Faith & Spirit Quote by Thomas Paine

Paine doesn’t lob this line like a theologian parsing footnotes; he throws it like a pamphleteer aiming for the hinges of an entire moral order. The provocation is surgical: calling the New Testament “revealed religion” isn’t merely mistaken, he implies, it’s irreverent. By flipping “blasphemy” back onto the believer, Paine hijacks the church’s favorite weapon and forces a reversal of roles. The accused becomes the accuser.

The intent is less to nitpick Scripture than to delegitimize the authority structure built on it. “Contradictions and absurdities” is a deliberately nontechnical pairing: contradictions suggest internal incoherence, absurdities suggest an insult to common sense. Together they frame faith not as mystery but as credulity, and clerical power as something maintained through intellectual intimidation. The question form matters, too. It’s not a debate invitation; it’s a trap. To answer “no” is to concede that labeling texts “revealed” might be a category error. To answer “yes” is to admit the church’s own standards of reverence have been violated.

Context sharpens the edge. Paine is writing out of the Enlightenment’s confidence that reason can audit tradition, and out of a revolutionary moment when old legitimacies (monarchy, aristocracy, established churches) were suddenly contestable. In The Age of Reason, he isn’t arguing for atheism so much as for a deistic universe where God is accessible without priestly intermediaries. The subtext is political: if revelation is unreliable, then obedience based on revelation is optional. That’s why the sentence still stings. It’s not just anti-dogma; it’s anti-deference.