Thomas Paine Quotes
That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason, Part II. H.D. Symonds, 1795, p. 8.
Despite his recognition of this point, he too became an advocate of murdering religious opponents.
What makes this quotation very notable is the fact that Dr. El-Naggar is not even a cleric but a scientist. and yet in spite of his education, much broader than most Muslim men, he still thinks of the Koran as the only source of truth available to man. Observation, deduction, induction, experimentation all have no weight. Herein lies one basic difference between Islamic Fundamentalists on the one hand and Christian, Jewish, Hindu & Buddhist and other religion’s fundamentalists. All may accept their holy book as the revealed truth, but it is only the fundamentalist Muslim who believes that it is the ONLY source of truth and wisdom. A classic difference between the radical fundamentalist and the moderates is that moderates, like almost all religious people on earth, believe that there are other sources of knowledge, truth and wisdom besides their holy book.
In 1996 the Tennessee Senate passed a resolution to post the Ten Commandments in homes, schools and businesses. Cohen was then a Senator of the Tennessee State Legislature.
Thomas Paine was an English-born American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and helped inspire the patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of transnational human rights. Historian Saul K. Padover described him as "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination".
