Thomas Paine's Rights of Man

Reading Christopher Hitchens' account of the life and writings of Tom Paine in his contribution to the Books that Changed the World series, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, you'd be correct in suspecting that it's a book right up my alley. Again, Hitchens has managed to write a book with all the eloquence and consideration of a master that feels like it's been written solely for me. When I was detailing the accounts described in the book to my beloved, from the French Revolution to the American Civil War to Bonaparte's imposition, she uttered with unenthusiastic monotony, "This is going to be another blog post, isn't it?" But how can I help myself, dear reader, when Hitchens paraphrases the sublime poetry of Paine's simple, yet profound renunciations of the monarchy, hereditary principle, and theism? Inspired by Marquis de Lafayette, a member of the French avant-garde, Paine took issue with his old friend, the aptly named, Edmund Burke, and produced a polemic against the British monarchy as means of riposte, retold by Hitchens:

[Burke further disdained any response to Part One of the Rights of Man,
which] left the field clear for Paine to launch a spirited attack on the
hereditary principle, which he ridiculed at length for its self-evident
contradictions. To him, the idea of a hereditary ruler was as absurd as the idea of a hereditary mathematician and put the country at the continual risk of being governed by an imbecile.

The Old Testament lent no further support to the monarchy, as Paine was keen to point out. One wonders what the modern Windsors would do when faced with such a glaring, radical movement sweeping Europe. Further, even more resounding is Paine's abhorrence at the primary theme underlying The Bible's core teaching: the notion of vicarious redemption or vicarious atonement; the very teaching that promotes the concept of accepting one man's death as repentance for your own sins. (This argument has been oft repeated by Hitchens on the debating platform).

If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in
prison, another person can take the debt upon himself and pay it for
me. But if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is
changed. Moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty even if the
innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this, is to destroy the
principle of its existence, which is the thing itself. It is then no longer
justice. It is indiscriminate revenge.

Thus, Paine offers, Jesus dying for our misdeeds is a positively, inherently immoral teaching. These suggestions effectively banished Paine from his birthplace, England, and forced him to France, whereupon he was later imprisoned anyway for his surreptitious combatance against the uprising of Napoleon Bonaparte. In prison he penned most of his conclusive work, The Age of Reason, referencing The Bible from memory alone, as he was wont to do, assured that his American audience would likely have read it. His indictment of the American constitution was supremely effective in assuring its survival even to this very day. Hitchens summarises the historical significance:

No nation had managed to evolve a system of government that did not depend on some form of autocracy. This whole case was now altered by the American Revolution, which had bound itself and its heirs, in the name of the people, to certain inscribed rules and laws which no successor regime was allowed to break.

It's here that one may feel as though they're getting ahead of Hitchens by claiming precisely what Paine later explicated, that the American constitution itself was a form of autocracy. However,

That constitution [serves], not only as an authority, but as a law of control to the government.

This last statement deserves our repetition, and consideration from our English body politic as a brilliant and concise insistence upon the distinction to be made between society and state. Naturally, I could continue to review the material at hand, but some of my readers have already warned me against lengthier texts, claiming they get bored after about 200 words. Inspired, however, I revolt.