On So Called
‘Divine Revelation’

Some Quotes From Five Founders
Curated by Tom Ulatowski

Introduction

   Without Revelation there are no dogmas and no organized religious sects.
   Carl Sagan observed that “human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.” These quotes are based on an awareness of the fact that there is no consensus about ‘Divine Revelation’ — a fact that was becoming more and more obvious almost two centuries after Columbus and the Magellan–Elcano circumnavigation, and five centuries after Marco Polo.

Ethan Allen:
“Reason...must be the standard by which we determine the respective claims of revelation; for otherwise we may as well subscribe to the divinity of the one as of the other...”
“To suppose that God Almighty has confined his goodness to this world, to the exclusion of all others, is much similar to the idle fancies of some individuals in this world, that they, and those of their communion or faith, are the favorites of heaven exclusively; but these are narrow and bigoted conceptions, which are degrading to a rational nature, and utterly unworthy of God, of whom we should form the most exalted ideas.”
“The representation of a God, who (as we are told by certain divines) from all eternity elected an inconsiderable part of mankind to eternal life, and reprobated the rest to eternal damnation ...is a selfish and inferior notion of a God void of justice, goodness, and truth...”
“A revelation, that may be supposed to be really of the institution of God, must also be supposed to be perfectly consistent or uniform, and to be able to stand the test of truth; therefore such pretended revelations, as are tendered to us as the contrivance of heaven, which do not bear that test, we may be morally certain, was either originally a deception, or has since, by adulteration become spurious.”

Tom Paine:
“A thing which everybody is required to believe, requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all...”
“Had the news of salvation by Jesus Christ been inscribed on the face of the sun and the moon, in characters that all nations would have understood, the whole earth had known it in twenty-four hours, and all nations would have believed it; whereas, though it is now almost two thousand years since, as they tell us, Christ came upon earth, not a twentieth part of the people of the earth know anything of it, and among those who do, the wiser part do not believe it.”
“That the idea or belief of a word of God existing in print, or in writing, or in speech, is inconsistent in itself for reasons already assigned. These reasons, among many others, are the want of a universal language; the mutability of language; the errors to which translations are subject: the possibility of totally suppressing such a word; the probability of altering it, or of fabricating the whole, and imposing it upon the world.”
“[T]he thing so revealed (if anything ever was revealed, and which, bye the bye, it is impossible to prove), is revelation to the person only to whom it is made. His account of it to another person is not revelation; and whoever puts faith in that account, puts it in the man from whom the account comes; and that man may have been deceived, or may have dreamed it, or he may be an impostor and may lie. There is no possible criterion whereby to judge of the truth of what he tells, for even the morality of it would be no proof of revelation. In all such cases the proper answer would be, ‘When it is revealed to me, I will believe it to be a revelation; but it is not, and cannot be incumbent upon me to believe it to be revelation before; neither is it proper that I should take the word of a man as the word of God, and put man in the place of God.’”

Thomas Jefferson:
“Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.”
“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter.”
“Indeed I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to Atheism by their general dogma that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a god.”
“My religious reading has long been confined to the moral branch of religion, which is the same in all religions; while in that branch which consists of dogmas, all differ… the former instructs us how to live well and worthily in society; the latter are made to interest our minds in the support of the teachers who inculcate them.”
“The clergy believe that any power confided in me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And, they believe rightly.”

Benjamin Franklin:
“But I was scarce 15 when, after doubting by turns of several Points as I found them disputed in the different Books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself…”
“As to Jesus of Nazareth… I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to His divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon…”
“Lighthouses are more useful than churches.”

John Adams:
“Philosophy, which is the result of reason, is the first, the original revelation of the Creator to his creature, man. When this revelation is clear and certain, by intuition or necessary inductions, no subsequent revelation, supported by prophecies or miracles, can supersede it.”
“As I understand the christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?”

Robert G. Ingersoll:
“Every sect is a certificate that God has not plainly revealed his will to man.”

Mark Twain:
“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”

Richard Dawkins:
“No one believes in Zeus or Thor. Almost everyone is an atheist regarding 99 out of 100 gods; however, most believers simply make one exception for the god that they were told to believe in when they were children.”

For further discussion of ‘Divine Revelation’ visit these pages:

Ethan Allen


Tom Paine


Robert G. Ingersoll


Richard Dawkins


Sam Harris


Christopher Hitchens


“The Agnostic Challenge.”