The Age of Reason started it. Started what? The Great Falling Away, of course. The beginning was well hidden by civilization. The plan is the complete rejection of God and Truth.

It’s so outrageous that a small beginning was required. But once you think about it at all, nothing less will do for the Lawless One. In the seventeen hundreds, these concepts had already been stirring around throughout the Western world for quite a while—beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century. In Peter Coker’s essay on Experiential Religion, [in a post on Gospelbbq.wordpress.com] he says it started with the Enlightenment Movement. “The Enlightenment movement advocated “Reason” as the primary basis of ultimate authority. Enlightenment thinkers embraced either Deism or secularized human reason and denied any supernatural authority. As a result, Christianity became more inward, seeking supernatural experience (in place of doctrinal validation). The supernatural experience was mainly limited to salvation by way of emotional appeals to one’s eternal destiny.”

In the United States, this was all going on beneath the notice of the major ruckus we call the First Great Awakening—which was the major societal move leading up to the American Revolution. But during all of this, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason also brought a revival of deism to the States. The results are stunning to the modern believer of the 21st century.

The starting beliefs of the age of reason

His book was very popular. But almost unnoticed were the following beliefs:

• The most important position was their call for “free rational inquiry”: into all subjects, especially religion. 
• Deists rejected the claim that there was only one revealed religious truth: or “one true faith”.
• They were skeptical of miracles.
• They thought Christianity taught irrational doctrines: the worst of these doctrines was original sin.
• They called themselves free thinkers: who rejected any belief which was not rational.

The basic assumption was the rejection of revelation, prophecies, and miracles. One of the first major successes to become visible was Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. But it also struck in theology with Higher Criticism. Mankind assumed that we had the authority to critique and even modify the Bible. We now know this belief system as the new religion of Secular Humanism. 

But they were having little luck integrating it into the cultural mainstream. The breakthrough victory was their integration of these ideas into the curriculum of the now required public school system. I experienced the results as I grew up in the 1950s. In the 1960s, I found myself consumed by rage over the lies I had been taught. But I assumed the problem was caused by the outdated assumptions of the American culture. It became so bad that I tuned in, dropped out, almost successfully destroyed my mind with the psychedelic drugs of the counterculture that inevitably resulted.

Now, in the middle of the third decade of the new millennium, it is hard to comprehend how this has resulted in what we are living with by the assault of lies and delusion upon the culture of the entire planet.