There are so many interesting points in this discussion thread. I particularly liked the inscription in Mr P’s photo.
http://thomas-paine-friends.org/historical-places.htm explains “this statue of Paine was sculpted by Lawrence Holofcener and dedicated on 7 June, 1997 by the Bordentown Historical Society. It sits on a grass median in a quiet residential section of town. The statue contains the following written message: "Father of the American Revolution. Paine's words and deeds put the concepts of independence, equality, democracy, abolition of slavery, representative government and a constitution with a bill of rights, on the American agenda.”
The first thing I want to point out about Paine’s achievements serves as a critique of the very interesting
Atlantic article by Shadi Hamid that DWill kindly linked. The article states “This is the danger in transforming mundane political debates into metaphysical questions. Political questions are not metaphysical; they are of this world and this world alone.”
In this statement the author exhibits an all too common basic misunderstanding of the meaning of the metaphysical. The mundane political ideas immortalised on Paine’s statue are totally metaphysical, simply because none of them can be justified solely by the descriptive evidence of facts. They are ‘beyond the physical’ in that Paine’s vision of the rights of man and the age of reason rests within a spiritual framework of moral values.
Now to be sure, Paine’s enlightened framework itself arose in response to the scientific enlightenment, which was a purely physical fact-based system. And yet just as man cannot live by bread alone, so too a merely scientific descriptive account is inadequate to provide ethical vision of the meaning and purpose of life. This ethical vision is exactly what Paine delivers with his metaphysical concepts of independence, equality, etc.
One way to approach this problem is to see the moral value within these ideas as all about the priority of connection over description. Paine sought to transform how society connects people together. Any merely descriptive account of how existing society functioned would necessarily lack the electric excitement generated by Paine’s revolutionary agenda for America.
This theme of connection helps to illustrate the importance of Harry and DWill’s conversation about the weakness of the new atheism, how as Harry said “The Four Horsemen and other militant atheists have not demonstrated great openness to holistic approaches to life's deep questions.” Holistic approaches ask how we connect to reality. The answers to that question involve moral ideas that are intrinsically spiritual, like Paine’s great themes.
The confusion here goes back to the philosophy of science, with the difficulty that writers like Dawkins have in explaining a coherent philosophy when their training has so strongly focused on matters of description rather than connection, leading to intense suspicion of any claims about some metaphysical connection between us all. And yet, scientific description itself has immense moral power, since denial of evidence is a cardinal sin against modern scientific knowledge.
The Atlantic article cites Paine indirectly in its analysis of America itself as “almost a religion,” saying “the American civic religion has its own founding myth, its prophets and processions, as well as its scripture—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers.” To suggest this civic religion has nothing of the metaphysical about it presents a basic mistake in epistemology, based on the false assumption that metaphysical simply means supernatural.
This unjustified dismissal of metaphysics appears in the idea in the article that “Whereas religion sees the promised land as being above, in God’s kingdom, the utopian left sees it as being ahead, in the realization of a just society here on Earth.” That distinction between religious and political visions is widely shared, but it creates a misleading confusion – what the article terms the spiritual void in “the various strains of wokeism.” And it is a distinction directly contradicted by Jesus Christ in The Lord's Prayer line 'thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven'.
Religion is not necessarily about ‘the promised land above’, but rather more about how we connect to each other in this world. The linguistic meaning of religion as ‘rebinding’ shows how central this theme of connection is to spiritual identity. The supernatural theory of heaven is not intrinsic to religious sentiment, despite the majority view to the contrary. The more enlightened wisdom traditions see supernatural language as allegory for natural discussion of this world. Literal belief in heaven is something from popular emotional fantasy, which naturally tends to crowd out more enlightened understanding.
Going back to writers like Thomas Paine with their integral connecting vision is an important way to help dispel the muddled views that beset modern politics and religion. Harry’s point against Hegel that thesis and antithesis do not always produce a synthesis may be true, but in this case, seeing modern politics as presenting an antithesis to traditional religion does offer a framework to look for a new integral connecting synthesis.