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But in these books are also found the words of fear and hate, and from their pages crawl serpents that coil and hiss in all the paths of men.
Such is the nature of my brain that Shakespeare gives me greater joy than all the prophets of the ancient world.
I believe in the religion of reason—the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.
let us admit the limitations of our minds, and let us have the courage and the candor to say: We do not know.
The real philosopher does not seek to excite wonder, but to make that plain which was wonderful. He does not endeavor to astonish, but to enlighten.
There are no exceptions. Substances are always true to their natures.
Credulity should be the servant of intelligence. The ignorant have not credulity enough to believe the actual, because the actual appears to be contrary to the evidence of their senses.
they have not intelligence enough to comprehend the absurdities involved in their belief, and the perfect harmony between the rotation of the earth and all known facts.
Credulity, as a rule, believes everything except the truth.
In other words, there are no miracles in any science.
The moment we understand a question or subject, the miraculous necessarily disappears.
No one need take an account of this result from the mouths of others: all can try the experiment for themselves.
it is a necessity that the free mind moves along the path of least resistance.
The effect of testimony depends on the intelligence and honesty of the witness and the intelligence of him who weighs.
In an age when reading and writing were substantially unknown, and when history itself was but the vaguest hearsay handed down from dotage to infancy, nothing was rescued from oblivion except the wonderful, the miraculous. The more marvelous the story, the greater the interest excited.
Age of miracles
that time nothing was known,
The world was governed by caprice. Everything was at the mercy of a being, or beings, who were themselves controlled by the same passions that dominated man.
all of the religions of the world have been believed,
This being so, nothing has been too absurd for human credence.
In other words, as the circle of man's knowledge grew, supernatural interference withdrew and was active only just beyond the horizon of the known.
Our religion alone is excepted.
When will people see the defects in their own theology as clearly as they perceive the same defects in every other?
If their miracles were false, ours cannot be true. Nature was the same in India and in Palestine.
What is meant by inspiration? Did the one inspired set down only the thoughts of a supernatural being? Was he simply an instrument, or did his personality color the message received and given?
How could the inspired man know that the communication was received from God? If God in reality should appear to a human being, how could this human being know who had appeared?
Although thousands have pretended to receive messages, there has been no message in which there was, or is, anything above the invention of man.
There is certainly nothing in the Old or the New Testament that could not have been written by uninspired human beings.
There is not, as far as I know, a line in the book of Genesis calculated to make a human being better.
If all the historic books of the Bible were blotted from the memory of mankind, nothing of value would be lost.
Can we believe that the author of Genesis had to be inspired, while Darwin experimented, ascertained, and reached conclusions for himself.
Ought not the work of a God to be vastly superior to that of a man?
And if the writers of the Bible were in reality inspired, ought not that book to ...
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As a matter of fact, miracles could only satisfy people who demanded no evidence; else how could they have believed the miracle?
The testimony of man is insufficient to establish the supernatural.
Neither the evidence of one man nor of twelve can stand when contradicted by the experience of the intelligent world.
With sword and flame it destroyed the brave and thoughtful men who told the truth. It was the enemy of investigation and of reason. Faith and fiction were in partnership.
Ignorance is the soil of the supernatural.
The natural is true. The miraculo...
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