The meaning of "revelation"

I shall begin this post with a quotation from the venerable Thomas Payne:

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.

-The Age of Reason

When I converted to Christianity (or a peculiar brand of it), I skipped over reason. I navigated no journey of logical, sensible, or rational cognition by which others may have convinced me that the tenets of the religion (the existence of God, the inerrancy of the Bible) possessed any objective basis by which to lay claim to my life. And yet, I was converted.

As I look back at that period of my life, and the years that followed, wherein life in the church cemented my choices and narrowed my options, I can see clearly that, were I, at that tender age, capable of logical thought, I would have rejected the religionists’ claims of “revelation” outright.

Why do men and women accept as revelation from God words that were not revealed by God to them, but rather, supposedly, revealed to someone else, for which claim we have only this person’s claim, or even less credible, someone else’s claim on their behalf?  “He saw a burning bush that did not consume the bush!” “They saw Moses and Elijah and Jesus together on the mountain top!” “He calmed the sea!” If someone made such claims in the present we would judge them mentally incompetent. God supposedly told Abraham to slaughter his child and burn it? Believable? A mother makes a similar claim in a courtroom (God told me to knife my children to death!) and she is sentenced to a mental institution or lethal injection.

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