open their eyes and look around? for goodness sake, says Paine, it is sick to be excited by subjects like tragedy and suicide. has the gloomy pride of man become so intolerable that nothing can flatter it but a sacrifice of a Creator?

and, for another thing, the doctrine of redemption is based on pecuniary justice, not moral justice. moral justice would not accept the innocent over the guilty, but pecuniary justice accepts that a debt which another person might owe can be paid by another. also another part of the doctrine of redemption includes giving money to the church. what!

for Paine, there is no such thing as redemption, and this is great!
what Christians ungratefully call 'human reason', Paine calls the greatest gift God has bestowed upon humanity ("as if humans could give themselves reason! pah!")
if you want the word of God, it's published all over the earth. his power is witnessed in the immensity of creation. his wisdom is witnessed in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed, his munificence is witnessed in the abundance with which he fills the earth, and his mercy is witnessed in the fact that he does not withhold such an abundance, even from the ungrateful.

to know what God is, don't look in the human-made book of scripture, look at the scripture that is called Creation.

Christianity appears to Paine as a system of atheism! he sees it as a religious denial of God, a compound religion made up of mostly man-isms and very little deisms. for one thing, they inject an opaque body between man & maker, and what's more is that they call that opaque body "the redeemer."
theology, for Paine, is the study of human opinions and human fancies concerning God. science, on the other hand, is divine. man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.

nothing was made in vain.

there are 3 means that have been employed to impose on mankind: Mystery, Miracle and Prophecy. all of these are incompatible with true religion. everything we behold is both a mystery and a miracle. as far as mystery goes, however, we are blessed in the fact that we don't actually need to know how the acorn grows, all we have to do is plant it and it will grow. as far as miracles are concerned, no one thing is a greater miracle than another, and no miracle is more difficult for God to perform than another. what is a miracle in our limited comprehension is no miracle to the power that performs it. the Christian doctrine degrades the Almighty to a showman, playing tricks to get people to stare. as far as prophecy is concerned, he harks back to his definition of a revelation. they cannot be shared between anyone besides God and one man, and therefore prophets are characters rendered useless and unnecessary.

ouch!