"The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum"
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A hand grenade disguised as a diagnostic: Paine reduces the origin story of Western religion to a bureaucratic oversight. The line is funny in the way a guillotine is efficient. By invoking “the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum,” he yanks prophecy off its pedestal and drops it into the Enlightenment’s favored arena: mental health, misdiagnosis, and social contagion. “Religious complexion” isn’t just doctrine; it’s the face the modern world wears - politics, laws, moral hierarchies, wars - all traced back to a city that, in Paine’s telling, lacked the institutional capacity to separate revelation from delirium.
The specific intent is polemical, not nuanced. Paine isn’t debating theology; he’s attacking the authority structure built atop “miracles” and sacred testimony. The insult is strategic: if the founders of a faith are lunatics, the faith’s claims collapse without requiring a scholar’s rebuttal. It’s a classic maneuver from The Age of Reason era, when radicals treated priestcraft as a technology of control and demanded the same standards of evidence for religion that science was beginning to apply elsewhere.
The subtext is also political. “Jerusalem” stands in for any society that sanctifies certain voices while criminalizing dissent. Paine had watched churches bless monarchy and punish heresy; calling prophets insane is a way of reclaiming the right to question without kneeling. His cynicism lands because it reframes a monumental cultural inheritance as a preventable administrative failure - not destiny, not divine plan, just a missing public service.
The specific intent is polemical, not nuanced. Paine isn’t debating theology; he’s attacking the authority structure built atop “miracles” and sacred testimony. The insult is strategic: if the founders of a faith are lunatics, the faith’s claims collapse without requiring a scholar’s rebuttal. It’s a classic maneuver from The Age of Reason era, when radicals treated priestcraft as a technology of control and demanded the same standards of evidence for religion that science was beginning to apply elsewhere.
The subtext is also political. “Jerusalem” stands in for any society that sanctifies certain voices while criminalizing dissent. Paine had watched churches bless monarchy and punish heresy; calling prophets insane is a way of reclaiming the right to question without kneeling. His cynicism lands because it reframes a monumental cultural inheritance as a preventable administrative failure - not destiny, not divine plan, just a missing public service.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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