Burn's Notes:
TP:"I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life."
BTS: Here we witness TP's profession of faith. This means something, and we will revisit it.
TP:"I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy"BTS:Here we see a moral code. A statement of what is virtue. I presume it is based upon TP's profession of faith.
TP:"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. "BTS:Man has perverted all good things for his own twisted ends. TPs observation is not a severe blow and jibes with Ecclesiastes 8:9: "All this I saw, as I applied my mind to everything done under the sun. There is a time when a man lords it over others to his own hurt."
TP:"But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself......When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."
BTS:Here TP would appear to maintain that all creedal belief save his own skeletal profession is self-deception. That "belief" is never Belief. Since he maintains that revelation is only possible through direct, divine, transcendent ontological realization how can he simultaneously maintain this belief about other minds that he himself can never directly experience?
TP:"As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some observations on the word 'revelation.' Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication. After this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him."
BTS: Essentially, TP asserts that God absolutely has the power to communicate with us. What TP evidently does not believe is that God ever has. Accounts of such communication are hearsay, fantastical, and not to be believed. This is as if to say that I have never seen an elephant, and that such an amazing apparition is only to be believed from first experience. If I were, for example, to experience an elephant directly the experience would be a revelation to me and to me alone (this concept exists in Christian thought and is called Private Revelation, as such it is not considered to be binding on others). If I were to tell so-and-so he would not be obliged to believe me. What I would be telling so-and-so about my revelation would be hearsay. However, this idea could also infect other aspects of our existence as the elephant example illustrates. TP notes that religion is mainly hearsay. People do choose to believe hearsay, and therefore have faith in the people or objects spreading that hearsayFor most things in our lives we do not have the ability to verify all statements made by others. This requires us to take on faith things that we could not otherwise verify . We are choosing on our own. I can not measure the speed of light. I have never met Socrates.
TP:"Be this as it may, they decided by vote which of the books out of the collection they had made, should be the WORD OF GOD, and which should not. They rejected several; they voted others to be doubtful, such as the books called the Apocrypha; and those books which had a majority of votes, were voted to be the word of God. Had they voted otherwise, all the people since calling themselves Christians had believed otherwise; for the belief of the one comes from the vote of the other. Who the people were that did all this, we know nothing of. They call themselves by the general name of the Church; and this is all we know of the matter."
BTS. Not so. The belief precedes the scripture. History evidences this. TP assails the Protestant view of Scripture, AKA Sola Scriptura. This belief is not universal.
TP:"Poetry consists principally in two things -- imagery and composition. The composition of poetry differs from that of prose in the manner of mixing long and short syllables together. Take a long syllable out of a line of poetry, and put a short one in the room of it, or put a long syllable where a short one should be, and that line will lose its poetical harmony. It will have an effect upon the line like that of misplacing a note in a song....The imagery in those books called the Prophets appertains altogether to poetry. It is fictitious, and often extravagant, and not admissible in any other kind of writing than poetry....To show that these writings are composed in poetical numbers, I will take ten syllables, as they stand in the book, and make a line of the same number of syllables, (heroic measure) that shall rhyme with the last word. It will then be seen that the composition of those books is poetical measure....There is not, throughout the whole book called the Bible, any word that describes to us what we call a poet, nor any word that describes what we call poetry. The case is, that the word prophet, to hich a later times have affixed a new idea, was the Bible word for poet, and the word 'propesytng' meant the art of making poetry. It also meant the art of playing poetry to a tune upon any instrument of music....We read of prophesying with pipes, tabrets, and horns -- of prophesying with harps, with psalteries, with cymbals, and with every other instrument of music then in fashion. Were we now to speak of prophesying with a fiddle, or with a pipe and tabor, the expression would have no meaning, or would appear ridiculous, and to some people contemptuous, because we have changed the meaning of the word....We are told of Saul being among the prophets, and also that he prophesied; but we are not told what they prophesied, nor what he prophesied. The case is, there was nothing to tell; for these prophets were a company of musicians and poets, and Saul joined in the concert, and this was called prophesying....The account given of this affair in the book called Samuel, is, that Saul met a company of prophets; a whole company of them! coming down with a psaltery, a tabret, a pipe, and a harp, and that they prophesied, and that he prophesied with them. But it appears afterwards, that Saul prophesied badly, that is, he performed his part badly; for it is said that an "evil spirit from God [NOTE: As thos; men who call themselves divines and commentators are very fond of puzzling one another, I leave them to contest the meaning of the first part of the phrase, that of an evil sfiirit of God. I keep to my text. I keep to the meaning of the word prophesy. -- Author.] came upon Saul, and he prophesied.""
BTS:In an age of the scarcity of the written word (as was universal before the invention of the printing press), would it not be unreasonable to set things down in a poetic manner as a mnemonic device?
TP:"We are told of the greater and the lesser prophets."BTS:A thoroughly human convention.
TP:"The axe goes at once to the root, by showing that the original meaning of the word has been mistaken, and consequently all the inferences that have been drawn from those books, the devotional respect that has been paid to them, and the laboured commentaries that have been written upon"
BTS:What is his proof that poet and prophet are the same and that "prophet" does not mean what we belive it to mean today? If a prophet is merely a poet, why the injunction at Deuteronomy 13:1-5 ? He presents pure speculation to support it.
TP:The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of an universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of wilful alteration, are of themselves evidences that human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. -- The Word of God exists in something else."
BTS:INDEED! Exciting! Scripture is ABOUT the revelation. Not the revelation ITSELF. In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Language is symbols of things, not the things themselves. Factor time, distance, and an alien, dead language and we separate the telling about the thing even more from the thing itself. As we have seen, TP himself made a Profession of Faith in commencing this piece.
TP:"THUS much for the Bible; I now go on to the book called the New Testament. The new Testament! that is, the 'new' Will, as if there could be two wills of the Creator. "
BTS:Here we witness an example of the created confining the Creator within certain constraints. The two "Wills" he alludes to are one and the same, unfolding through history in stages. It is men that call them two Testaments. I believe that in the fullness of time a more perfect understanding of the Will of God will be attained.
I leave off here. I will look at Chapter XIII at another time.
Sincerely,
Burn.
